Anna Cathcart on Growing Up and Staying Grounded in Hollywood
With a new season of Audible’s Middlebridge Mysteries, the Vancouver actor is growing up alongside her characters and figuring out who she wants to be.
Anna Cathcart in Toronto promoting the Audible Original podcast series Middlebridge Mysteries. (Photo: Juanito Aguil)
When fans tell Anna Cathcart they’ve grown up with her, the 23-year-old actor has a response ready to go: “Me too!”
“I was also busy growing up,” she says with a laugh. “I was growing up with you guys.” Many of the fans who first encountered Cathcart as a teenager are, in fact, just about her age. They watched her in projects like Disney’s Descendants and, of course, as Kitty Covey in the To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before films and XO, Kitty while she was busy experiencing those same awkward, formative years off-screen. Now, as those fans are entering adulthood, so is she.
It makes her latest role feel especially fitting. Cathcart returns as Violet Wilner in the second season of Audible’s Middlebridge Mysteries, a spin-off of another Audible series, Mistletoe Murders, from creator Ken Cuperus. Released August 27, the new season finds Violet in her second year studying criminology at Middlebridge University, while also juggling relationships and an escalating collection of mysteries alongside a cast that includes Eric McCormack, Charles Vandervaart, Mason Temple and Saara Chaudry.
If the first season was about Violet finding her footing, Cathcart says the second is about what happens once that unfamiliar place finally starts to feel like home.
“She’s no longer new at the school,” Cathcart says. “This is her world, her campus. She has her friend group. She has Hunter, who’s like a developing maybe-boyfriend, maybe-not.”
Anna Cathcart speaks with RepresentASIAN Project editor-at-large Sadaf Ahsan at an Audible event in Toronto. (Photo: Juanito Aguil)
It’s a transition Cathcart understands well. She spent three years studying part-time at the University of British Columbia before putting school on pause to focus on acting. She remembers how dramatically university life can change once you get beyond that initial disorientation — suddenly you know your way around campus, who your friends are, which classes you like and where you belong.
Cathcart is going through a similar recalibration. Acting has been part of her life since she was a kid, and something she squeezed in while going to public school, hanging with friends, getting homework done and experiencing the rest of an otherwise relatively ordinary childhood. Now, acting is becoming the main thing, and the timing feels right.
She describes her early 20s as a “pivotal” period. Her friends have graduated, and school is no longer structuring her days. Everyone is suddenly facing the same big questions: “What do we want to do? Who do we want to be?”
Anna Cathcart as Kitty Song Covey in XO, Kitty. (Photo: Courtesy Netflix)
For Cathcart, there’s an additional layer. She isn’t just discovering herself as an adult and renegotiating her relationship with a profession she’s already been doing for years.
“It’s a re-learning of myself and re-meeting of my career,” she says. As a child, acting could still feel like a hobby that happened to be unusually successful. Now, she says, “My career is my A-plot. That’s definitely a shift, and has been an ongoing process of figuring out my goals.”
Middlebridge Mysteries has also offered Cathcart a chance to rethink something even more fundamental to her work: how she acts. Without a camera capturing a raised eyebrow, a nervous gesture or the way she moves through a room, an audio drama leaves her with just one tool.
Anna Cathcart at an Audible event in Toronto.
“You only really have your intonation and how you’re going to say something — when you’re going to speak, if you’re quieter or louder,” she explains.
Because much of the series takes listeners inside Violet’s head, Cathcart and the team had to develop subtle ways of distinguishing her internal voice from the one she uses when speaking aloud. For an actor accustomed to thinking about physicality, timing and movement while memorizing lines, limiting the performance entirely to her voice became its own creative exercise. “Finding those types of details, but all just within voice, was really fun,” she says.
Although Cathcart’s career is now at the forefront, she’s been deliberate about keeping some distance from Hollywood, where that career can easily consume everything else. She still lives in Vancouver, even as work regularly takes her to Los Angeles and elsewhere. More importantly, she remains extremely close with her parents, and her older sister, whom she calls “the best friend in the whole world.”
That sense of stability feels particularly significant at a moment when the costs of growing up in the entertainment industry have once again come into sharp focus with the recent death of former child star Hayden Panettiere at 36, after years of speaking candidly about the difficulties she faced growing up in public. This was also shortly after the deaths of other former child stars Michelle Trachtenberg and Daveigh Chase.
“Having a home base has helped me stay connected to who I was before I started in this crazy, complex industry,” she says. Being able to leave Los Angeles, in particular, provides some perspective on an environment “where everyone’s after the same thing.” She explains, “It can get very overwhelming very quickly. For me the most grounding thing is getting to come home. My family has been so supportive from day one. You need that.”
It helps that Cathcart, who is Chinese and Irish, grew up surrounded by a large Asian community and remembers attending a high school where mixed-race kids like her were common enough that she rarely felt conspicuous.
“So many people were half Asian; they looked just like me and had the same experiences as me,” she says. “Growing up, I was really privileged to feel like it was normal and welcomed, and to be comfortable in who I was.”
It wasn’t until her acting career exposed her to fans far beyond Vancouver that Cathcart began to understand how unusual her experience was. Some of the kids watching her characters had grown up without seeing others who looked like them at school, in their communities or onscreen. That realization has changed how she views her own visibility.
“My stories or characters have really impacted how some people see themselves in a positive way, or it’s made them feel braver or more comfortable being themselves,” she says. “That is the coolest impact that I think art could ever have.”
“So many people were half Asian; they looked just like me and had the same experiences as me. Growing up, I was really privileged to feel like it was normal and welcomed, and to be comfortable in who I was.”
For someone whose career already spans film, television and now immersive audio, Cathcart still has a hefty wish list. She wants to make a feature film that debuts in theatres, and is drawn to projects that require her to learn something new before stepping in front of a camera.
“I would love to do an action movie or a musical, something that has another element to shooting,” she says, imagining months of rehearsals, training or learning a new skill for a part. Descendants gave her a taste of that kind of production years ago, she says, and “it was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done.”
But she also has an affection for returning to characters over time. Kitty, especially, has been in her life long enough that Cathcart talks about her as if she might be a real-life friend. She says, “I get to revisit her, check in on her, relearn her and unlearn her. It’s the best.”
There’s something especially fitting about that for Cathcart today. Both Kitty and Violet are growing up, just like the people who have been watching Cathcart since they were kids. Which leaves the young actor to determine who she is when the childhood version of her career gives way to whatever comes next.
While that may sound daunting, Cathcart says with a smile, “I think it’s cool to grow up with an audience, and have an audience grow up with you.”
