The Brady Brunch star Susan Olsen is getting honest about the moment she realized acting wasn’t the right career for her.
Susan, who turned 65 on Friday (August 14), chatted with ReMIND Magazine earlier this year for an interview published on her birthday. In it, she revealed that she realized she hated acting shortly after landing her first acting job at the age of 23.
Susan Olsen said she realized she hated acting at a young age
“For reasons I can’t even explain, I continue to do acting or to pursue it,” she told the publication. “I think to please my mother, even when I was like 18. I had an opportunity when I was accepted at USC, even though my grades were not quite good enough. I do not know why I didn’t go ahead and join the film school, because I must have known that I had an inkling for that. And now I know that’s really where I belong, and it’s just weird to me that I didn’t know it [then].”
It was after she successfully got an acting job that she was driving home script in hand and went, “Oh my gosh, I hate acting. What am I doing? This is terrible.”
Susan continued, “Of course I did the role, but I called my teacher, I called my agent and said, ‘I can’t do this.’ It wasn’t my medium. And then immediately things started working out well for me as a graphic artist.”
She dreamed of becoming a rock star if she hadn’t been an actor
“I did more dreaming than practicing,” she admitted. “I think in my head I didn’t even consider being a filmmaker because I knew I was going to horrify my mother by becoming a rock star.”
“I started out as a guitar player, but I really found that I was much more suited for bass. And this was before bass became the token female position in the band. And you didn’t see girls playing bass, but it felt so much more natural. The only band I was really in, I was kind of best friends with the drummer so it just all made sense.”
Susan played the youngest member of the Brady family, Cindy Brady, on the series that aired from 1969 to 1974. She later returned for several television spinoffs like The Brady Brunch Hour, The Brady Girls Get Married, and The Bradys, among others.
In 2019, she participated in A Very Brady Renovation on HGTV and she reunited with several Brady Brunch co-stars for the Lifetime Christmas movie Blending Christmas in 2021.
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