

“The weeks leading up to leaving were really scary for me. “My stomach dropped a little bit,” Van Patten admits now. She'd be leaving her family and friends in the midst of a global crisis, and she wouldn't be able to see them until production had wrapped.

But when the coronavirus pandemic began, the Perfect Strangers team told Van Patten to pack her bags and jet off to Australia, a continent she hadn't visited since she was 10 years old. The Brooklyn-based actress, 24, had been planning to spend her summer filming in Los Angeles in fact, she'd already signed an apartment lease. (Van Patten's unit was right by the little homes Samara Weaving and Tiffany Boone shared with their husbands.) She felt it every day when she awoke on set, sleeping in a row of houses built specifically for the quarantined cast around the grounds of the real-life resort SOMA. For Grace Van Patten, the surreal sense of isolation swallowing the fictional wellness resort Tranquillum House in Hulu's Nine Perfect Strangers wasn't hard to conjure.
