Lizzy Greene’s Winning Streak

For years, Lizzy Greene was a familiar fixture of television living rooms—first as the disciplined, quick-witted young star on Nickelodeon, then navigating the emotional ensemble of A Million Little Things. At twenty-three, the American actress has already spent a lifetime in front of the camera, growing up publicly across Nickelodeon comedies and family dramas before stepping into the complex, sun-bleached world of Netflix’s Ransom Canyon. 

When she first got the scripts for her character, Lauren Brigman, she had one request. She didn’t want the sixteen-year-old at the heart of Netflix’s Ransom Canyon to be defined by the boys around her. “I wanted to make sure that no part of the story, especially because I’m portraying a sixteen-year-old girl, ever felt like the only thing going on in her life was these boys,” Greene reveals.

They landed on art as her anchor—something that belonged entirely to her. Off-screen, Greene turns to drawing as a form of therapy, filling sketchbooks in her downtime. During our conversation, she even held up one of her recent sketches—a portrait she’d drawn of her boyfriend, Sean—smiling as she flipped through the pages of the notebook that rarely leaves her side, its cover plastered with colorful stickers.

Pieces of that personal habit naturally bled into the show, with several of the drawings on screen actually drawn by her. “We wanted her to have something that was just for her,” the Texas-born actress explains. “Something she could come back to that wasn’t a job or another expectation. It added another layer to who she was.”

If art gave Lauren a refuge, struggle gave her a purpose. Greene actively encouraged the writers to let Lauren fall flat on her face, convinced that nobody grows up without getting a few scrapes first. “Pain and struggle breed the most change in someone,” she tells A Shot, describing how she pressed the room. “I remember going to the writers’ room and saying, ‘Please have her struggle.’ Not suffer for the sake of suffering but go through something so she can have this new becoming by the end of the season.”

And the writers went there. In season two of the show, that golden-girl sheen starts chipping away. The perks of high school popularity and a crowded love life give way to real messiness, like a dose of awkward jealousy over Lucas (played by Garrett Wareing) thriving while her own world gets complicated. Playing flawed characters requires a delicate balance of empathy, especially when their choices don’t match up with your own moral compass.

Greene knows this tension well, separating her personal perspective from the mindset of the sixteen-year-old she plays. “There’s the actor me and then there’s the real me,” she points out.  As audiences dissect Lauren’s decisions, it’s easy to forget that Greene approaches them from two entirely different perspectives: her own and Lauren’s.  “If we don’t understand why they’re acting this way, it’s never going to quite compute performance-wise.”

Being an adult now herself, Greene looks at Lauren’s chaotic decision-making through the lens of a teenager trying to figure out right and wrong without ever seeing a healthy relationship modeled at home. “She has to come to the understanding of what is right and wrong and who she is as a person,” she explains. “Whether that’s done with grace or if it’s done with a bit of messiness all plays into how old she really is.”

Much of that reckoning unfolds through an unexpected role reversal. While Lauren struggles to make sense of fractured relationships, family turmoil and her own identity, Lucas begins to flourish, stepping into the confidence and popularity that once belonged to her. Watching him thrive awakens feelings she never expected to wrestle with, breeding an interesting dynamic. “I think the person she is in comparison to season one and two are starkly different,” Greene reflects. “She becomes more human and probably also feels a bit inherently guilty for being jealous over him.”

To Greene, indifference from the audience is far more dangerous than criticism. As long as Lauren keeps audiences talking, questioning and occasionally yelling at their televisions, she’s done exactly what she set out to do. “When I watch films or TV, I’m so passionate—I could be cussing at the screen,” she laughs. “We care as viewers, and I don’t fault people at all for however they view the season. If we’re invoking any sort of reaction, if we’re invoking any emotional response, then hopefully we’re doing our jobs right.”

The actress is equally clear-eyed about what Ransom Canyon is—and what it isn’t. She has no interest in overselling the series or pretending it’s something it isn’t. In fact, she thinks leaning into the show’s identity is its greatest asset. “We’re very aware of the show that we’ve made,” she says. “We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel in any way.”

As a sprawling, multi-generational ensemble, Ransom Canyon juggles dozens of storylines and characters at once, leaving limited room for every arc to unfold as deeply as some viewers might hope. “We want there to be something for everyone. Because of that, we might not get to give things the time audiences want, or the meat that they want, because we’re also wrestling with a lot of characters and a lot of things going on.”

For Greene, that’s simply part of the show’s identity. The series embraces a gentler rhythm—one that asks audiences to settle in rather than brace for the next twist. “Our main goal is to make something that is really escapism,” she explains. “We want audiences to feel like they’re a part of this small town. Sometimes the biggest thing going on is the relationship drama and who thinks what about what.” Greene makes a case for a show that doesn’t demand your attention so much as gently keeps you company. The kind you put on after a long day, sink into with dinner in hand, and return to because it feels like home.

If television had taken a slightly different bounce off the crossbar, she wouldn’t be sitting in a makeup trailer reviewing scripts or breaking down character arcs—she would be lacing up professional cleats. 

Soccer has been the steady heartbeat running parallel to her entire life, a constant companion through living in Vancouver, industry strikes in Los Angeles, and countless rewatches of anime. Even during her Nickelodeon years, Greene found ways to keep it alive, lobbying for her character to become a footballer and eventually sharing the screen with U.S. soccer star Alex Morgan. 

“Soccer is such a big part of my life,” Greene shares to A Shot, recalling how she managed to sneak a soccer ball into the back of her car wherever she went, using the pitch as a sanctuary and therapy. “In another life, that was the dream for me.”

That version of her life never happened; acting did. Yet football never really left—it simply found its way back to her through a different door. In The 99’ers, the upcoming drama chronicling the U.S. Women’s National Team’s historic 1999 World Cup victory, Greene steps into the cleats of soccer legend Kristine Lilly, fulfilling a dream she’d carried with her even before the cameras started rolling. “I remember telling my reps, ‘I would give anything to be any part of it,’” Greene says. “Even if it was just to do the six weeks of soccer camp.”

Bringing the legendary 1999 U.S. Women’s National Team to life for The 99’ers wasn’t just a matter of hitting your marks and reciting lines—it took a heavy dose of VHS detective work. To nail the intricate group dynamics of the main eight players, Greene and her castmates—including Zoey Deutch, Emilia Jones, Emily Bader and Isabelle Fuhrman— turned homework into a hang session. They piled into the production office for watch parties complete with a mountain of chips, combing through vintage footage shot back in the day by team legend Julie Foudy.

Since scripts can only capture so much, those old tapes—plus direct input from the soccer icons themselves—became a goldmine for real inside jokes and unscripted banter to sneak into the movie. Greene laughs recalling how Kristine Lilly tried to describe her younger self: “She’d be like, ‘I’m sure you see in those videos I’m really shy.’ And I’m like, Girl, you are not shy!” When production finally wrapped after four and a half months, the cast collectively agreed on one thing: they needed a break from football. “At the end of it, we were all a bit tired of soccer,” Greene laughs. The hiatus lasted all of a week.

Soon enough, the cast found themselves back in the stands, this time as spectators, attending the Brazil–Morocco match together. Only now, Greene wasn’t watching as a casual fan. Months of intensive training, endless VHS sessions and living in the shoes of Kristine Lilly had fundamentally changed how she experienced the game.

If anything, The 99’ers reignited a passion she’d briefly lost touch with. Today, the cast remains in near-constant contact through two aptly named group chats—Soccer Like It’s Hot and The 99’ers— where discussions are just as likely to revolve around live matches as they are around their latest projects. One moment they’re celebrating each other’s new roles; the next they’re reacting in real time to a dramatic penalty or a last-minute goal. “We’ll text each other during games like, ‘Did you see that penalty? That was insane!’” Greene says with a laugh.

Beneath the laughs , the cheekily-named group chats, and the vintage clips lies the legacy of a team that changed sports forever. “The film spans years of this team, and you’re able to see just how much of a part they played in equal pay and people taking women’s sports seriously,” Greene says. It’s that legacy—the fight for recognition, visibility and respect—that makes The 99’ers feel especially timely.

“That project was so hard on us,” Greene admits. “It was really one of the hardest things I think any of us have ever done. But in that, we were forged in fire, and these relationships we had were just so much closer because of it.” Nowhere was that bond more apparent than in Greene’s friendship with actress and costar Emily Bader. Cast as football icons Kristine Lilly and Mia Hamm—teammates and lifelong friends whose connection stretches back to their early teens—the pair found themselves mirroring that closeness off screen.

“Kristine and Mia have known each other since they were babies,” Greene says. “We’re playing best friends in the film as well. We particularly got to be close because that was the real-life relationship between them.” Life began imitating art. As Greene and Bader spent months training, filming and navigating one of the most physically demanding productions of their careers together, their friendship naturally echoed the one they were tasked with portraying.

Portraying one of the greatest players in the history of the sport demanded more than emotional preparation. It required the physicality of an athlete, the discipline of a competitor and, at one point, more resilience than she ever expected. After fracturing her knee while filming a cheerleading sequence in Ransom Canyon, she suffered another injury to the very same knee during football training for The 99’ers: a stress fracture caused by months of playing on the turf. 

The diagnosis forced her to the sidelines for several weeks, costing her some of the on-field sequences she had been most excited to film. “One of the biggest parts, aside from the legacy and being able to play this incredible character, was also getting to play because I love to play,” she adds. Going through that injury gave Greene a glimpse of the resilience that shaped Kristine Lilly’s career. “Every actress here had some form of injury we were working through. We’re actors, not athletes, and our bodies caught up to it. We did everything we could.”

To recreate the sport authentically, the production enlisted professional and Division I footballers as stunt doubles and coaches. While professional stunt doubles stepped in when necessary, the goal was never to rely on them. “Obviously, we can’t get to Olympic level like these girls did after decades and decades. But we really wanted to make it as real as possible and maybe be a cool example of what you can do—what the body can do—if you really, really give it your all.”

By the time filming wrapped, Greene had left with far more than another credit on her résumé. She left with friendships, mentors, a football signed by the teammates who helped bring the game to life, and the chance to honor the pioneers who changed women’s sport forever. “The goal was to have us all do everything,” she says. “And I think by the end, we got pretty damn close.” It’s little wonder she smiles before admitting, almost apologetically, “I could talk about the film all day.”

That grit—the willingness to sweat through burning turf and push past physical limits—traces Greene at this exact chapter in her career. Ask her about her inspirations, and she doesn’t point to traditional Hollywood icons first—she points to anime, specifically Naruto, whose steadfast moral core she calls her blueprint. “He’s my hero, he’s everything,” she says, her eyes lighting up. “His work ethic, his devotion to life, and how he stayed such a good person and never once changed who he was or what he wanted.”

Despite a résumé spanning children’s television, sweeping Western dramas and sports biopics, Greene’s ultimate cinematic obsession comes from a very different corner of pop culture. A lifelong anime fan, she doesn’t hesitate when asked what shot she’d be if she were a single frame from a film. “Undoubtedly,” she begins. “It would be the scene from Akira where Kaneda is in the bike fight, and he slides on his bike. It’s one of the coolest shots in media ever.”

Greene first stumbled upon the cult classic at 14, streaming it on what she jokingly describes as “probably an illegal website” long before it was widely available. The experience, she says, was transformative. “It just changed my life.” She still dreams of dressing as Kaneda for Halloween one day—a fitting choice for someone who grew up admiring fearless protagonists long before she became one herself.

She’s already running toward the goal, cleats laced, braced entirely for the fire. In another life, she might have hoisted a World Cup trophy. But sitting here now, trading the pitch for the screen, she is still playing to win.

‘Ransom Canyon’ Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.

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