Brittany Snow talks whitewashing, timing of ‘Bushwick’ after Charlottesville violence

When Brittany Snow signed on two years ago for the action thriller Bushwick about militia attacks in New York, she had finished a second Pitch Perfect, Barack Obama was still president, and a state trying to secede from the union seemed pretty darn fictional.

With Bushwick coming out Friday (in select theaters and on video-on-demand platforms) in the aftermath of the violence in Charlottesville and amid a combustible political climate, it’s starting to look a lot more plausible.

“It’s really sad because this was supposed to be a cautionary tale about what happens when differences divide people and the polarization of a nation, and right now what we’re seeing is exactly that,” Snow says. “We never intended to make a movie so timely.”

The actress stars in the action film as Lucy, a New York City grad student who’s traveling to the Bushwick section of Brooklyn to visit her grandmother. She gets off the subway just in time to witness a domestic terrorism incident — a Texas militia attacks in an attempt to make the metropolis a base for East Coast operations for their nascent Lone Star republic.

Lucy runs into Stupe (Dave Bautista), a muscular veteran who stows her in his basement and helps her survive. In the exclusive clip above, Lucy and Stupe begin to realize that they’re in the middle of a domestic civil war.

In addition to playing someone back in college (“which I don’t think I’ll ever get out of”), Snow enjoyed the fact that Lucy was “kind of a blank slate” who has to take every new and crazy situation as it comes. But the actress admits she’s not totally clueless. “I wanted to make sure that although she was young and in college, she was still aware that in times like this you really have two choices: You can either be strong and stand up for what you want and believe in or you can just sit there and ask more questions.”

Snow has found herself as the center of complaints about the lack of a diverse cast more in line with the real working-class Brooklyn neighborhood. Last week, her dad showed her an article online saying she was the person "whitewashing" Bushwick. “I was like, ‘What?! Me?!’ I don’t think I have that much power.' But you know, he’s 79,” Snow says, laughing.

She’s not bothered by it. “That’s what I love about movies and cinema and art in general. It is open for interpretation and opinion and everyone has their right to share their opinion about what they see and how they take the movie, but that was never our intent to whitewash a neighborhood. That’s just kind of silly.”

Snow explains that Lucy’s Polish grandmother raised a diverse group of youngsters and Lucy was adopted into this foster-care system “to symbolize that there can be a lot of different races under one roof that unite together when things get turbulent.”

Snow admits to having “an interesting career” with a lot of lighter roles — in addition to the Pitch Perfect films (with the third arriving Dec. 22), she also had notable turns in The Pacifier, John Tucker Must Die and Hairspray in the 2000s.

However, “I actually relate to and like watching and like playing drama more. It’s so interesting that people keep putting me in comedies because I don’t think I’m very funny,” Snow says with a laugh. “I really enjoy picking apart a script and being serious. For some reason, that makes me feel more at home.”