Connie Britton is playing two versions of the same woman in her new Hulu series — and the transformation behind it was so painstaking, the crew was still changing her face a week before release.
The 59-year-old actress stars in “Phony,” the new Hulu comedy-mystery that premiered on October 20, alongside “The White Lotus” alum Sam Nivola.
The show is a coming-of-age mystery about a teenager who wakes up in the hospital after a car accident to discover his mom — his only parent and best friend — appears to have been replaced by an impostor.
Britton plays Ellen Cooke, the single mom at the center of the mystery, in a dual role.
The face transformation that took weeks
In a new interview, Britton opened up about the painstaking process of changing her appearance for the dual role.
“We started with prosthetics,” she told People. “We did a whole kind of prosthetics journey and shot a bunch of it with prosthetics and realized that that was not gonna give us exactly what we needed in terms of the subtlety and just the detail.”
The crew then developed a different technique while filming, making detailed alterations to her appearance frame by frame.
“It was really a very complicated process, very labor intensive, very time consuming,” she added. “I think that they were still making changes a week before [the release] — like, a week ago!”
Britton said the show’s creator, Nick Paley, had a “very unusual vision” for the series, which attracted her to it from the outset.
“It felt immediately like something that I hadn’t really seen before,” she said.
“An amazing metaphor” for being a mom
Britton told People the show is “an amazing metaphor” for what happens between a parent and a child during the teenage years — something she knows firsthand.
The actress is mom to a 15-year-old son, Yoby, whom she adopted from Ethiopia when he was 9 months old in November 2011, after a three-year-long adoption process.
“Because of course it’s a teenager’s job to, like, separate,” she said. “But it’s so painful, and the way that teenagers go about it is so hard. And I’m experiencing my version of that.”
In a cover story for People’s October 26 issue, Britton opened up about raising her son as a single mother, recalling working 18-hour days filming her series “Nashville” without “a support system.”
The “White Lotus” alum also spoke about being “TV’s favorite mom” — thanks to her beloved role as Tami Taylor in “Friday Night Lights” — while being “clueless” about motherhood at the time.
Her costar’s big break
Nivola, who plays son Sonny, told “Good Morning America” — where the pair appeared on October 20 — that working with Britton on what he described as his “first proper big lead role” was “the best.”
“I felt like I really had the access and opportunity to have really deep, creative discussions with her,” he said. “She’s so smart about all of it, not just acting but story and about understanding your character’s place in the story and I just learned so much from her.”
The first two episodes of “Phony” are out now, with new episodes releasing weekly.
Source: People / JustJared (October 2026)
