High Desert star Harlow Jane isn’t afraid to go really sink her teeth into a character.
The 20-year-old actress joins her mother Patricia Arquette, 55, on the Apple TV+ comedy as the younger version of Arquette’s character Peggy. Although the mother-daughter duo already bear a close resemblance, Jane wanted to ensure she really looked the part — right down to her smile.
“I went to my dentist and I had him put these artificial teeth over my teeth,” she tells PEOPLE exclusively. “My mom has very specific teeth. And I was getting really into it. I cut my hair, dyed my hair. It was just so fun to me.”
Jane appears as the teenage version of Peggy in the fourth episode of season 1. In the flashback scene, young Peggy furiously confronts her father and the woman with whom he’s been having an affair — at one point, even stubbornly holding on to a car window the pair are trying to roll up while driving off.
According to Jane, every bit of that scene was real. “They wanted somebody to fake [it]. I was like, ‘No, I’m putting my arm through this and you’re going to drive away and you’re going to roll it up,’” she shares. “I had bruises for a week on my arm. But it was worth it.”
Jane shares that it was a unique challenge to get into character for the flashback. “My mom and I are very close, and so I had a pretty good understanding of how she would be or how she would maybe act at that age or in that kind of situation,” she explains. “But it was weird, because it was her through the eyes of a different character, but it was also my character.”
“I love my mom, and I just felt like I knew what her face would look like in this moment of screaming at someone,” she adds. “I love and adore the character of Peggy. I think she’s so cool. And I loved talking to the writers about, ‘What was she [like] when she was younger?’ How sick is that? It was so exciting for me.”
Despite her obvious connection to the series protagonist, Jane wasn’t automatically guaranteed the role of young Peggy.
“I don’t think that we explicitly knew that there would be a young Peggy, but I remember I’d gone to Palm Springs with my mom. … She was meeting with the writers of the show and we had gone to this art installation,” she tells PEOPLE. “I noticed they kept taking pictures of us next to each other. I was like, ‘That’s cute, that’s fun.’ But I remember, I think it was Katie [Ford, the show’s creator], she had mentioned, ‘Well, we’re kind of playing with the idea of having a young Peggy.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, cool.’ Secretly hoping. And so I told my manager about it [and] went and picked out all my best tapes.”
She continues, “My mom was very tight-lipped. She was like, ‘I don’t know if it’s going to happen or not, but maybe they’ll cast you.’ I felt very, very lucky to get that opportunity because I just loved Peggy and how punk-rock she was.”
Of course, Jane’s ability to book a role comes naturally — in addition to her Golden Globe-, Academy Award- and Emmy Award-winning mom, she has a double infusion of talent thanks to her father Thomas Jane, 54, who’s known for starring in projects like The Mist, The Punisher, and Hung.
Despite that natural inclination to join the family business, though, the actress admitted she initially resisted following in her parents’ footsteps.
“I definitely rebelled against it for as long as I could,” Jane previously told PEOPLE. “And then when I got into high school, I ended up going to this very arts-heavy boarding school, and I took a theater class. And that’s when I decided, ‘Yeah, I don’t know if I can not do this anymore for the rest of my life.’ I can’t live a lie of wanting to be anything else.”
She confessed, “I couldn’t help but secretly love it.”
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