Anna Camp: Playing Dorothy Bradford | Saints & Strangers

2m read

·Nov 11, 2024

[Music] Dorothy Bradford is William Bradford's wife, played by Vincent Caryer, and he is one of the first governors of Plymouth Rock. Dorothy's personal journey is an incredibly sad one. She's left her only child behind and the feeling of not being able to comfort her son or not even know—I mean just thinking, you know, you don't have cell phones, you didn't have Skype like I do now with my family who's so far away.

To not have known anything and not even gotten a letter about how your child is doing when it's the most important thing to you in the world can leave someone feeling incredibly hopeless. What if we never see our son again? What if he is dead? How would we know? We wouldn't. Would we not for years? John is fine. I don't know if her husband quite gets to the extent of how much in pain she is.

I think we are the most saintly of the Saints, and so there's not a lot of emoting. He was always trying to calm me down, trying to inspire me, keep me strong. I know it troubles you. God chose these strangers to be our partners in this venture. God in the Merchant Adventurous Company.

No one really knows how alone or how emotional Dorothy is feeling because that's not something that people really did back then. Just in a scene I just shot, feeling like I wanted to tell him that I loved him but I couldn't, and nowhere in the script do I ever say "I love you." So just that struggle of trying to say it to someone just through my eyes was something I felt was incredibly moving and powerful, and I hope people will respond to it.

Dorothy left her homeland to do this journey because they are separists, and it had to have been so terrible for them to have left. Because they did make a very, very horrid journey, and I don't think that anyone knew exactly how bad the conditions would have been when they got onto the Mayflower. But it was all worth it, I think, so I'm glad she did.

Holy Cats! Jerusalem's Strays and Their Unsung Guardian | National Geographic

Can Humans Sense Magnetic Fields?

View All

What feels like play to you, but looks like work to others?

I think for everybody there is something that they do that other people think is work but is effortless for them. Their friends will basically say to them, “Oh, I can’t believe you can just do that without hating it.” Everyone’s got something like that, a…

Bill Belichick & Ray Dalio on Having Great Relationships: Part 1

Now let’s talk about partnership. Now when you’re dealing in an organization, you have the owner, you have the players. Okay, now there’s interpersonal relations. How do you deal with those interpersonal relations? Like probably, you know the question exa…

Causation from 1980-2020

From our first lesson focusing on the migration of indigenous people to the land mass that today comprises the United States, we’ve made it all the way to the present. A journey in time of more than 15,000 years. We’ve looked most closely at the last 500 …

15 Things to STOP EXPECTING from Other People

Your life picks up once you realize you’re in the driver’s seat, not the passenger seat. Everyone else might hop on and off the you bus, but they’re not the ones holding the steering wheel. This doesn’t mean you should become a lone wolf, no, but there’s …

Risking My Life To Settle A Physics Debate

This propeller craft was built to settle a physics debate because what its creators claim it can do is so counterintuitive that it seems to violate the law of conservation of energy. So I’ve come here to drive it myself and see if it really works. And is …

Nietzsche - Follow No One, Trust Yourself

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the chapter called The Bestowing Virtue, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote something surprising. Zarathustra—a sage who is also the central character of the book—tells his followers to stop following him. He says, “I now go alone, my…

Anna Camp: Playing Dorothy Bradford | Saints & Strangers

More Articles