Maia Reficco Talks Hadestown Run, Pretty Little Liars Cancellation, and What’s Next for Her Career | Teen Vogue

“I love to make the best stuff that I possibly can make,” Reficco tells Teen Vogue.

WRITTEN BY AAMINA INAYAT KHAN

Broadway has changed Maia Reficco. The Hadestown star now habitually speaks in a higher register because it helps preserve her singing voice. She’s always drinking water, and it’s always room temperature. She even turned off the air conditioning as soon as she arrived at the hotel room where we met for this interview, a common practice singers do to prevent irritating and drying out their vocal cords.

In early July, Reficco took over the role of Eurydice, the female lead in the Broadway production of Hadestown, from fellow TV actress, The Summer I Turned Pretty’s Lola Tung. Prior to this Broadway stint, she was best known in the U.S. for starring as Noa in the Pretty Little Liars spinoff, which was recently canceled after two seasons at Max. (“We’ll forever be Pretty Little Liars🤍 and what an honor it was,” Reficco wrote on X. “Thank you so much for the love and support throughout the past 3 years, it’s been a dream. to my liars: i’ll love you always. see u next time.”) Prior to PLL, however, she was a successful child star living in Buenos Aires; she’s also pursuing a music career, with a handful of singles over the past few years.

The change from television acting to stage acting is a pretty major one, with a completely different pace. TV shows and movies are often shot out of story order, and there’s plenty of down time while shots are being set up and re-set up. Once a Broadway production starts, however, there’s no down time and no stopping. That’s especially true for an opera like Hadestown, where the entire show runs on time with music, rather than just on dialogue.

© Photographed by Michaelah Reynolds

Days on set can go up to 16 hours a day, whereas her job as Eurydice requires around five hours a day. But theatre is so much more physically taxing, she says, and she’s so much more exhausted these days than she was while filming Pretty Little Liars. Now she’s got to stay healthy and adjust her lifestyle to make eight live shows a week sustainable, especially now that her contract has been extended to January 2025. It’s a matter of endurance, Reficco says.

We’re having our conversation a block away from Walter Kerr Theatre, and if it weren’t for the interview, on a typical day, she would have already had her mic taped up by now. She’s still getting used to the exhaustion, she says, but playing Eurydice every night fulfills her, and she’s eager for more of it.

“As a performer, it’s the smartest, best training I've ever had,” she tells Teen Vogue. “I kind of got used to those ways of adapting my life to fit into what theatre requires from me. I'm also able to prove to myself that I'm capable of doing it for a prolonged period of time, which was something I didn't know if I had in me.”

She cites all the pop stars who started on Broadway who’ve gone on to have amazing singing careers, something she wants badly for herself. She sees in those girls a blueprint of what theatre can do for a singer, perhaps of the kind of artist she can become herself.

© P!nk and her daughter with the cast of Hadestown

She cites all the pop stars who started on Broadway who’ve gone on to have amazing singing careers, something she wants badly for herself. She sees in those girls a blueprint of what theatre can do for a singer, perhaps of the kind of artist she can become herself.

“I love seeing so many theatre girls, Reneé [Rapp] for example, getting her moment,” Reficco says. “She is such proof of the theatre school and how that can allow for you to be such a phenomenal singer and an artist. I think she's one of the greatest voices right now in mainstream media. She's absolutely fantastic. Her voice is out of this world, and theatre really does prepare you for that. Like, singing the Regina [George] track eight times a week is crazy.”

Reficco is living in New York, spending night and day on Broadway, but of course, since she’s working, her schedule doesn’t allow her to consume too many other shows right now. The exceptions: Uncle Vanya (she’s a huge fan of the show’s star Steve Carell), Illinoise (starring PLL co-star Ben Cook), and then of course, there’s Wicked. A running joke she has with her brother is that you have to see Wicked every six months, just as a memory refresher. But the last time she got to see it, it was a reminder of something else — ”Like, dude, I'm doing that, dude. I’m on Broadway! What the hell!”

The same way that starring on a big TV show changed the way she watches television, joining the cast of a Broadway show changed her audience experience for other theatre productions too. But knowing the work it takes to put on a live show has made Reficco all the more invested. “I can't enjoy a goddamn show because I get so caught up on analyzing things,” she says. “But I love it, and I'm such an emotional mess that I get so involved in the story every time. Every time I end up sobbing even if the show doesn't call for it. I'll cry in a comedy.”

© Photographed by Michaelah Reynolds

As Eurydice, Reficco brings a real youth to the character. Eva Noblezada, who originated the role on Broadway, played Eurydice as sensual and bittersweet, whereas Reficco’s Eurydice is angstier and more animated. Each actor brings their own kind of strength to Hadestown, which is necessary as a show gets bigger and runs for longer, as is definitely the case with Hadestown, which opened on Broadway in the spring of 2019 and is now extended to at least 2025 with a production on the West End and another one touring North America. The roles become amenable to what different actors bring to them.

Reficco says she watched the show over and over again while learning the role, and injected pieces of herself in her own way. In Act I, when telling Orpheus to sing the song he’s writing to bring back spring, she speaks to him in Spanish. She also wears an Argentinian flag pin on her coat. She took inspiration from Jon Jon and Isa Briones, a father-daughter duo who played the roles of Hermes and Eurydice earlier this year, and who included lines in Tagalog. “I’m not Filipina, but just seeing that on stage was so moving, and I know what that can mean,” Reficco says.

Another thing she loves about the stage is that if she’s working, she’s lucky enough that people are watching. Between the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes in 2023 and the general glacial pace that it takes for something to get made and then for that work to get shown to an audience, film and television are still extremely unpredictable. The end of Pretty Little Liars: Summer School did not give viewers the impression that the show was over. When we talked in early September, the cancellation decision hadn’t been announced yet. “I don’t know, dude. I’m scared,” she jokes. “I’m like, please let us know!” She had hopes to redeem her character Noa’s messy streak in the then-undecided season 3. “I got a lot of hate this season,” she says, She referring to the anger and frustration fans felt toward Noa’s cheating on Shawn, and, on the flip side, toward the show’s employment of a trope that bisexual women cheat. “I would love to kind of get into all the underlying things that made her decide the things that she did. I think she's so incredibly valid, and I love her. She's so strong, and it really frustrated me to see those comments at times.”

Since it was announced on Sept. 20 that Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin would not be getting a third season, ending the story at a place that feels incomplete, there’s a lot that remains unresolved for Reficco. The reaction to Season 2 was part of what led her to get off Twitter. It’s very understandable how an actor becomes invested in their characters so personally, so this is no easy thing for Reficco to let go of. “Noa has changed my life,” she says via email to Teen Vogue in the aftermath of the cancellation. “It was a gift to play and share her with the fans of such a beloved universe that I grew up loving. I’ll forever be grateful for this show and cherish the close relationships that came through it. I’ll miss it very much. ”

As much fun as actors have, it’s not uncommon for an actor to get booked for a job, film it, and then have the project stay in limbo, with no real answers as to what comes next. Between the strike last year, PLL’s future, and projects she’s wrapped on like A Cuban Girl's Guide to Tea and Tomorrow still without a release date, Reficco has learned to deal with uncertainty as an actor. “My job is to act,” she says. “Everything else I can't stress about because there's enough uncertainty with not knowing when the hell my next paycheck is going to come in…all I can tell you is I'm as close to peace with that as I can be.”

She really internalized that lesson when she ran into a fellow actor while filming Do Revenge in Atlanta. She starts to tell a story of a night she and some cast members went out together and ran into another cast that was shooting at the same time in Atlanta. “An actor that I’ve looked up to my whole life — he's young, but he was a child actor, and I had seen him in a bunch of things — we started talking, and he asked me about [a role] that I wasn't really proud of that I'd done, and he looked at me and goes, ‘But why do you care?’" Reficco says. "And I was like, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘Well, my job is to just show up to work, have fun, enjoy it. And then I don't care about anything else. I don't care about the finished product. I don't care about what people think of it, not my job. My job is to show up.’”

But it’s complicated because at the same time, she does care. She cares about her career and her future and the stories she gets asked to participate in. Not even a minute after her declaration of apathy, she even tells on herself. “I am saying all this, and then it's not really the reality of it. I'm completely lying,” she jokes. “No, I try my hardest to be this way, but I love film, and I love to make the best stuff that I possibly can make.”

If you would like to receive Maia Reficco's news, simply enter your e-mail address and the language(s) you understand best in the comments or in the chat conversation.

This would help me a lot as I have a number of mailings that are updated every year so to avoid sending mails to uninterested people I prefer to send it to people who are fans and interested in any Maia news in any language. Thank you for your interest.

See the rest of Maia's shoot on Maia Reficco France and the outfits she wears on the site Maia Reficco Fashion.