Beverley Mitchell owes her greatest fame to Seventh Heaven, a TV series that ran for eleven seasons from 1996 to 2007 in which she played Lucy, one of the Reverend Camden’s daughters and his wife Annie. Securing this role required a hard-fought battle for Beverley Mitchell, a detail revealed recently, just as fans prepare for a reboot.
The hard road to Seventh Heaven: Beverley Mitchell recounts her comeback
At the urging of Jessica Biel, the reboot of Seventh Heaven is in development and will bring new dynamics to the Camden family, almost certainly featuring new performers for the characters already known to the audience. This means the reboot will also have a new Lucy, and Beverley Mitchell has recently seized the opportunity to share some behind-the-scenes insights about her fame as a child star.
Via Instagram, the actress revealed that she had opened a profile on Substack where she shared some details about herself and how the line between Lucy and Beverly has always been a little blurred, even today: “For 11 years I played Lucy Camden. And between growing up on set, experiencing many firsts in life in front of millions of people, and trying to figure out who I was off-camera, the boundaries between Lucy and Beverly began to blur. The funny thing is that, after all these years, I’m still trying to figure out where one ends and the other begins.”
It all began at four years old, when she was spotted in a shopping mall. Even then she knew she wanted to become an actress, but turning that dream into reality required time, preparation and patience: “Growing up in this industry, it has always been clear to me that I wasn’t the most talented. That meant I had to work harder than everyone, be reliable and responsible, be the one who put in maximum effort. It’s been that way from day one. Nothing ever came easy. Neither school, nor friends, nor work. NOTHING. But the one thing I could control was how hard I worked, how much I studied and how prepared I was. I grew up in the film world alongside Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis and Michelle Williams. In short, women of incredible talent. I had to find my own place.”
Her big opportunity came eleven years later after numerous auditions: at the time she was 15 and knew she wanted to be Lucy in Seventh Heaven. “It was the first and only job I fought to get back into the audition. The first person who saw me said I wasn’t suitable, but I begged to come back and earned my chance. It was the first time I understood my value and my abilities, and I was right. That was the start of my greatest transformation.” Playing on that TV series was not only her springboard but also her refuge: “Getting the role in Seventh Heaven changed my life. It’s where I lived the pain, the loss, the death and the rebirth, both on screen and off.”
She recalled the eleven years spent with the Seventh Heaven cast: “Perhaps that’s why it’s so hard to tell where Lucy ends and Beverly begins. I grew up on that set. Lucy and I shared many of our firsts side by side: the first kiss, the first boyfriend, the first loss, the wedding. Much of what Lucy became happened while I was still figuring out who I was, and in many ways, I’m still doing that. After the show ended, a void formed, and a part of me was lost. I had to figure out who Beverley was.” She added a few behind-the-scenes details about Hollywood. “I’ve always been seen as the not-beautiful, the anonymous one, the classic little sister. There was always some ridiculous comparison. We were always pitted against each other, but in reality each of us had our own place. From the beginning, I was considered inferior, and it was clear that my career path would be very different from theirs. Even on a successful TV series, I had to fight for every opportunity, and there weren’t many for me. Because, frankly, I wasn’t the most popular.”
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