The “Matilda the Musical” love isn’t exclusive to films either, with two Broadway replacement performers — Gabriella Pizzolo and Brooklyn Shuck — now starring on some of the biggest supernatural TV shows currently on the air. Pizzolo is a dyed-in-the-wool Broadway kid having also performed in “Fun Home,” and “Sunday in the Park with George,” but became a household name when she took the role of Suzie Bingham on “Stranger Things,” the science-wiz girlfriend of Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo, another Broadway kid) with a deep love of “The NeverEnding Story.” She’s also currently playing a recurring role on “Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin” as Angela Waters, a melodramatic teen show that doubles as a slasher series.
Likewise, fellow “notable Broadway replacement” Brooklyn Shuck plays Lynn Bouchard in the supernatural drama “Evil” on CBS/Paramount+. She’s the eldest of four daughters of the show’s protagonist, and the siblings are like a funnier, more rambunctious version of the March sisters in “Little Women.” The Daily Beast reported that the four sisters are the only ones on set allowed to truly improvise during scenes, meaning Shuck’s theatre background is certainly coming in handy. And then there’s English Eleanor Worthington Cox, one of the famous “Matilda” replacements during the West End production, who still mainly sticks to stage acting but has dabbled in both film and television. Most notably, Cox played Janet Hodgson in the horror drama series “The Enfield Haunting,” where she was nominated for a British Academy Television Award for Best Supporting Actress. If “The Enfield Haunting” sounds familiar, this is a dramatization of the story that served as the basis for “The Conjuring 2.”
These mentions are just the Matilda performers that are easily identifiable because their productions were high-profile enough to be found online and don’t account for the numerous regional, community, and educational productions that could have also been the stepping stone for young horror performers. Let this be a lesson to us all — if a young performer can believably pretend to move objects with their mind on stage, they’ll be great in a horror movie.
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