When Nicole Brydon Bloom first received the character breakdown for Jane, her role on the show “Paradise,” there was no sign she was anything other than a sweet, straightforward young professional.
“It just said she was one of the younger Secret Service agents and was a little bit naive, kind of coming up in that position. And it said that she was sweet and liked her job, and I was like, ‘I think I could probably swing that,’” Bloom says.
In her first callback, the Hulu show’s creator Dan Fogelman (behind hits such as “This Is Us”) hinted to her that there may be more to Jane than initially meets the eye.
“He wanted me to play one of the scenes a little bit differently, which sort of caught me off guard,” Bloom says. “He was like, ‘could we just hypothetically try this character as if she’s a psychopath?’ I was super surprised and didn’t really know what to do with that.”
Luckily, Bloom is a psychology fan — she studied it in college — and was more than willing to play along. The show’s creatives remained tight-lipped about Jane’s arc until her final audition, when Bloom finally got the scene that played out in the show’s fourth episode.
“And my mind was blown,” she says.
“Paradise,” which was just renewed for a second season, follows a Secret Service agent (played by Sterling K. Brown) who is tasked with the safety of a former U.S. president (James Marsden). The show, a political thriller at first, is revealed to be set in a city-size underground bunker years after a doomsday event. Bloom’s character Jane is a junior agent thrown into chaos with the rest of the team after the president is found dead.
“Everyone is so incredibly talented, but so kind of quiet about it,” she says of the cast, which also includes Julianne Nicholson and Sarah Shahi. “Even Dan wears his success so lightly. It was just a really refreshing set to be on. Sterling is the perfect man to lead our show and was super welcoming. I remember being pretty nervous the first time I met him just because of who he is, and he was instantly very grounding and very warm.”
Nicole Brydon Bloom
Courtesy of Emilio Madrid
Bloom, who is 30, initially started acting with her twin sister. Growing up they were put in various activities, from sports to art — “I can’t draw for the life of me” — and finally, a local theater group.
“I instantly fell in love with it,” she says.
After a couple years of plays with the theater group, she started to attend a theater camp called Stagedoor Manor in Loch Sheldrake, N.Y.
“I was there for so long. I think I went for seven years until they basically were like, ‘you can no longer come back because you are an adult,’” she says. “It was so fun to be around people who loved to do exactly what I got so much joy out of.”
Bloom initially went to college for journalism — her father is the late television journalist David Bloom — as well as psychology, unsure of what a career in acting might look like.
“Acting is such a difficult industry, and I had shot a couple little episodes of things, but I just didn’t really understand how the industry worked, and it’s a lot of rejection,” she says. “And then I saw a play in college, ‘August Osage County,’ and watching it, I was like, ‘oh my gosh, these are the kind of stories that I want to be a part of and that I want to be telling.’ And so I pivoted back to acting.”
Bloom with her fiancé, Justin Theroux, at the New York City Ballet Fall Fashion Gala.
Lexie Moreland/WWD
Prior to “Paradise,” Bloom had a role on the HBO series “The Gilded Age,” as swindler Maud Beaton, as well as roles in “The Affair” and last year’s “We Were the Lucky Ones.” Coming up she’ll be seen opposite Justin H. Min starring as a divorcing couple in the film “Handle With Care,” as well as a second season of “Paradise.”
“I think so often in life and in film and television, we see women being taken advantage of, and in ‘Paradise’ — and even one of my more recent projects, ‘The Gilded Age’ — I’ve been able to play characters who really flip that narrative and actually have a lot of strength and smarts and cunning than people expect,” Bloom says. “So does that make them the villain? Maybe. But it’s so much more interesting to play these complicated characters. I think human beings are complicated. Our desires and fears and insecurities and past experiences really inform who we are and that’s what drives us. And so diving into Jane and trying to understand what makes her tick was super fascinating for me.”
