This girl did not feel interrupted.
The only female lead in Broadway’s “The Outsiders” said the show’s producer Angelina Jolie helped advocate for her and the other women in the cast.
“I knew that if anything ever happened, like she had our back, especially the girlies,” said Emma Pittman, who plays Cherry Valance in the musical and shares the stage with eight male leads.
“She was very, very a part of our process, which was amazing. She always made us feel seen and supported when she was there.”
Pittman, 28, said Jolie, 49, “who is so real, grounded and kind,” came on board because of her daughter, Vivienne Jolie-Pitt, 16, who is also the show’s producer.
“Her kid came to see the show in La Jolla and loved it and saw it again and again. And Viv was like, ‘Mom, you have to come see the show,'” Pittman, a Mississippi native who now lives in Washington Heights, told The Post.
“And she was so moved by the way that it was moving her kid and also herself, that she was like, ‘Let’s be a part of this.'”
The mother-daughter team spent a lot of time at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, where the show has been running since April, giving their input on how the musical, which is based on the 1967 novel and the 1983 movie, should be adapted.
“Angie’s never overlooking anything. She’s always taking her time when she’s in our space, when she’s listening to people,” Pittman gushed.
“And Viv was there almost every single rehearsal, which was so cool to have a kid in the place who loved the story.”
After the show won Best Musical at this year’s Tony Awards, Jolie even threw an “after-after afterparty” for the cast and crew at her clothing store in NoHo, Atelier Jolie.
Diane Lane, who played Cherry in the movie version of “The Outsiders,” has also shown her support, Pittman said.
“It was so cool to meet her . . . She didn’t really want any pictures taken. She really just wanted to come and see the show and be a supporter and not make it about herself at all, which I thought was so sweet and kind,” she recalled.
Pittman made her Broadway debut in 2022 as the lead in “Chicago,” after winning Broadway.com’s “The Search for Roxie!” contest, replacing Pamela Anderson, another A-lister who has also shown her some love.
“She was so sweet,” she gushed. “She gave me two dozen pink roses and in the card it said, ‘Break a lash.”’
The starlet, who grew up in Batesville, Miss., with a population of just over 7,000, took her first trip to New York City when she was a preteen, with her dance studio.
“I remember just walking around and nobody knew who I was. And I was so enamored by this idea that there were so many people in the city and nobody knew who I was because I grew up in a small town and everybody knows my family,” said Pittman, whose parents are both lawyers.
Her parents always supported her dream to be on stage, and her mother enrolled her in the Joffrey Ballet School Summer Intensive for four summers while she was in high school.
“That was a big leap for my mom to do . . . sending her kid to New York City with not really any chaperones. You live in the dorms at Pace, and you take the subway up to the Joffrey,” said Pittman, who went on to graduate cum laude from Wagner College in Staten Island.
The brunette beauty said the best compliment she receives from fans of the book is that she is exactly who they pictured the character of Cherry to be like when reading it.
“It’s my favorite compliment,” she said. “It makes me feel so connected to something bigger than me.”
Another compliment she hears “a lot” is that she looks like Rachel McAdams, who starred on Broadway until June in “Mary Jane,” just two blocks from “The Outsiders'” theater.
“I did think about trying to find my way over there,” Pittman said. “But I couldn’t get past, like, what’s my opening line? — ‘Hi, everyone says I look like you?'”
