Jennifer Nettles is one of the biggest names in country music. As the frontwoman of Sugarland, she’s been a radio favorite for years and years. She also moonlights as an actress from time to time (as fans of The Righteous Gemstones will know from her quirky role as Aimee-Leigh). Her latest TV role is in Prime Video’s horror-comedy series The Bondsman, which releases in full on Thursday (April 3), and she picked that part for a very particular reason.
In the series, she stars as Maryanne Dice, a longtime nightclub singer with hopes of finally making it into the recording scene in Nashville … until her ex-husband Hub (played by Kevin Bacon) is murdered and resurrected as a demon-hunter who inadvertently ropes her into his dangerous new career.
“I’ve been approached numerous times before with offers to come into TV and film projects that were about a musician, and I’ve turned them all down until now,” she told TV Insider. “I felt like, number one, they didn’t really understand the industry — it was always sort of glamorized in a certain way or exaggerated. But this show in particular, they’re musicians living lives. There’s much more to what’s going on, obviously, in this world and Hell and beyond.”
“You get to see them, not just as musicians, but you get to understand more of who they are, in terms of their character, in terms of their relationship,” Nettles continued.
Indeed, a major arc of The Bondsman is Hub’s rejection of the music world, even as Maryanne begins to get a big break, along with their teenage son Cade (Maxwell Jenkins). In key flashbacks, we learn that Hub and Maryanne used to perform original songs together when things were better between them.
Those tunes were written by Bacon and Nettles themselves and are being released as an album after the show’s streaming premiere.
“I just loved the opportunity on this show as well to write for these characters and to write for the show. Kevin and I got to collaborate and to write music for this,” she explained. “All of that is music that’s inspired by and written as the characters in the show. So there’s really a lot of layers to it.”
The Bondsman, April 3, Prime Video