Brittany Snow: My ‘Pitch Perfect 2’ character is headed to Burning Man

The girls from “Pitch Perfect” are back with “Pitch Perfect 2,” and if you think that Brittany Snow’s character, Chloe, should have graduated by now, you’re not wrong. For Snow, that meant playing a character pretending to be dumb enough not to graduate — all for the sake of a cappella.

Exactly how many years has your character been in college now?
(laughs) Um … she was a sophomore in the first one, so she’s failed, I think, now three times? Yeah. She just loves being a Bella and she just can’t give it up. They wanted her to still be involved and unable to let go, and because she’s had to stay in school to be a Bella she has to progressively get more and more dumb.

How do you approach playing a character who is intentionally trying to seem dumb?
The way to play that is to make her not dumb. She believes wholeheartedly everything that she’s saying, and she really passionately cares about these girls and this legacy. You see that in the first one and you definitely see that in this one, that she cares so much about this. It’s her entire life. She’s a very power-of-now sort of person, where she only sees what’s in front of her and she doesn’t see that eventually you have to move on.

Speaking of, where do you see her going after she finally leaves college?
Because she’s an extremist and she only does things to 100 percent, she probably would take it in the exact opposite way and really let go of everything. I just have this image of her being a hippie, just living in a commune or, like, in a field, going to Burning Man or something like that. Maybe she just takes it really too far.

But she would be, like, really into Burning Man, right?
She’s really into Burning Man. She’s doing all of the, you know, activities and everything at Burning Man. She’s probably manning all the booths.(laughs)

How did you find the right balance for the humor in this?
When we got the “Pitch Perfect 2” script it was very edgy and it was really pushing the envelope, and I was extremely excited because it really didn’t shy away from all things funny, no matter what or who it offended. And a lot of that has been cut out because we couldn’t make that movie with a PG-13 rating, and also we didn’t want to offend everyone.

What sort of offensive stuff are we talking about?
My character was drunk a lot of the time and jumping in the pool and going a little bit crazy, and that got cut as well. Chloe’s definitely still having a nervous breakdown, but she’s not drunk — which is unfortunate, because I really liked playing that. (laughs)

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