Eden Brolin

With a massive role in Freeform’s Beyond and a new list of exciting projects, Eden Brolin has definitely found her way into the spotlight.

Though she was born in New York City, Eden moved around several times as a child and mostly found herself living on California’s coast, with a move to Los Angeles when she was 11-years-old. Throughout middle and high school, Eden found a love for acting in her school’s theater programs and eventually picked up an agent at age 16. Despite having an agent, she ended up spending most of the end of her high school theater career off stage, getting involved on the crew side and learning about lighting, sound, and sets.

After high school, she moved to New York City where she attended The Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre where she focused on school and put auditioning on the back burner. Because of the school’s rule against booking jobs and her intense focus on her studies, she ended up not booking her first job for almost four years. For most, the lack of bookings would be discouraging, but Eden remained constant in her passion for acting and finished her last few years of school. “I wasn’t booking anything but 70% of my energy was going to school. [Also], I knew it took work and timea lot of it has to do with timing and who’s on the radar. I knew that it was a process,” Eden says.

After a move back to Los Angeles and almost two years of auditioning while making ends meet as a waitress, Eden booked her first television role on Freeform’s Beyond as Charlie, a character with a unique power that allows her to use math to predict future events, or, as Eden puts it simply, “I’m good at math.” She said of the audition process, “I’m an awful auditioner, but this was one of the few times that I went into the audition room knowing that I had to have this [script] memorized, because it was all numbers stuff in that first episode, its all numbers and algorithms,” she recalls.

During filming of the first season, Eden most fondly remembers working with the show’s star, Burkely Duffield, saying “I got to work with Burkely a lot, which was really nice. I think I worked mostly with Burkely, it’s nice to have a buddy on set – I wasn’t alone as much”. Of her time on Season 1, she says that getting to experience the world of multiple directors, writers, and crews was an important experience because she got the opportunity to see how different people work and how it comes together for the continuity of the show and the characters, something she had never experienced before.

Eden says that her time on set for the first season was a “weird and lonely time” because she spent a majority of her time alone, or was only on set for a short period of time. “I would go into a manic state when I got on set” she admits. Due to of her lack of time on set, she would have to try to catch up with and meet everyone in the time that she had. However, this time around for the second season there were several new cast members to interact with, her favorites being Keenan Tracey and Peter Kelamis.

In Beyond’s Season 2 opener, we see Charlie in a yoga studio where she is pretending to be pregnant in order to get into a class to meet with Robin (Aliyah O’Brien) so she can gain access to her house by finding out dates that translate into the codes she needs. Charlie is also teaming up with Yellow Jacket (Peter Kelamis) this season in order to find Arthur (Alex Diakun), which will be her main objective throughout the season.

A key difference between the first and second season is the lack of “instant gratification” for Season 2. The first season was immediately available to watch in its entirety on the Freeform app, whereas Season 2 will be released more traditionally with one episode per week. “It’s kind of scary because the thing about people being able to binge it was you got those instant fans and instant viewers and it’s kind of scary thinking about people waiting knowing that there’s so much content out there that is ‘binge-able’ these days” Eden says. But is also exciting because everyone will experience it together, with the potential for releasing spoilers online lessened.

In addition to Beyond, Eden worked on two movies in 2017 which she anticipates being released this year. Back Fork is about the opioid epidemic in West Virginia, which Eden found especially rewarding to work on. “It’s nice to do something that’s so rooted in real life,” she says, “It was a beautiful thing to work on because I went out there a little afraid that people were going to respond with some resistance about ‘Hollywood’ coming in and glamorizing their [situation] but it was so nice to see people coming up to the director and saying, ‘I just lost a friend from this, thank you for getting this story out.’”

She also stars in King Fish alongside Molly Ringwald and Kevin Corrigan, a Goonies-esque film that follows a group of kids trying to find treasure off the coast of Montauk, which will also be out later this year.