Roxy LeBlanc is the firecracker among the “Army Wives,” Lifetime’s biggest hit series ever. She was the first character viewers met when the show debuted this summer. Roxy, petite and scantily clad, was working her job at a bar, pouring and serving drinks, when a gorgeous young serviceman approached her. Though they’d only known each other for three days, Trevor, the serviceman, told her she was his soul mate – and proposed.
Any reasonable woman would have told the guy thanks, but no thanks. Not Roxy. She took the leap, tying the knot and moving onto the army base with her two young sons (from two previous relationships) and her new husband, Trevor, winningly played by Drew Fuller.
Like Roxy, Sally Pressman had no idea what she was doing when she first showed up on set.
“I’d really done nothing before this,” says Pressman, 25, from her home in Los Angeles. “And then all of a sudden I was auditioning for one of the leads of this show. I was thinking, ‘What are we doing here, people?’ Roxy is so different from who I am and so different from anything else I’d ever gone in for. I thought: ‘I’m so not going to get this.’ That released all the tension and pressure. From the minute I went in, I felt like I was what they wanted to see from that character.”
“Roxy was a tricky role to cast,” says Deborah Spera, one of the show’s executive producers. “We auditioned a lot of actors for it. When Sally walked in, we all looked at each other and said ‘Thank God.'”
“Army Wives” is loosely based on the non-fiction book by Tanya Biank, in which one of the young couples Biank profiles really did meet and marry that quickly.
“For some people, when their lives get rough enough and the signs are clear enough, they just go for it,” says Pressman. “In this instance, Roxy made a really good choice. Trevor is the all-American dream guy. In fact, Drew had a little difficulty with it. He would ask, ‘Why is this guy so perfect?'” laughs Pressman, who has been dating her boyfriend, actor David Clayton Rogers, for two years.
From then on, Roxy finds that there’s a lot on her plate: getting to know her new husband, settling her children and moving to a new place with entirely foreign rules and customs. Through it all, she maintains her humor and her common sense.
“What’s so great about Roxy is that things hit her immediately and very surprisingly,” says Pressman. “She’s always like, ‘Wait, what? No one told me that.’ And she’s the only person in the story who’s just coming to these realizations. That’s why the audience attaches to her as their guide into the show.”
Born and raised in New York City, Pressman couldn’t be more different from LeBlanc. A classically trained ballerina, she graduated from Yale University with a degree in theater. Still, she says she has some things in common with Roxy.
“She’s very honest, very loyal and she doesn’t really take crap from people,” says Pressman. “And sometimes I get in trouble with my opinions, too.”
One thing that Roxy and Pressman definitely don’t share is a sense of style: “I would never dress that way on my own,” she says, admitting that she’s definitely watching what she eats during shooting because of all those “tops that barely go over Roxy’s ribs. She works at a bar, so she understands that to get tips she’s got to flaunt it a little bit.”
“Army Wives” has been so successful for Lifetime that the network renewed the show for a second season after only five episodes had aired. Season two, which will jump to 18 episodes from 13, starts production this November in Charleston, South Carolina.
ARMY WIVES
Sunday, 10 p.m., Lifetime