TV Talk: Murrysville native Julie Benz spills ‘Secrets of a Gold Digger’ on Lifetime

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

While some American actors have gone stir crazy waiting out the required 14-day quarantine before they can work on film and TV projects that shoot in Canada, Murrysville native Julie Benz learned to love the downtime last fall before beginning production on Lifetime’s “Secrets of a Gold Digger Killer” (8 p.m. June 13).

“I was nervous about the quarantine,” Benz said by phone last month. “It turned out I loved the 14-day quarantine!”

The Los Angeles-based Benz said once she arrived in Vancouver, British Columbia, she followed a daily schedule that mixed time working on preparing for “Gold Digger” with some relaxation (“I became obsessed with ‘Call My Agent’ on Netflix”) and an early bedtime (8:30 p.m.).

Benz said “Secrets of a Gold Digger Killer,” based on the 2015 nonfiction book “The Fortune Hunter” by Suzy Spencer, had “a beast of a script” that tells a true crime story largely through flashbacks. Benz stars as Celeste, a waitress in Austin, Texas, who marries 70-year-old multimillionaire Steven Beard (Eli Gabay) before Celeste checks into a mental health facility and seduces a fellow patient (Justine Warrington) into carrying out a deadly plan.

“I had to do a lot of research on Celeste,” said Benz, who has played characters based on real people before, but never a convicted felon. “Like many people, true crime podcasts are what I listen to, so this was right up my alley.”

Benz still has extended family in Western Pennsylvania — full disclosure: she’s the cousin of Trib sports columnist Tim Benz — and last visited about four years ago. She said she dreams of filming a project in Pittsburgh someday.

On her last visit, the 1990 Franklin Regional High School grad spent time at her alma mater with students studying theater. She recalled her first and only directing gig was in high school.

“It was not my best experience,” Benz said, chuckling at the memory. “I had a really hard time getting the other actors to learn their lines. It turned me off to directing for a long time. I cast myself as the lead so that probably was not the best move for a first-time director.”

In addition to the Lifetime movie, Benz has a recurring role in season two of Hulu’s “Love, Victor,” now streaming. The half-hour drama follows a teen coming to terms with his sexuality in suburban Atlanta. Benz, who arrives in episode five, plays a member of a support group for the parents of gay teens that Victor’s father attends.

“It was a really wonderful experience, and I was really excited to be a part of the show because I feel that show is so important to a lot of youth in America and all over the world who can watch the show,” she said. “It’s such an important story to be told, so just to be a small part of it was very exciting for me.”

Early in her career, Benz had a recurring guest role as the vampire Darla on Joss Whedon’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel” — Benz said she didn’t witness any of the inappropriate behavior series regulars alleged earlier this year ­— before starring roles on Showtime’s “Dexter,” Syfy’s “Defiance” and in the 2010-11 ABC superhero drama “No Ordinary Family.”

In the decade since “No Ordinary Family,” Benz said the number of episodes of most broadcast series has dropped well below what used to be a standard 22-episode season. She sees that as a good thing.

“You can tell really good stories in 13 to 16 episodes,” she said, adding that a 22-episode season is a marathon that’s overwhelming for a show’s writers, cast and crew. “We had some executive changes midway through (‘No Ordinary Family’) and that affects the show, and it seemed like there were some shifts in focus on what the original plan to tell the story was versus kind of what they were settling into. They would have been better to have done 13 episodes, and it might have lasted longer. I love that show. That was a dream job. But it was a little ahead of its time before all the (Marvel) superhero stuff came out.”