With girl-next-door looks and a sweet demeanor, actress Brittany Snow may appear to be for the straights. However, Snow is decidedly for the queers.
After all, her career contains multiple iconic sapphic scenes and storylines, and in Netflix’s summer hit The Hunting Wives, she (finally!) goes all in—playing as gay as any L Word character. In honor of Snow cementing herself as an on-screen sapphic queen, Tagg explored Snow’s professionally queer evolution… Starting with the latest and greatest step.
In The Hunting Wives, which dropped July 21 and inspired by the May Cobb novel, Snow portrays Sophie, a seemingly strait-laced wife and mother whose world is upended when she meets Margo (Malin Ackerman), the wife of Sophie’s husband’s new boss. Having moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts to a fictional town in Texas, Sophie’s a fish-out-of-water: a liberal city girl thrust into the company of gun-toting, snooty Republicans. But quickly, Sophie finds in Margo a friend… and so much more.
Enter sapphic scenes to die for.
Just five minutes into the pilot, Sophie visibly experiences gay panic as she watches Margo undress. In the same episode, there’s palpable tension when Margo teaches Sophie how to skeet-shoot, then how to drive a stick shift—their bodies tight together as Margo guides Sophie’s positioning, and whispers instructions in her ear. Through the rest of the season, there’s an insanely sexy body shot scene, kissing, sex, and so much more steaminess between the two women.
These story elements are special because (1) yay to lesbianism in general, and (2) Ackerman is a Swedish goddess. Still, the excitement is undeniably heightened because it brings Snow into full-blown sapphic action, after two decades of foreplay.
The most mainstream taste of Sapphic Snow came via the Pitch Perfect franchise (2012, 2015, 2017). Snow’s character, Chloe, recruits Becca (Anna Kendrick) to her college acapella group, and proceeds to be very fruity with/toward Becca—e.g., steps naked into Becca’s shower to praise her singing (Pitch Perfect); tells Becca, while lying beside her in bed, that she wishes she’d “experimented” more in college (Pitch Perfect 2); “accidentally” cups Becca’s breasts—and lets her hands linger—when she pushes her out of sight of someone. Becca and Chloe are never intimate, but it’s significant that Snow played a bi-curious character in such a hit franchise.
What’s more, in a nod to Becca-Chloe (affectionately called Bechloe by fans) shippers, Kendrick and Snow cheekily made out in an intentional blooper. However, The Hunting Wives is not her first on-screen lady lip-lock.
In another of her well-known roles, the 2006 rom-com John Tucker Must Die, Snow kisses now-out star Sophia Bush. Snow portrays Kate, the new-girl-in-school who becomes the center of a scheme to revenge on the high school’s cheating playboy John Tucker (Jesse Metcalfe). When the three scorned girls leading the scheme learn Kate has never kissed a guy, they worry she’ll fail her mission, so Beth (Bush) teaches Kate first-hand. Cue a sapphic kiss for the ages.
Between John Tucker Must Die and The Hunting Wives, Snow notched two other on-screen sapphic kisses.
First, in the 2008 movie Finding Amanda. Her eponymous character works at a strip club and greets her co-worker/friend with a kiss on the lips. It’s quick, more friendly than steamy, but the friend is wearing only a thong and a baby tank top, and the kiss is followed by all the ingredients of something Snow does effortlessly in multiple roles: portray queer-coded female friendships.
Think flirty banter and body language, such as nose-scrunching, heart eyes, wide open smile, and unnecessary hand/arm slapping.
For her next kiss, in the 2010 music video for lesbian-themed love song Just Impolite by indie rock band Plushgun, Snow kisses actress Juno Temple. This kiss turns up the steam level from Finding Amanda, with Temple and Snow giving slow, sensual passion.
In that vein, Snow hasn’t just kissed women; She’s kissed them well! There’s none of the shyness or stiffness some presumed-straight actresses show. Whether a peck, something deeper but tender, or a hungry devouring kiss, and whether on her lips, her neck, trailing down and down, Snow seems gayme for anything. And she always makes it look authentic and easy.
Though she’s never come out as a member of the community, off-screen Snow established herself as an advocate for the LGBTQ+ community more than a decade ago—earning the Point Foundation’s inaugural Point Horizon Award in 2010, and teaming with The Jed Foundation to launch the viral “Love is Louder” anti-bullying campaign that same year.
Snow’s also not shy about finding women sexy (as this clip of her greeting Pitch Perfect 3 costar Ruby Rose proves). And even if that’s all the queer that comes to pass for her IRL, with The Hunting Wives, Snow is finally claiming fully and plainly for all to see—and sapphics to gush over—that on screen, she really is a sapphic queen. To that, as Sophie’s Texas circle would (never?) say: “Thank God for it!”
✨BONUS✨
6 degrees of Sapphic Snow
Along with her own sapphic roles, Snow has frequently circled queer identity and culture. Here are a few of our favorite close encounters.
- In 1999-2000, Snow had a role on the daytime soap Guiding Light… which began featuring a popular lesbian love story in 2008.
- In 2007, she played Amber Von Tussle in Hairspray…which has a ton of queer lore (e.g., lesbian actress Nikki Blonsky starring as Tracy Turnblad, the gender-bending character portrayal of Edna Turnblad, and more).
- In the 2008 horror movie Prom Night, Snow starred alongside Jessica Stroup, who starred in 90210…which had multiple queer story lines over the course of its run.
- Snow appeared in the 2012 dramedy Petunia… which had a gay couple in it.
- In 2017, she starred in the action film Bushwick… which is a prime NYC gayborhood.
- In the 2019 rom-com Someone Great, she played a character whose roommate is a lesbian. The friendship dynamic was arguably very queer-coded, per Snow’s usual M.O.
- In 2019-20, she starred in the Fox show Almost Family… in which her character’s half-sister (Megalyn Echikunwoke) is bisexual.
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- In the hit 2022 horror film, X, Snow portrays Bobby-Lynne Parker, an adult film actress. Though never explicitly labeled LGBTQ, when talking about her job, Parker says “Everybody likes sex. It’s a gas. We’re just not afraid to admit it. Queer, straight, Black, White—it’s all disco.”
- Several of her Pitch Perfect costars are queer, or at least have fruity tendencies—Anna Camp recently came out with a girlfriend, Rebel Wilson married a woman in 2024, Hailee Steinfeld kisses and flirts with women on screen like it’s nothing and vocally lobbies for us IRL, Anna Kendrick has frequently displayed what could be bisexual tendencies, and Ester Dean has long been out.