A strange world. In Everyone Is Doing Great, Alexandra Park portrays Andrea Davis, an actress who married her former costar, Jeremy Davis — played by her real-life fiancé James Lafferty.
However, Park, 31, doesn’t associate herself with the word fame.
“I don’t really see it that way. It’s very surreal,” she says on the new episode of the “Watch With Us” podcast. “It’s wonderful to see that you have an effect on people in the shows that we’ve done. But there’s the other side to it as well which we investigate in Everyone’s Doing Great, which is that it can become a little bit of a bash to the self-confidence.”
The Royals alum notes that the negative side of fame includes that people “assume they know everything about your personal life,” which is part of the reason she chose to turn off her Instagram comments, reminding fans that “it really does affect you” to read insulting remarks.
“I think the way to deal with that, for me, is to just try and ignore those comments, and just be as active as possible with the wonderful fans and supporters that I do have,” she tells Us. “It still makes them feel included but also protects me in my headspace. I think social media is a really tricky thing, and I’ve learned a lot about that recently.”
Although she and Lafferty, 35, have kept their relationship private through the years — they met when he directed an episode of The Royals in 2015 — they did share the news that they were engaged in September 2020.
“We are very private by choice, but we want to get some love out for the show and we want to share our lives with our supporters and fans. We walk the line of putting a little bit out there at times,” the Australia native adds. “We share little bits and pieces here and there. He’s the only person I hang out with other than my dog and people are already like, ‘You can’t just post pictures of your dog all the time!'”
While some real-life couples are hesitant to work together, it was almost the opposite effect for Park and Lafferty.
“We came up with the idea! So we thought it would just be great [to play a married couple]. The chemistry is in there,” the Home and Away alum says. “We love working together. That’s one of the things I’m so grateful about in our relationship is that we’re able to work together doing the things that we love, so we just thought it would be really fun to play around with the dynamic of Jeremy and Andrea in obviously something that’s very opposite to our personal relationship. We work together on everything. It’s very natural for us and really fun.”
Everyone Is Doing Great is now streaming on Hulu.
For more from Park and more exclusive TV news and interviews, subscribe for free to the “Watch With Us” podcast.