TV Talk: CMU grad Victoria Pedretti is haunted in Netflix’s ‘Bly Manor’

Actress Victoria Pedretti’s acting career took off just a few months after she graduated from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama in 2017 when she was cast in a supporting role in Netflix’s “The Haunting of Hill House.”

Form there she landed a major role in season two of Netflix’s “You” – she’ll be back on “You” for the upcoming third season – and this week she returns to the “Haunting” franchise as the lead in “The Haunting of Bly Manor,” streaming Friday on Netflix.

Like FX’s “American Horror Story” franchise, writer/executive producer Mike Flanagan’s “Haunting” tells a new, complete story each season. Several season one cast members — including Pedretti, Henry Thomas, Oliver Jackson-Cohen and Carla Gugino – return in new roles in the nine-episode “Bly Manor,” which is set mostly in 1987 in a stately British home where an American nanny (Pedretti) cares for two children after their parents’ deaths.

Where “AHS” is gory and brash, “Haunting” is subtler, scarier and spookier. “Bly Manor” also hangs together better. “AHS” tends to fall apart before the end of each season; “Haunting” grows deeper, delivering a satisfying conclusion.

Tonally “Bly Manor,” inspired by Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw,” differs from predecessor “Hill House.”

“It has different pace. It carries a large amount of romance — this Gothic doomy, dark kind of romance — but there’s still so much love and joy and lightness that shines through because of these characters,” Pedretti said. “I would categorize it more as a tragic love story than a family drama as the first season was.”

Pedretti’s Dani arrives in the “Bly Manor” story with what appears to be a supernatural affliction. Dani also appears to walk on her tip-toes, especially when moving quickly.

“It grows from the psychology of an anxious person,” Pedretti said of her choice in Dani’s physical movement. “She’s struggling with anxiety attacks. She seems very afraid of people and the judgment that they carry. She’s far more comfortable with children and you can see that she even talks to them more comfortably than she does around the other adults.”

Pedretti said “Hill House” helped ease her transition into on-camera work in big-budget productions.

“Working on season one, I had very little understanding of how it actually was to work on a set and so I was constantly, constantly learning,” she said. “This season I had to learn how to work to build my stamina to a whole other level. … How to calm your nervous system when you’re representing a lot of traumatic events happening. And you’re doing it over and over again throughout the day, which is different than what you learn when you’re studying theatre because it’s about working through a story so that you get to that point naturally throughout the arc of a play.”

Like “AHS,” “Haunting” gives actors an opportunity to take on a new role each season, which Pedretti appreciates: “I have ADD so I think I might get bored if I had to do the same thing all the time.”

Pedretti said she loves Pittsburgh and has returned to visit friends since graduation but she hasn’t gone back to her alma mater.

“I don’t go to CMU because … I have a very complex relationship with that school,” Pedretti said. “It was a dark time. I think a lot of people had a really rough time. I hope they do more to help create a more positive environment there.”

Pedretti said she’d like to talk to CMU drama school representatives more “because I have hope that arts education can be an empowering thing.”

She said in her CMU experience there were too many expectations that student artists follow old standards and traditions that she says no longer suit the modern world or the student body.

“The idea that people learn differently and carry different strengths … that doesn’t make them defective,” Pedretti said. “Even things related to gender, race and sexuality, and prejudices that exist in relation to that. It’s fuddy-duddy. … Shakespeare’s great and all but you can’t just teach a bunch of white, male favorites to a diverse student body. It’s even telling students that we need to conform to the system as opposed to empowering artists to change the system to serve themselves.”

Colbert encourages voting

CBS’s “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” offers state-by-state informational videos encouraging citizens to register to vote.

Colbert’s customized message for Pennsylvania — available at https://www.betterknowaballot.com/pa/ — includes the host saying, “Pennsylvania has a special place in my heart. It’s the part that’s not already blocked by a cheesesteak I had back in 2008.”

WPXI’s new hire

Channel 11 hired a new reporter, Alyssa Raymond, who got her start in journalism at Moon Area High School writing for the student newspaper, Moonbeams. She’s a 2007 Moon Area High School grad who has worked as a weekend morning and noon weekday anchor/reporter at WTHR-TV in Indianapolis since October 2017.

A Syracuse University grad, Raymond interned at Pittsburgh’s KDKA-TV and WTAE-TV. She freelanced for WTAE in 2017. She’ll start at WPXI on Oct. 12 as a weekday morning reporter and will do some fill-in anchor work as needed.

Kept/canceled

Showtime ordered a sixth season of “Billions” to follow the back half of the fifth season which has yet to be filmed and televised due to the pandemic.

Netflix renewed YouTube import “Cobra Kai” for a fourth season and the third season will premiere Jan. 8.

Netflix renewed animated comedy “F is for Family” for a fifth and final season.

Netflix canceled “Teenage Bounty Hunters” after one season and rescinded its season four renewal for “GLOW,” canceling the series after three seasons.

Channel surfing

Mt. Lebanon native Joe Manganiello will voice a character in Netflix’s “Army of the Dead: Lost Vegas” an anime series prequel to a 2021 zombie heist film. … “PBS Kids Talk About: Race and Racism,” featuring content from Pittsburgh-based Fred Rogers Production’s “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” and other PBS Kids shows, premieres at 7 p.m. Oct. 9 on the local PBS Kids Channel (over the air Channel 13.5) and on WQED-TV’s main channel at 8:30 a.m. Sunday. …Pittsburgh native Billy Porter will narrate HBO Max’s “Equal” (Oct. 22), a four-part docu-series about the LGBTQ+ movement. … Tarek El Moussa and Christina Anstead return in 15 new episodes of “Flip or Flop” (9 p.m. Oct. 15, HGTV). … NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” welcomes Bill Burr as host this weekend; Issa Rae hosts Oct. 17 with Justin Bieber. … Netflix’s “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life” will air over four nights (8-10 p.m. Nov. 23-26) on The CW.

TV writer Rob Owen: rowen@triblive.com or 412-380-8559. Follow @RobOwenTV on Twitter or Facebook.