Artist Profile: From ‘Annie’ to Harvard, Annabelle A. Wachtel ’28 Balances Campus Life with Her Acting Career

A typical day for Annabelle A. Wachtel ’28 begins with a 9:45 a.m. class, a Tatte run, an a cappella rehearsal — all followed by her coursework as an Art, Film, and Visual Studies and Theater, Dance & Media joint concentrator. Outside of her life at Harvard, though, Wachtel has also performed on Broadway and in television and film. She attributes her growing work in these artistic fields to her time on campus.

“I would say that a lot of the things that I learn tend to be put into the art that I make. And so, in order to create things that I would consider to be worldly or well researched, I think I have to have a kind of a base of some sort of knowledge, and that, for me, can only come from learning in a liberal art environment, such as Harvard,” Wachtel said in an interview with The Crimson.

Wachtel completes about two or three taped auditions a week. In the Winthrop music room, Wachtel spends hours reading character breakdowns, and both preparing and filming tapes. Though she might have a sense of where a character might fit into the overall screenplay, Wachtel learns more about her characters the more time she spends physically portraying them.

“While running it over and over again and delving into the intricacies of my acting choices, I discover the character further. And I find that that makes it way easier just to do it over and over again during that two hour period of actually taping,” Wachtel said.

Wachtel played Ruthie on Hulu’s “The Beauty,” directed by Michael Uppendahl and released this previous January. The experience on set was particularly unique because Ruthie had undergone a botched nose job, requiring intricate special effects and makeup to choreograph the fake blood exiting her nose at just the right moment.

“I absolutely adored working with Michael Uppendahl, who directed my episode, and I also loved working with my fellow actors,” Wachtel said. “It was really, really interesting meeting and working with someone who’s playing a different version of the same character that I was playing. That was a super specific and really awesome experience.”

Wachtel began her acting career at the age of nine on the National Tour of the Broadway Musical “Annie,” after her third grade vocal coach suggested she begin auditioning for Broadway musicals. For seven months, Wachtel played Molly, the youngest orphan. In real life, Wachtel was also the youngest actor on tour.

“It was honestly an unbelievable experience,” Wachtel said. “The experience of working with other kids, as well, was very enlightening. I totally did not know what I was getting myself into. I had started my acting experience essentially a year before, and it was completely random.”

But from “Annie” on, Wachtel knew that acting was forever.

“I was only eight years old, and so in terms of getting my bearings or having something of an understanding of what being a child actor was, I kind of just stepped right into that, with a huge lack of knowledge,” Wachtel said. “But I was super happily surprised, and I made a lot of lifelong connections during that, and I learned that it was something that I wanted to do for the rest of my life — whether that be acting specifically or working just within the entertainment industry.”

Wachtel studies both playwriting and stage and screen directing for her concentration. Her roots as an actor allow her to see the importance of crafting realistic stories through dialogue and writing, instead of relying solely on the performer’s craft.

“As an actor, you focus on real life, and you try to implement the way that you see people behave into your characters that you’re playing to hopefully craft a dialogue that feels extremely natural,” Wachtel said. “That really does go into both writing and directing a whole lot, and that’s something that I focus on primarily in my writing.”

Wachtel’s short film, “Plantman” was the first film she ever directed. It detailed the experience of a socially isolated college student who talks to his plant everyday. The plant undergoes a metamorphosis into a Plantman, and ultimately the college student is able to discover himself through this complex friendship.

Even when behind the camera, Wachtel thought critically about how to highlight her actors’ craft. More specifically, she prefers a simplicity to the editing aesthetics and cinematography to allow the viewer to focus on the acting.

“I think that that’s because my roots are in acting, that I have that kind of preference when I’m filming something, when I’m behind the camera or when I’m behind the stage, I always have a bias toward the actor and toward capturing those natural, real moments, because I think that that personally is what makes a film or a play quite magical,” Wachtel said.

Wachtel closed the interview by giving insight into her plans for the future, not tying herself to one medium or the other.

“Out of college, I intend to pursue both directing for the stage and screen and writing for the stage and screen,” Wachtel said. “So I think that there’s not one form of media that I can say I prefer over another. They all hold a very special place in my heart and have been very important to my life at different periods.”

—Staff writer Victoria Washington can be reached at [email protected].