Shay Mitchell may be a cool mom to her two daughters, but watching Pretty Little Liars together may never happen.
Sitting down for an interview on The Jennifer Hudson Show on Thursday, the 37-year-old actress and entrepreneur discussed returning home to the Warner Bros. Studio, where they filmed the popular Freeform drama, and why she struggles with the idea of a rewatch with her girls. Mitchell shares two daughters, 4-year-old Atlas and 2-year-old Rome, with her longtime partner, Matte Babel.
“I always think about this, me and my partner are always like, he’s like, ‘The day Atlas is old enough, we’re going to watch it back,’ and I’m like, ‘Ooh, my eyebrows are real thin shooting that entire season,'” she joked, adding that she doesn’t ever watch episodes by herself.
Mitchell — who played Emily Fields from 2010 to 2017 — added, “I don’t know if I’m ready but, you know, it’s — it was such an incredible experience, absolutely, I have only fond memories from shooting.”
According to the busy mom, she finds it hard to rewatch her old projects as she feels like she is constantly trying to catch up on the never-ending watch and reading list that grows by the day. Therefore, going back to a project she knows intimately is not something she is keen to do anytime soon.
That being said, the Béis CEO said she is not fully ruling out the potential of watching a couple of episodes of the show — which ran for seven seasons and also starred Lucy Hale, Ashley Benson, Troian Bellisario and Sasha Pieterse — when the time comes. A complete rewatch is out of the question, though, as she hilariously admitted that she does not have the time to do all that.
“Maybe I’ll watch a couple episodes, it was a lot, it was seven seasons,” she said of the 160-episode series that catapulted her to stardom. “There was a lot of show there but maybe when the time comes.”
In December, the Canadian-born actress opened up to Byrdie about the struggles she faced early on in the series and the comparisons she would draw in her own mind when measuring herself against her PLL co-stars.
“When I booked the show, I knew I didn’t have as much acting experience as the other girls. A part of me was scared, but I knew I would eventually figure it out,” Mitchell shared. “Do I think my performance was Academy Award–winning? Absolutely not. But f**k it. I did it, and I tried my best. I learned more [on that set] than I could in any acting class.”
She also admitted that while her character on the show defined her as an actress and a human being for a while, it also gave her the opportunity and platform to chase dreams outside of acting, including with her luggage company.
Mitchell said that the lessons she learned while on the show helped mold her into a more empowered and bold woman, something she plans to pass on to her own two daughters, who are mixed race. Mitchell is Filipino and Irish, while Babel is Trinidadian and Caucasian.
She previously touched on approaching race with Atlas, a newborn at the time, in a June 2020 interview with ET.
“I think it’s so important to educate them at a young age so they know that truly no matter what you look like, you deserve to love and be loved without judgment, be all and end all and that’s it,” Mitchell said.
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