Kendra Leigh Timmins Dishes On Nickelodeon's New Show 'Ride' (JJJ Interview)

Check out this brand new interview with the talented Kendra Leigh Timmins!

We caught up with the young actress, who stars as Kit in the new Nickelodeon series Ride about girl who leaves her American country lifestyle behind to attend an elite equestrian academy in England.

“I loved how she was a combination of so many different personality traits, she didn’t fit into a stereotype or a box” Kendra told JJJ about her character. “She’s free-spirited but stubborn, she’s really confident but also has fears, and she’s a bit of a tomboy but she loves dressing up too, and I wanted to be the person to bring her to life and show other kids that it’s okay to be a little bit of everything.”

She added, “So that also became the biggest challenge, making sure I didn’t mess her up, that I did her justice and made her a good role model. Sometimes that felt like a lot of pressure.”

Ride premieres TONIGHT, January 30 @ 8PM on Nickelodeon.

Click inside to read the rest of our interview with Kendra…

JJJ: Tell us about your audition process for the role!

KLT: The audition process was actually really long! I had to do four or five auditions for the role of Kit. And I felt pretty good about the first one, and then it got more and more nerve-wracking the further along in the process I got. I was meeting more people involved, more people were in the audition room, and I was being asked to try different things with the lines. And after all that time I’d gotten really attached to Kit as a character and it was getting harder and harder to not know, until I finally got the call that I got the role.

JJJ: Did you have any experience riding horses? How much training did you have to do?

KLT: I had a little bit of experience riding horses. I’d been to horse summer camp and taken a few lessons, so I was really comfortable with horses, but definitely not an expert. Filming actually happened so fast that we didn’t get a whole lot of training in, but what we did learn was awesome. We had experts on set who were there to stop us from messing up too badly and answer all of our questions. Luckily Kit wasn’t supposed to be a horse expert, so I didn’t have to do much work at all.

JJJ: Who are you closest to in the cast?

KLT: We were actually all really close in the cast. We ended up feeling like a family because we worked such long hours, plus the British kids were so far away from home that we really only had one another. But if I HAD to choose, it would be Rameet [Rauli] who plays Anya. We got to spend so much time together because our characters are roommates in the show, and we just clicked right away, just like Kit and Anya do! We also had lots of things in common and helped each other through the rough days. It’s very hard having a long distance friendship now!

JJJ: Any fun filming memories you can tell us about?

KLT: We had so many fantastic filming memories while we were filming. We liked to pull pranks on one another behind the scenes. I used to knock scripts out of people’s hands when they weren’t paying attention. The boys liked to scare people with our photo-bombing rubber chicken. We also had some great horse filming moments, where they decided not to behave and we had to improvise a little. Sultan (who plays Will’s Horse Wayne) used to nibble on you as soon as someone called action, and pull things out of people’s pockets when they weren’t looking.

JJJ: What was it like shooting in a real castle?

KLT: It was incredible getting to film in a real castle! Not only was it beautiful, but it had so much history and is still a functioning home, so we had to be really respectful, careful and watch our step because some of the stuff in the castle was centuries old. We even had some trouble because there are lots of sheep who live on the castle property, and one day one of the lambs escaped and we had to stop shooting until they could catch him and reunite him with his mom.