It’s time for part two of our exclusive interview with Mary Kate Wiles, star of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries and Squaresville.

We’re back with the second and final instalment of our esclusive interview with Mary Kate Wiles. In part one, we heard Mary Kate’s thoughts on Episode 87 of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, and then discussed the controversy created by certain plot and character decisions surrounding Wiles’ character Lydia Bennet. This time, hear all about The LBD audition process, what’s coming up in Squaresville season 2, what’s next for Mary Kate, and more.

Hypable’s exclusive interview with Mary Kate Wiles

Hypable: So you probably know by now how Lydia’s story is all going to wrap up?

Mary Kate Wiles: Mostly, yeah.

Do you think it’s going to satisfy the fans?

I don’t know, I hope so. I get so many people writing to me saying, “We just want her to be happy, we just want her to be happy,” which is so funny.

Because she’s not real.

Yeah, exactly. I think ultimately for Lydia – actually Rachel [Kiley, The LBD writer responsible for Lydia’s vlogs] and I talk about what’s going to happen to her in her later life a lot.

Can you give us a rundown?

I don’t know. I personally have been very sad for her throughout this whole thing, and Rachel has been like, “It’s okay, she’s going to be okay”. But I do think that this is going to be something that – of course it’s hard to say because in my own personal life the heartbreaks I have experienced were terrible and awful and I hated them, but I wouldn’t have grown in certain ways without them.

And I think the same is going to be true of Lydia, and I hope we get to give her a hope and a future. I’m not sure yet exactly what her last episodes are, but I know that there are things that we hope that we can do. It would be nice to see her with Mary again, I’m not sure if that’s going to happen or not, but we’ll see.

What about Lydia and Gigi, that could be some great spinoff where they fight crime and take down jerks.

A lot of people are very much on that train. I’m not saying it’s out of the question, but I think it would be so far in the future. It’s going to take Lydia a little while to bounce back from all of this, and that’s okay, because that’s what real life is.

The fans just get excited, they want to see people following each other on twitter.

They do.

That’s the endgame. Isn’t that the point of Pride and Prejudice?

Right. It’s just all about twitter.

It’s what they were doing the whole book, have you not read it?

Well there’s not that much left to do, obviously there’s certain people that have to get together by the end, so the focus is going to be a little off of Lydia for a while, after these next couple weeks.

I think there’s still a lot of questions about Lydia because her story has been the most altered from the book. Lizzie and Darcy, and Jane and Bing we can see are going to happen. But in the book, Lydia and Wickham end up married, after the running away arc, which seems to have been cut. So Lydia’s resolution is one of the things that is most up in the air at the moment.

I think that it’s clear that it is going to happen one way, but then I see people speculating, so maybe it’s not clear. It’s different. The sex tape is the scandal. Obviously things are different about that instead of eloping.

Yeah, that’s an interesting choice you guys have made, so it will be fun to see how that wraps up.

I really hope that we get to wrap up all the loose ends.

So you’re still filming?

Yes. As for if there will be more of Lydia’s vlogs, I don’t know.

Going back to the start, let’s talk about the audition process. You originally auditioned for Lizzie?

I auditioned for both.

Can you tell us a bit about the process?

Well I had met Bernie [Su, head writer, executive producer, director and co-creator] before, and I saw the breakdown and I thought “Oh cool, this sounds fun, I like Pride and Prejudice.” Obviously every girl initially relates to Lizzie, and Lizzie is one of my favourite female protagonists in literature, but I also knew that I look younger so that’s why they wanted to bring me in for Lydia as well.

I did Lizzie much more straight, down the line, normal girl. Then as a foil to that, because everytime you’re reading two characters in an audition you want to make them different, I made Lydia way on the other side, a super crazy party girl, and so much so that I had no idea if it was any good at all. And they had me do the Bing scene, in my first audition – “This dance is super slamming.” I was like, this is so weird, we’re pretending to be other people, I don’t get it. And then I didn’t hear back from them for a while. I think our initial audition was a year ago in December.

Then I finally got the callback, and I was only called back for Lydia, and again I was like, “We’ll see if they like this. I’m going to throw this at them and see if it sticks,” but it just seemed to me that that’s who Lydia would be in a modern setting, and there was only me and one other girl called back for Lydia and she was taking a very different approach, so I thought “Well, you know, they’ll choose the one they like better.”

I guess they did.

Yeah, I guess they did. And again, I didn’t hear back for weeks, so I thought “Well, I guess that didn’t happen” and then I got it. None of us really knew each other very well at the beginning, it’s kind of funny how we all got to be so close because at first, I don’t even know if I met Laura [Spencer, plays Jane Bennet] before our first shoot or on our first shoot. I guess we were there at the same time, but it took time for us to actually get to know each other and create this crazy bond that we have now, and obviously as time has gone on everything has informed our characters and our relationships.

Would you ever be open to having your Lizzie audition tape included on a DVD as a special feature?

Oh yeah of course! I don’t think it was probably very good, but I wouldn’t mind. I would actually be more nervous about people seeing my Lydia audition because it was so kooky. So crazy. It’s hard to remember and judge, but I was pretty silly in it.

It did the trick.

I guess so, I’m glad.

Lydia is a very close character to you now, but do you ever feel in hindsight any regret, or just a wish, that you had had a chance to play Lizzie?

Oh no, not at all. I don’t mean that as an insult to Ashley [Clements, plays Lizzie Bennet] at all, but no. It’s funny, because at the beginning Laura always gets to be so pretty and sweet, and everyone was always annoyed with Lydia, and I was like, “I wanna be the pretty, sweet one”. But then as time goes on I’m like, “No I don’t! I really like Lydia!” I really like this person that we got to create with her, and she really is so different from anything else I’ve gotten to do personally. In my career, I have never played the party girl, ever. I’m always very brooding, I’m very weird.

The hipster.

Yeah. It was kind of a shock at first to have all of these people know me as this person who is so not me. Actually Laura had to give me a pep-talk about it at Vidcon, where she was like “Stop doing that”. I wanted to assert that I wasn’t Lydia, that I was different to Lydia. And she was like, “Just stop it, why are you doing that?” And I was like, “I don’t know”. And then as time went on I realized that Lydia and I had a lot more in common than I originally thought.

It’s an interesting turnaround because I don’t think anyone really grows up thinking “I want to play Lydia Bennet,” everyone says “I want to be Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice,” but I think you have turned that around now.

Thanks, that means a lot to me. Again, I didnt ever realize that that’s how it was going to happen, and now I’m so proud of her. And I’m so proud of her story and I feel like it’s some of the best work I’ve ever done in my career, and that’s so crazy. It’s just been really cool.

I think you can be proud of yourself as well, you had a little bit to do with it.

Thanks. I’m very lucky.

It’s been a really great adaptation. I’m interested to see what they would do next. Would you like to be involved if they do another one? Would you like to work with the same people, or do you want to do something different? Obviously you have Squaresville coming out.

I do have Squaresville coming out. I highly doubt that they will ask us to be involved, because – this sounds so arrogant – our characters, to these people, are kind of iconic in that way. I don’t know if anyone will be able to see me in a similar sort of thing, not as Lydia Bennet. And I’m happy with that, thats fine. I’m very happy being Lydia Bennet to them. I’m definitely interested to see what they decide to do, it’s been such a cool thing to be a part of, really no classic story has ever been told this way, ever.

It’s so original and new and cool and different, and I feel so lucky to be a part of it in that way. I’m very curious, I know that they’re going to want to change some things up, but still keep it similar, so I’m very curious to see what they come up with and how it goes. I have loved working with the team, and would definitely love to work with them again, I doubt that it will be on this next one, just because I’m sure they are going to want to make a different story.

Let’s talk about Squaresville for a little bit.

Yay, Squaresville!

The second season has just premiered. Give us the Squaresville sales pitch, how would you describe it to someone who hasn’t seen it before?

Squaresville is about two young girls in suburbia, bored with nothing to do, who are so frustrated because they want something to do, they want to mean more than everything around them let’s them. It’s very Freaks and Geeks meets Ghost World. I feel like it is a young teen coming-of-age story for this generation. It’s very new and fresh and a very relatable story, that is in its own way very unique. And I love it. I love Squaresville and I’m so proud of it, and I’m very happy to be in it.

[Authors note: Squaresville was also recently included on Entertainment Weekly’s Must List, and reach 1 million views on Youtube]

And in comparison to The Lizzie Bennet Diaires, it’s a lot more like traditional television in the way that it’s filmed, except if you were only seeing little snippets of an episode instead of a 30 minutes.

Obviously the episodes are much shorter, but they are very much more traditional tv-style.

Can you tell us anything about season 2? Anything we can expect, new things that are happening?

Season 2, yeah it’s really cool. I’m really, really excited about season 2 because we had a little more freedom, and there’s some fantastical elements that are really neat that I’m really looking forward to. Kind of in the way of seeing into the characters heads, because they are teenagers and they are bored, and they spend a lot of time day-dreaming and wanting to be off in space, and we’re going to get to kind of do a little of that, and it’s really neat. It’s going to be really sweet.

And it also examine the relationships deeper. It’s cool because season 1 was sort of setting up these characters and their relationships to each other, and in season 2 we have a little more freedom to go off with them and have fun, and look at them deeper. It’s gonna be fun.

And season 2, you’ve already filmed it, it’s all wrapped?

It’s all wrapped, yeah.

So over how long it will come out?

I think our episodes are going to take us into August. I might be wrong about that, but it’s quite a few months.

Squaresville obviously has a much smaller audience than The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. More concentrated maybe, but it hasn’t been picked up in the wider offline community – so how has your experience been different between the two web shows?

I don’t know. It’s weird because they’re very different but they’re also, to me, so intertwined, because they have been coming out at the same time. Every week I’m promoting both shows and I know the fan-base for Squaresville is not as big as the one for Lizzie Bennet, so I’ve actively been promoting it in my own circle, so I hope to have those fans cross over because I think a lot of the fans of Lizzie Bennet would enjoy Squaresville, and do, even though they are so different.

So it’s been weird on one hand, but it’s also been really wonderful, because people are like, “Wow, you’re so different as Zelda than you are as Lydia” and I’m like, “Well, yeah. Isn’t that the point?”

It’s funny, because I always thought Zelda was the character I related to the most, and I am like her in a lot of ways. But as time has gone on I actually found out some things about Zelda that I was like “Oh, I’m not like that at all.” And the oposite it true for Lydia, who at first I thought I’m not like her, and then I was like oh wait, I am like her. So it’s been a really interesting self-discovery process as well.

And is there anything else you’re doing right now?

Not really. I’m in a movie called Dreamworld that will be coming out soon, and then I’m also in another film called The Sound and The Shadow. But these two are really my big things.

You have a Youtube channel as well, where you upload song covers and things. Is musical theatre something you’re interested in? Have you done that before?

Yeah, actually at USC all I did was musicals, which was so crazy because I never went into it thinking I was ever going to do that. I love musicals, the last one I did was Anne of Green Gables and I played Anne, and that was really cool. It’s a little hard to make a living doing them in Los Angeles so I havent done one in a while and it’s a bummer. But I love them and I love music.

Last question. If you could play any character, male or female, young or old, whoever, who would it be?

Uh, it’s so embarassing. My answer is Frodo Baggins.

That’s an excellent answer.

Because Lord of the Rings was what made me want to be an actor, and everyone knows I’m very much in love with Elijah Wood and I think he’s fantastic in those movies. But just watching Frodo’s journey I was like, I want to do that. That’s what I want. That’s who I want to be.

I think that’s a great answer.

I’m the biggest dork. I dont think I could do it better than he does but I think Frodo is very interesting and wonderful and one of my favourite characters.

Images: Tumblr, Marykatewiles.com