Sweet Magnolias: Allison Gabriel on Making Waves in Serenity [Interview]

This interview contains spoilers for Season 1 of Sweet Magnolias. 

Allison Gabriel is good at playing sad people. So, when the opportunity to play a woman vying for custody of her nieces on Netflix’s new drama Sweet Magnolias came to her, the audition tape was easy as pie. 

But Gabriel was auditioning for one of two possible parts, and the role of Serenity’s resident “scrappy” villain Mary Vaughn Lewis was more intriguing to her. 

Luckily for Sweet Magnolias fans, she landed the part of Mary Vaughn. It’s hard to imagine anyone else portraying the pristine mayor’s wife intent on setting the record for the longest and strongest high school rivalry.

Mary Vaughn isn’t a member of Sweet Magnolias and she’s not particularly concerned with being sweet, but that doesn’t mean she’s inhuman.

I got to talk to Gabriel about Mary Vaughn’s layers, the origin of her grudge against the Sweet Magnolias, and Gabriel’s hopes for the first lady of Serenity’s journey on Season 2 of Sweet Magnolias.

“I think Mary Vaughn is a very vulnerable person and she covers it with bravado and a very hard but pretty candy shell,” Gabriel told me, about her character’s feelings toward the Sweet Magnolias — heroines Maddie Townsend (JoAnna Garcia Swisher), Dana Sue Sullivan (Brooke Elliott), and Helen Decatur (Heather Headley).

“I think [she] is very hurt that she was left out [of that clique]. And I think in her mind she was left out on purpose by those girls.” 

Mary Vaughn is quite clearly the biggest villain in Serenity, a town where everyone will know your business if you whisper at the wrong angle in the church pews on Sunday.

But Gabriel challenges fans to examine our perspective of her. Gabriel’s friend helped her tape her audition and proposed a theory that twists first impressions of the perfect Mayor’s wife upside down. 

“She was like ‘You were mean girled. Those girls mean girled you,” Gabriel declared. “And I think a lot of women can understand that.”

She clarified, “[Mary Vaughn’s perception] may not be the case, that may not be the objective truth. They may have been the very sweet Sweet Magnolias. But according to Mary Vaughn’s point of view, they were the mean girls.” 

Based on the Sweet Magnolias TV series alone, this potential perception is far from reality. But Sweet Magnolias is also a book series by Sherryl Woods and between those pages, Gabriel found a very complex woman with a different relationship status. 

She’s separated from her husband and dating other people, but she doesn’t realize that the man she’s interested in is dating one of her friends. “She’s happy for her, but also her heart is broken.”

Gabriel described a scene in which Mary Vaughn goes to meet the couple for a drink. Before getting out of her car, she lets herself feel her pain for a minute before painting on her smile and heading into the restaurant. “I swear to you, I cried reading the book.” 

We have yet to see the pain Mary Vaughn is potentially hiding on-screen, but according to the source material, she holds many different kinds of strength inside her immaculately groomed body.

The kind we’ve seen so far is not afraid to stand up to high school baseball coaches like Cal Maddox (Justin Bruening). In fact, the scene where Mary Vaughn tries to insist on her son being put in the starting lineup was Gabriel’s favorite to shoot. 

“I feel like it’s the first time where I felt Mary Vaughn and I really felt like we were cooking,” Gabriel said. “She was really there and I had a deeper understanding of the character I think.” 

Plus, there are perks to her job. “It’s always fun to get into some tall, handsome man’s face and tell him what’s up, you know?” she confessed. 

Villians can be female, especially on small-town dramas. But Gabriel compared Mary Vaughn’s behavior to a new awakening she’s watching younger women have on Tik Tok, where they’re taking control of their bodies in what might be perceived as extreme ways (by growing body hair out, for example). 

Just like female Tik Tokers demand agency of their bodies, Gabriel said, Mary Vaughn grabs the future that she wants and doesn’t let go. 

“She never kowtows to anyone, she never filters what she wants to say, her truth is her truth and she lives by it. Whether you agree or not, she’s not interested in that. She’s just interested in what she wants. So, there’s something kind of masculine about it you know? I love that about her. Because I would never go talk to the coach and tell him who should start the baseball game. I would never do that.” 

As for what Mary Vaughn will do or say next, Gabriel is on the edge of that car accident cliffhanger just like the rest of us. (“I was like, ‘that is so rude.'”) 

She can only share her wishes with me: “I hope we get to explore more of her backstory because I think she is a really interesting character and I think if people knew more about her they might identify with her a little bit more.” 

There are 11 books in Woods’ Sweet Magnolias series, so I too hope the run-in with Coach Cal is just the first of many waves Mary Vaughn intends to make in the quiet town of Serenity.

After talking with Gabriel, I may even root her on sometimes.

 

Follow Allison Gabriel on Instagram and Twitter. 

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Sweet Magnolias is available to stream on Netflix right now. 

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