Xochitl Gomez – The Baby-Sitters Club

By starrymag | July 23, 2020

By: Lisa Steinberg

 

 

Q) The staff behind the TV series we see on Netflix really put such conscientious efforts into including some amazing nods from the books and 90’s movies that really encapsulates “The Baby-sitters Club” so well. From the phone to street signs and costumes to dialogue. When you began reading the scripts, and eventually started to film, did you pick up on a lot of these?

 

A) Oh, definitely.  I had already seen Clueless so many times that having Alicia [Silverstone] on set, that was also one of those connections, but also one of the lines that Kristy (Sophie Grace) has says, “Oh you know my mom, she can be so clueless.”  Also, I had some lines from other movies like The Parent Trap, that was one of them.  There were a whole bunch of movies that my character makes reference to so what I did was download the movies and rented them.  I watched the movies so that I could really understand what my character was saying and what the joke was and how to make the joke and how to make it real because I knew that people who grew up with those movies would react to the joke.  So, I wanted to make sure that I was saying the joke like I actually knew what it was. One of the other ones was First Wives Club, that was one of the jokes I made. After I watched the movie it was just like, “Okay, I can make like forty jokes about this.”

 

Q) What I love is these familial bonds we see is that they are not just with the girls of The Baby-Sitters Club, but with Dawn and her mom and her spiritual group. How do these maternal and female forward bonds we see in the series really help form the young woman we see on screen and open up the audience to that female empower energy as well?

 

A) It definitely shows with these group of girls that you don’t really get to see a boy’s opinion.  I actually decided to go back and watch “Boy Meets World” and “90210” and a bunch of old TV shows.  A lot of them focus on a guy’s point of a view and I know that when I was reading “The Baby-sitters Club” books I realized that this book series featured girls.  I was realizing at that time how much that meant to so many people and how much already how that was their power during that time.  It’s getting to do a reboot of that and introducing a brand-new generation to that feminine power that the older people grew up with.

What’s really funny is that when we were filming, we were not thinking about who the audience was going to be at the time.  We were so focused on the friendship and making it feel real, that now I am realizing all of these people who are contacting me and telling me that they like the show aren’t just younger people and the people who grew up with it being girls; it’s also other people that I would not have thought would have ever seen the show.

 

Q) What I love about “The Baby-sitters Club” is that it showcases the girls championing social justice and environmental issues as well as inclusivity, among the highlights that a lot of beloved pre-teen and teen based series tend to shy away from. It’s truly a series that sets a high bar with its spectrum of representation, empowerment, and progressiveness. Specifically personified so well with your character.  Dawn is strong in her convictions, but she also learns as she grows. We see this personified with the stand she takes while at Camp Moosehead against Meanie. These young women aren’t just role models for the children they look after, but for each other as well as its audience. What does that realization and gravity mean to you?

 

A) That’s one of the things that Dawn and I don’t really have in common.  In some of the early episodes she was turned into an activist for the last two, which is really hard for me and was tricky because it was like before in the first couple of episodes that she is in she isn’t really this full activist girl.  Definitely for the last two episodes I had to figure out because it’s almost like a new person, so I tried to dial in the subtext that she was new at organizing things.  People overdo it sometimes and get it wrong, so I wanted to make sure that I had that purpose of Dawn still in it and not make it an annoying activist girl. That she was turning herself into a new girl and she is opening up and she is taking that leadership and owning it.  I myself am not really like that.  That is probably one of the things that Dawn and I don’t have in common, but it made me realize that I don’t do that and so I am slowly getting there.  I am slowly opening up to the idea of the new Dawn in the last two episodes.

 

Q) This realization and culmination does make sense for Dawn.  We see the episode of “Dawn and the Impossible Three” where she uses her voice not just for a cause, but she is actually her own advocate.  It was this really great set up for the final episodes for her at the camp. 

 

A) I know that the younger generation didn’t really realize that. There are a few things that the younger generation didn’t really notice.  I know that they focused on “Boy-Crazy Stacey” and other episodes, but there are some messages in the episodes that they didn’t really understand and they didn’t really focus on, and I think that’s one of them.  They didn’t really see the fact that she has a brand-new development.

 

Q) While the girls are young women, we see how adults can often take advantage. That’s a big moment for Dawn, realizing that she doesn’t have to go with the flow just because the person in position of power is an adult. What do you hope this moment audience? We are often taught to respect our elders or not question authority, but this moment where Dawn puts herself first really shows that it’s okay to advocate for yourself and you don’t have to be taken advantage of.

 

A) I feel like her mom really helped her with that because her mom was the one who answered the phone.  Sharon (Jessica Elaina Eason), her mom, definitely helped her in that direction.  But there are definitely things that I did not take from the episodes, like at this point I didn’t really think about all of those things like that.  There are definitely things that I didn’t really think about like your point and other people’s points that I didn’t even realize.

 

Q) There’s also this great moment at camp when it clicks for Claudia (Momona Tamada) and Dawn that they really haven’t spent much time just the two of them even though they are a part of the same club. Instead of camp pushing them apart for different interests, it actually ends up bringing them even further together unexpectedly. What did they learn from one another that further cemented their friendship?

 

A) Momona and I had actually not really hung out.  It was mainly me and Malia [Baker] hanging out.  So, that definitely brought us into the actual characters because we hadn’t really known each other.  That scene where we are dragging in our luggage, that was one of the first scenes that we shot together and one of the first ones we shot at camp.  When we first started talking to each other off screen we were like, “Okay, this is new for us.”  By the end we were like best friends.  During the time we were bonding off set we realized how our characters make this huge shift.  Not only does Dawn, but so does Claudia and we realized that they have this voice that they never even really knew that they had.  It’s a huge character development not only for Claudia, but for Dawn as well.

 

Q) We see this awesome handshake that Dawn and Mary Anne (Malia Baker) share with one another, is that something you and Malia came up with together or was it something taught to you?

 

A) We had two handshakes.  We had The Parent Trap handshake that we did at the wedding and also a second in Mary Anne’s episode.  We do The Parent Trap handshake that we actually had to learn which was really fun.  We also had the handshake in Mary Anne’s episode where we do the snail thing.  I actually don’t remember what it was. I think we just made it up.  We saw a bunch of snails or we were talking about snails for some weird teenage reason and we just kind of came up with it. I came up with what we were going to say and we both figured out what we were going to do with our hands.

 

Q) What is your favorite part of Dawn’s character whether it’s something specifically about her characteristics or who she is at her core?

 

A) The thing is, I can tell you that it is so important that a Latina character and her family is represented in this series because growing up I never really saw anyone who looked like me on a popular TV show.  It really impacts me as a person just to know that they were going to make a show that had a Latina girl in it and figuring out that I was going to be in it. I was going to be the Latina girl in it, really meant a lot to me.  In the past there have been a few series with Latina characters, but it was like they were invisible in a way.  With “The Baby-sitters Club,” the woman who wrote my episode is a woman of color, and so that really meant a lot to me as a girl of color as well.  One of the other things that stands out to me for Dawn is that she is really confident, and she is a lot more sophisticated in a way.  She’s a little confrontational, but not in a bad way, in a way that she kind of wants to have a little competition, but it’s a positive competition.

 

Q) Which episode was your favorite to film?

 

A) All of them were so fun to film. They were all from a different person’s point of view.  I like Dawn’s episode because there is one scene in particular that I really love with Marc Evan Jackson (who plays Mary Anne’s father) and Jessica in the supermarket.  Just an entire episode with a really big arc.  That entire episode was so fun to film.

 

Q) Is there anything else about the series that you would like to mention that we didn’t touch on or talk about? Or say to “The Baby-sitters Club” fans for hope on season two?

 

A) One thing I do want to add is that I have collected over eighty books of the original books.  My favorite books are two part, Books 30 and 31, Mary Anne and the Great Romance and Dawn’s Wicked Step Sister.  Those two books cover a lot of stuff with the marriage of Dawn’s mom and Mary Anne’s dad and also it has plenty of friendship drama between the girls.  I really hope we get to do those if we have a season two.  I really, really hope that we get to do those.  Maybe at the end of the season, I think that would be really awesome.