Rachel Potter on Her Country Music Ambitions and Going Grim as The Addams Family's Wednesday

Age & Hometown: “Old enough to drink”; Seminole, FL

Current Role: Making her Broadway debut as dour daughter Wednesday Addams in The Addams Family.

Disney Roots: Potter’s parents met in a rock 'n' roll band, so it was only a matter of time before she began taking voice lessons from her mother. And yet “theater wasn’t even on my radar,” she says now. “I wanted to be a recording artist and used to design my own album covers when I was a kid.” That changed when Potter headed to Orlando for college and landed a job performing as The Little Mermaid’s Ariel at Disney World. “I feel like I received most of my education at 'Disney University,'” she says fondly. The actress continued to play dress-up when she joined the Wicked national tour as a Glinda understudy. “I fell out of the bubble my first time on,” she laughs. “It was terribly embarrassing, but [the performance] still felt so special.”

Wednesday Every Day: Transitioning from peppy Glinda to gloomy Wednesday wasn’t a drastic change, according to Potter. A veteran of beauty pagents, she recalls, “I was never really like the other girls. I was a little darker and a lot more serious." In any case, she sees more in Wednesday than her morose exterior: “People have a tendency to assume she’s really monotone, but to me she’s incredibly confident. She doesn’t apologize for the darker things she likes.” Tony winners Roger Rees and Bebe Neuwirth helped shepherd their stage daughter through her Broadway debut. “They’re such good mentors. I can basically talk to them about everything,” she says. She's excited about welcoming new Morticia Brooke Shields, calling the actress “so nice and humble; she seems like such a joy to work with.”

Broadway to Nashville: Despite a blossoming Broadway career, Potter holds on to her childhood dreams of becoming a recording artist. She spends her time off from Addams working in a studio and hopes to have an album or EP released by the fall. “I’m finally coming to a place where I know who I am and what kind of music I want to write,” she says, describing her sound as “pop country with a touch of rock.” Potter believes the transition from show tunes to country crooning isn’t such a stretch these days. “There’s a few people from the theater world doing country music now. Laura Bell Bundy is doing so great, Kristin Chenoweth is branching that way. They’re paving the way for people like me.”