Photo by: TJ Baker
We caught up with Kathrine Barnes who we will soon see playing Arina in the new dark comedy series, Average Joe, premiering June 26th on BET+. The series is inspired by showrunner Robb Cullen’s life experiences and follows a blue collar plumber, Joe Washington (played by comedian and actor Deon Cole), who discovers his recently deceased father lived a secret second life and stole millions of dollars from dangerous people just before he died. Those people think Joe knows where the money is, and it turns into a bloody and violent confrontation triggering a chain of events that forces Joe and his close-knit circle of friends and family out of their average and mundane lives.
Average Joe also stars Tammy Townsend (Queen Sugar, K.C Undercover), Malcolm Barrett (The Boys, Timeless), Cynthia Kaye McWilliams (Bosch, Real Husbands of Hollywood), Michael Trucco (Fire Country, Battlestar Galactica), Ashley Olivia Fisher (The System), and Pasha Lychnikoff (Deadwood, Shameless). Kathrine will play the recurring role of Arina (nicknamed “The Chameleon”), a former KGB assassin and enforcer for the Russian mob who is dragged out of retirement and back into Nicolai Dzhugashvili’s world.
We asked Kathrine about her character in the upcoming series, what we can expect when tuning in, how she prepared to play a former KGB assassin, and more. Check out our conversation below.
What can viewers expect from your upcoming series, Average Joe?
Kathrine Barnes (KB): DRAMA. I knew my contribution to the story wasn’t exactly gonna be all sunshine and puppies, but listen, I walked into a series led by one of the funniest standup performers I have ever seen in my life thinking it was going to be a somewhat dark comedy, and I wasn’t there for 2 days before we did a scene where I’m watching Deon Cole cry his eyes out in a grocery store aisle. The show is still rich with comedy, but the intense commitment out of everyone to the life-or-death stakes of the story is really something.
How would you describe your character, Arina?
KB: I think of Arina as a superhuman who craves a deeply ordinary life and is doing what she can to make herself happy. She was pretty young when she became a KGB assassin and was so talented that she was recruited into the Dzhugashvili crime family, but she only gets out of that world after experiencing a serious trauma, so nothing about her life has been easy or average. She’s brilliant, she’s engaging, she can be ruthless, she’s a little weird, and I think sometimes she might be the tiniest bit self-destructive, but you 100% want her on your side in a fight. I think she’s just so cool. And she made me laugh on the page.
What can you tell us about the preparation process for this series and your character in particular?
KB: With Arina, it kind of felt like she just spontaneously burst out of me fully-formed, but I still had to put the work in to keep everything sharp and emotionally invested. Practically, that looks like a lot of walking around for months daydreaming about her relationships, her life, her thoughts, and a lot of just whispering the words in the script to myself. It was a pretty quiet process. Vocally, I had already been working with a Russian accent coach before I even auditioned for Average Joe, but Arina is a master polyglot, so I worked with a couple of coaches for some of my accents, I spent a lot of time with our magnificent on-set Russian language coach, and I did some listening to native speakers of the languages and accents I was using whenever I could.
And then physically, I got to train with some of the best stunt performers in the business. I’m already fairly movement and fight savvy, and I’ve been a dancer since I was a little kid, but these guys threw a gi on me, tossed me onto a mat, and started making me use muscles I not only didn’t know existed, but soon wished I didn’t have. Those physically hard days were also my favorite days. But I would frequently wear myself out because I was just so excited to be there that I wouldn’t stop, so I also had to prep by forcing myself to take breaks. If my therapist is to be believed, this is also a good practice for life in general.
When people watch Average Joe, what are you hoping they get out of it?
KB: I hope people are thrilled and repulsed. I hope they laugh as hard as I did at some of it. I hope they get confused by and curious about who and what they’re rooting for. I hope they want more.
Where there new learning experiences acting-wise you gained from playing Arina?
KB: I don’t know how deep into the weeds people want to get about acting, but I really could talk about it all day long. I’d say that, because of how instinctive it felt to access Arina, it was a good opportunity to practice being gentle with my emotional preparation and really seeing what would happen if I just trusted that I had done enough. It’s the kind of thing that can feel so impossible on certain jobs when you’re only there for a day or two and you know you’ve got to show up, execute, and roll out. I felt like there was a little more freedom to fail here, which, ironically, I think often makes failure less likely. And sometimes it wasn’t even intentional!
Some days you show up and have to run to set from the makeup trailer and you’re muttering your lines in a language you don’t speak and going over fight choreography and double-fisting Twix bars and herbal tea while listening to direction and hitting your blocking and there is simply too much to do to even remember to stress about your preparation. So yeah, I think there were definitely some epiphanies around abundance mentality and letting go that I already knew cognitively but was able to integrate repeatedly for the first time, which felt like a gamechanger. It wasn’t like, oh I’ve flipped a switch and now I’m always showing up to work without any pressure to cling to my preparation, but even just having a taste of the alternative feels like a huge step._
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Avergae Joe premieres June 26th on BET+.