Becki Newton is featured in another article that’s praising her portrayal of Ugly Betty’s Amanda (not that we ever get tired of reading them!). This time, the article was published by New York Magazine. I’m so happy that Becki’s getting more and more of the recognition she deserves for this role-of-a-lifetime! Read the small excerpt from it below!
Now in its third season, Ugly Betty is beside the point. Not the show Ugly Betty, which still draws obsessive fans on Thursday nights, but the eponymous lead character, the plucky ugly duckling played by America Ferrera in a bad wig and braces. The conceit of Betty—that she’s a hardworking, wrong-side-of-the-tracks magazine assistant at Mode, a fictional Vogue populated with high-fashionista backstabbing—is getting stale. How long do people actually wear braces, anyway? But if Betty herself is losing steam, this has only provided more scene-stealing opportunities for her entertaining supporting cast. The standout among that crew—Michael Urie as Marc, Vanessa Williams as Wilhelmina, Judith Light as Claire Meade—is Becki Newton, who plays Amanda, Mode’s sexy receptionist and resident underminer. Newton’s distinctly low-pitched voice and perfectly arched eyebrow accompany her devastating zingers, provoking a wealth of heh-heh rather than ha-ha moments, courtesy of the show’s writers. But that Amanda is also vulnerable, rather than just another mean girl, is entirely thanks to Newton.
“When I read the Ugly Betty pilot, I thought, Oh, this part’s funny,” says Newton, 30, who’s sitting across from me in the Upper West Side’s Cafe Lalo. She’s wearing a knit hobo cap and a loose-fitting sweater—a strikingly different ensemble from that of her gladiator-heeled character. “I said to my husband, ‘I’m going to get it!,’ ” she says. “But based on what? All my exquisite comedic work in a Nike commercial? Yet something about the character made perfect sense in my head, even though she’s so demented. I knew exactly how I wanted to portray her.”