Who ya gonna call to fend off the four horsemen of the apocalypse? Make it ghostbuster Nicole Beharie. The 28-year-old actress is kicking butt as Lt. Abbie Mills, Westchester cop battling supernatural evils on the highly-rated Fox drama Sleepy Hollow, which airs Mondays at 9 p.m.
“I started boxing training right before I got here, just because I felt like Abbie would be pretty tough and know how to defend herself,” Beharie said by phone from Wilmington, NC, where the spooky series is filmed. “I haven’t been able to continue [training] because our schedule is pretty hectic, but I have videos in my trailer,” she says with a laugh.“Don’t tease me!”
Armed with spunk and a gun, Beharie takes charge on-screen, despite her diminutive height. Beharie is 5-foot-1 — a sizable contrast to her 6-foot-1 costar Tom Mison, who plays Mills’ 200-year-old partner, Ichabod Crane. “With his additional boots and heels and all that stuff — I look like such a teeny, tiny person. I’ve always been able to hide it, never really cared about it,” she says. “This is the first time I’ve been, like, ‘I’m short!’ ” Beharie admits to overcompensating at times. “For a while I was wearing super-high heels, running and fighting monsters. Then I was, like, I give up — I can’t do this for, you know, 16 hours a day,” she says. “I’m just gonna have to be, like, peeking in, just managing to get into the take to see my forehead,” she jokes.
Beharie is both surprised and happy she nailed such a commanding part on the spooky show. “There’s a kind of look that happens when you’re doing action, horror and sci-fi. I would have to be a really leggy, lean, buxom blond to be doing that, you know?” she says, laughing. “I was, like, wow — I never really imagined that for myself, so I’m stoked!”
