Ciara Bravo Joins More Nickelodeon Stars in the Original TV Movie "Swindle!"
Game on! Tune into Nickelodeon at 8:00PM on August 24 for the Premiere of "Swindle!"
By: Susan J. Yeager
"Being part of the Nickelodeon family is a dream come true!" gushes sixteen year old Ciara Bravo. "I watched the station when I was a young kid. I never in a million years thought I would ever be here! Now I am and it's surreal almost."
For the last four years, Ciara played "Katie Knight" on the network's insanely popular series "Big Time Rush." On Saturday, August 24, an original TV movie called "Swindle" will premiere. The Kentucky native is among a handful of other Nickelodeon talent that makes up the movie's cast.
The project was just as fun to make as it is to watch. "Swindle was so much fun to film!" she says excitedly. "First off, the cast is fantastic! The crew was fantastic! It was my first project where I really filmed with kids my age. So it was absolutely wonderful to get to experience actually hanging out off the set as well as on the set. On 'Big Time Rush' the guys are like 22 years old, so it's not like we're hanging out after as much. So that was so much fun!"
"The movie is about these two kids who get swindled out of a baseball card," Ciara explains when asked about the movie's premise. "One of them, who plays my older brother 'Griffin,' brings this group of teens together to form this ultimate, kind-of powerful team that goes and wins the card back fair and square."
"So, my character, Melissa, is the tech savvy girl of the group. She's the younger sister to Griffin Bing, who is the one who can talk his way into anything. He's always got someone who owes him something. She's very tech savvy and she's kind of the hacker of the group so she deals with all the technology, and all the computers. You know, getting through security systems and messing with elevators and stuff like that to help them getting to different places on time. You know, escape from dangerous situations."
This character was a tiny bit of a stretch for Ciara. "It's something that I have zero idea how to do in real life," she confesses. "It was so much fun to play, to like mess around on computers and pretend like I knew what I was doing. It was awesome!"
Once she found out that she got the role... how did she get ready to play "Melissa?" "When I read the script, I think you find out a lot about the character through the script. What kind of person she is... is she sarcastic? Is she nerdy? Is she shy? Is she outgoing? What I found out about 'Melissa' just from reading the script is that she is a strong character. She knows what she wants to do. She has gone to Griffin and was like, 'I want to help! You need my help! I'm here! I'm going to be a part of this team.' So I found out that she was a strong character. I didn't know who exactly to base her off of. When I first read it and I saw 'tech savvy,' I was like, 'National Treasure.' That's exactly what I thought of first. I realized that she's not exactly like him because she's a stronger character."
"Honestly, my process was... I just kind of read the script and found out about her through there. I would take notes on different personality traits that I thought she would have and write down different back story relationships with the different characters... mainly Griffin really because that's the one that she knew the best."
Working with the stars of other Nickelodeon shows like "Sam and Cat," "iCarly," and "How to Rock," proved to be a winning formula. "I hadn't met any of them before... besides at little events like here and there and stuff but I hadn't really hung out with any of them before. I was a little nervous going in to it," Ciara admits. "I couldn't have been happier with how great they all were. Jennette was just so fun loving and excited and so professional and happy all the time! It's so lovely to work with people like that because it brings an uplifting feeling to the set. So she was great! The two Noah's were fantastic! Chris and Ariana and everyone... I just couldn't be happier!"
See the trailer for the movie here:
"Like I said before, it was great because it was the first time I got to work with kids my age. We would go and hang out in each other's hotel rooms after work. We'd watch movies together... go out to dinner together. It was just so much fun! I had a blast! And it really was a great bonding experience with us all kind of being stranded in the middle of nowhere for six weeks."
There is plenty of action in "Swindle" so we wondered if one scene stood out most to Ciara. "My favorite scene from the movie was probably the cake fight! Who doesn't want to have a food fight first off? That's a dream I'm pretty sure almost everyone has... but also with cake? That's like ten times better cause it's delicious! There's like, cool whip being thrown in your face and vanilla cake being thrown in your face. It was fantastic! The clean up was pretty rough but that was definitely my favorite scene because it's like a dream that I've had forever, to be a part of a food fight, and then it comes true!"
Ciara's schedule has opened up for more great projects like "Swindle" because "Big Time Rush" has filmed its last official episode. "I'll miss the cast the most!" Ciara exclaims emphatically. "Being on 'Big Time Rush' was such a great experience and being with each other for so long, you really form a bond with the cast. It is a family! We are a family! The guys have become very much like my older brothers, all of them, not just Kendall. Challen Cates who plays my Mom, I LOVE her! I spent so much time with her off set, as well as her children. I actually regularly babysit her kids which is awesome because you're kind of like her TV family but also a little part of her family in real life too! I'm definitely going to miss the cast the most."
The time spent on the series was valuable to Ciara in many ways. "What I learned from Big Time Rush, really... [was] organization! I have a job and I'm still a student, so it's two things that you have to balance. It was really difficult for me at first, trying to get it sorted out and organized where I could get my school work done promptly and on time and still giving it my 100 percent and all my effort while still being a part of 'Big Time Rush' and doing well there too."
"That was really, really stressful to me at first," she continues. "I feel like the longer I went on, the more I realized how to organize everything so that I could do school during these periods of time, study my script from here to here, go to work from here to here, do school in between these blocks. It's always difficult to tell, because in acting, you never really know what your schedule is going to be until the week of... and then you also have exams to do and then you also have studying and extra homework. So organization was something I definitely learned from there."
Time management is a skill that Ciara thinks will continue to be incredibly useful in the near future. "I think that will help me in college as well. That's what my sister was telling me... it's very similar to being a college student, where you have a full time job but also you still have to focus on your studies."
When she's not working in front of the camera or lending her voice to animated projects (Ciara's resume boasts several voice over appearances as well!) the typical teenager can be found living life very much like other teens. "In the summers I'm at camp always! One hundred percent you'll catch me at camp! When it's not summertime, usually I'm just hanging out with my friends, going to movies, reading a lot, a lot of reading and a lot of Netflix! I'm always, always watching TV online. Those are my favorite past time activities, shopping, reading, watching movies... hanging out with my friends, the usual."
"I watched all of 'Sherlock,' three times... the BBC version of it! I absolutely love it!" she says about what TV shows she's making time for these days. "That, 'Breaking Bad' is my favorite. 'Arrested Development' is really good! What else have I been watching? I've been watching the old '30 Rock' episodes recently. That's a classic! There's quite a few good ones out right now!"
She's also careful to be sure that there is some "giving back" time penciled in to her hectic schedule. "There's one that I am really close to because my Dad actually suffers from this disease and it's the CCFA, the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America," she says when the discussion turns to charities. "I've done a few of their walk-a-thons to raise awareness for the disease so that's one that I've been close to for quite awhile now." You can find out more about this organization at:
Ciara will always be grateful for her time spent on Nickelodeon and hopes to make more wonderful memories with the network as time goes by. "It's kind of cool to be part of the Behind-the-Scenes thing and see how it all works and how it all runs. Getting slimed was awesome! I feel like that was the official initiation was getting slimed!" She says of the networks famous favorite pastime." Hopefully, she will continue to turn up on other Nickelodeon projects. "It's so gratifying," she gushes. "It truly is a dream come true!"
Catch Ciara and her teammates' crazy antics when Swindle premieres on Nickelodeon, August 24, at 8:00PM!