Jaime Parker Stickle's "Vicious Cycle"

Jaime Parker Stickle is a writer, actor, podcaster, and professor of film and television at Montclair State University. She’s also the creator and host of the true crime investigative podcast The Girl with the Same Name, as well as the hilarious podcast about side hustles, Make That Paper. Stickle lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, and fur babies.

Here she dreamcasts an adaptation of her new novel, Vicious Cycle:

I love to think about casting once I am deeply into the characters. I hold back in the beginning, mostly because the characters must form themselves. Once they have become a second language to me, I begin to hear them in my dreams, in music (lyrics become conversations between all my characters) then I can start to think about the dream cast. As a screenwriter and actor myself who has done a bit of casting for projects, I wouldn’t for a second dismiss the possibility of a series or film. I think it would be an incredible feat.

For my protagonist, Corey, who is a new mom in her late thirties, I really thought about someone who had the confidence, life experience, and vulnerability it would take to play a character that suffers from severe postpartum anxiety and panic attacks while caring for her newborn and solving a murder and immediately thought Christina Hendricks based on her role in Good Girls. It was a slam dunk for me and I often picture her delivering the lines while I write. Today, I think a lot about Brianne Howey from Ginny and Georgia. She definitely has the hutzpah and attitude to embrace a character as complex as Corey.

Corey’s husband, Evan, is already based on many of the men I dated before I married my husband. Each trait of Evan, even some of the dialog is absolutely bits and pieces of things the men I dated had said or done to me. Which made the soundtrack quite easy, but picturing all the male actors in my head that I would play him, only one made the cut so far, Jamie Dornan. He is deeply unapologetic in his roles and that is exactly Evan—he’s unapologetic, lives by his rules and wants his wife to fall in line. It’s a hard role, because Evan isn’t all bad, he’s specific and buttoned up and needs to control his environment to maintain a sense of security and Jamie Dornan fits the picture.

Visit Jaime Parker Stickle's website.

--Marshal Zeringue