The second season premiere of NBC’s Undateable airs tonight (March 17) at 9PM, and the show gets a new addition in the form of singer/songwriter/actress Bridgit Mendler of Good Luck Charlie fame.
We spoke with Bridgit last week on the Burbank stages of Undateable to find out how her character, Candace, gets assimilated into the group.
“I think they’re coming from the beginning of her arrival, so she’s just arrived at the bar, started working there, and then gradually, you start to hear she comes from this rough past, she doesn’t really have any roots anywhere,” she says of her character’s entry into the show. “She’s looking for a home and a family, and then this group of mismatched weirdos becomes her people.”
Quickly, we’ll see that Candace actually ends up living at the bar, and she even adopts a dog. “The dog is found in a dumpster, and she has a connection to this dog because she also feels kind of abandoned in the world. She wants to have something to nurture and care for – I’m making that sound really dark, but part of her character is that she’ll say really dark things, but she delivers them in a way that’s just accepting and kind of optimistic, because she’s just used to things going badly,” she explains. “She lives in the apartment because there were complications with her old place, and then she gets this dog… she’s not allowed to have a dog… it’s just a sequence of events that make it make sense. She doesn’t have a lot of money, so yeah. She winds up living in the bar.”
The character of Candace is different from many of the females who have come onto the show in the past, as she’s younger, and therefore is treated more like a “little sister” than as a sex object. However, there is one person in the group who ends up catching her attention — Justin, Brent Morin’s character who is very similar to Candace in many ways.
“I think it’s just because they have a lot in common, and he is a caring person,” Bridgit says of her character’s crush. “I think she hasn’t seen that in a lot of guys before, and so she sees it in him, and they have so many similar interests… She has this pure crush. She sings a song for him, and she’s like a little girl, which is different from a lot of the girls that the guys start dating. They’re just more mature. I think for her, it’s like a sweet thing, and it feels like a pure love. I think that’s a nice thing.”
Undateable is definitely a different kind of project for Mendler, and she’s glad she took the part. “I love these people. The environment is great. I think the writers are really talented; I think the cast is really talented, and I believe in the show,” she says. “It’s genuinely funny. I want to make my younger fans wary of the fact that it is a more mature show, thematically, and I’m hoping that the older fans will enjoy it and will watch it.”
You can see Bridget Mendler’s Undateable debut on tonight’s season premiere, 9PM on NBC. Below, see a music video starring Mendler promoting Season 2:
