Get ready, Bailee Madison fans, because the actress is gearing up to star in a brand new flick called A Week Away, and she just spilled all the behind-the-scenes secrets on it exclusively to J-14!
“It’s about this boy who is in the foster care system and it’s kind of like the last resort. He gets shipped off to this church camp for a week and he’s like, ‘This sounds horrible.’ But on the way he meets the camp leader’s daughter, which is me,” the 20-year-old explained. “He’s just kind of thrown into the world of finding himself and what it’s like to have a sense of community at home.”
Wow, how awesome does that sound?! Want to know the best part? It’s a musical!
“The musical numbers could not be larger,” the brunette beauty continued. “They’re so fun and exciting. We did four weeks of dance rehearsals and recording, so I’m finally able to sing, which is fun. It’s a really sweet film and I think hopefully everyone will be able to look at the characters and see themselves in it. There’s a beautiful sense of representation in the movie and I’m really proud of it for that reason. Anyone really can watch it, it’s a great film.”
Bailee explained that learning the dance routines were a little difficult because sometimes after she’d finally get them down, the choreographers would switch the entire thing around!
“You’re honestly doing dance rehearsals and you go in the next day and the whole number has been changed. And you’re just like, ‘Alright guys. Let’s do this, we’ve got this,'” she told us. “We were all just ourselves and we had such a great time. On dance number days, we had the time of our lives. We were literally like ready to roll cameras and our choreographer would be like, ‘Scratch that, we’re going to do this now.’ We went to kind of being these four kids who barely kind of knew each other in dance rehearsals, to in the end of it being able to pick up these moves, and we really leaned on each other for it. It was a really beautiful thing to watch everyone come together be like, ‘Yes! You killed that move! Go girl!’ The support was so fun.”
But was she nervous to perform on screen for the first time?
“Anything is nerve-wracking when you want to do the best job that you can do. Obviously I’ve never been in front of the camera dancing or singing before. There were nerves but there was way more excitement because it had been on my bucket list for years, to show this side of me and I was just thrilled and honored,” the former Wizards of Waverly Place star dished. “I was like, ‘Alright, let’s give it all. Give it whatever I’ve got and see what happens.’ I was so fulfilled, it was so great.”
The movie also stars Sherri Shepherd, Kevin Quinn, David Koechner, Kat Conner Sterling and more. Bailee explained that when the cameras stopped rolling, she and her costars got along great!
“We spent two months in Nashville together, so you kind of are forced to become good friends whether they like it or not,” she said. “Katherine, who plays my best friend in the movie, she’s like my girl now. We still text every single day. It was really her first movie that she had done and she just kills it in it. She’s so adorable and we still talk. [The entire cast] is in a big group chat still, all these months later. We had a good time.”
Love J-14? Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel for fun, exclusive videos with your favorite stars.
