Connie Britton shares what made her laugh during her emotional farewell to ‘Nashville’
Here’s a clue: She was on it -- not that she takes responsibility for its greatness.
Connie Britton’s heart-wrenching goodbye to “Nashville” came with a lot of laughter and a lot of tears.
The star of the country music soap, which was picked up by CMT when ABC dropped it after Season 4, survived a stalker only to die after a car accident in the show’s fifth season this year. As Britton put it when she recently stopped by The Times’ video studio, Rayna really “bit it.”
As the actress bid adieu to the country singer character, the Emmy-nominated star shot long, emotional scenes in a hospital bed. It took a while to shoot those final episodes, so there was a lot of laughter on set, she said.
“Particularly when Rayna is wheeled in after she just had the accident. Then our [director of photography] Michael Lohmann — a jack of all trades— in order to shoot it, he ends up sitting on top of me on the gurney,” she said. “This is so awkward but I’m just going to go with it. There was a lot of comedy in that. We got to enjoy those last moments. And when things turned, where [Rayna] wasn’t going to come back, there was a lot of tears that got really tough — the crew and cast and everybody ...we were all crying for a lot of days.”
She had to say goodbye to the character but also to her costars with words that creator Callie Khouri plucked from her own life.
“It’s a devastating story to tell,” Britton said, pointing to a poignant line that was cut from the final episode.
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That being said, the “Friday Night Lights” and “American Horror Story” alum looked back on her time in the Music City-set soap fondly.
“In general, when I think back on the show, my best memories are probably that there was so much fun and joking around on the show” behind the scenes, she recalled.
More specifically, her favorite memories were performing onstage, despite her fear of singing live.
“Doing those performance pieces, which were the most challenging but also the most rewarding, and really exciting for me as an actor to live in this world for five years and to play this character who’s going up onstage and singing those songs,” she said.
She was the “most nervous about those scenes” but became less nervous as the show progressed.
“I’ll look back and be so grateful that I had those opportunities,” she said.
Watch Britton’s full interview below:
The actress, Rayna Jaymes on the CMT show, says there was also some laughter while filming it.
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