You star Kathryn Gallagher is a friend to all animals—even ones who invade her pool. Gallagher, who played Annika Atwater on the show, shared pictures of herself relaxing in her pool, wearing a bright halter-neck swimsuit—and making friends with an amphibian friend. “This is my friend toad who is a frog. He jumped in the pool and I saved him from a chlorinated demise. After that we hung out for a while and I thought u guys might like him as much as I did,” she captioned the sweet post. Gallagher is an accomplished Grammy and Tony award-winning artist—here’s what her days off look like.
Gallagher sees her physical therapist on her days off. “I would love to say I go for a fun lunch and do really great stuff on my day off, but that would be a lie,” she says. “I wake up, I’ll get a massage, I’ll read. I’ve got the hobbies of a grandmother; I bake cookies, I crochet. The smartest person I know does crossword puzzles and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s how she knows so many words,’ so I thought I should start doing them too. I started with Mondays, and so now I do them every Monday—my time is getting shorter every week, I’m getting much better.”
Gallagher loves to spend down time in the country, relaxing and recharging. “I try to get up to my family’s house in Connecticut as much as I can,” she says. “It’s so beautiful and I’ve been coming since I was two years old. I come up on a Sunday night, I wake up Monday and build a fire, make some coffee, and sit and read. It’s a dream. I’m a big fan of Sakara. I try to be vegan, and it’s all plant-based so I love it. But I also definitely indulge. Over Christmas I made cookies for the cast and I did a classic gingerbread house.”
Gallagher looks for humor and honesty when collaborating with other musicians. “Honesty’s a big one,” she says. “I start any co-write with just talking. Openness and all the things I look for in a friend. And also talent is always lovely [laughs], but it really is almost further down on the list. You have to like them as a person, especially because co-songwriting can be such an awkward thing…you have to be honest and open, and that’s not an easy thing to do at all.”
Gallagher spends her day off practicing, and enjoying her favorite foods. “I pick up my guitar every day and write, but Monday is a good day for me to focus on the business side of my music; figuring out what song I’ll put out next or getting together the artwork for a release,” she says. “H&H Bagels is 100 percent my place. I’m a bagel aficionado, and pretty much every day off starts there. When I’m really stressed out, I walk through the Natural History Museum. I find it really relaxing there, maybe because I grew up nearby and went a lot as a kid. Nostalgia is my favorite way to deal with stress.”
Gallagher played Bella Fox on the Broadway show Jagged Little Pill, and says the experience was incredibly timely. “When I got the role, it was before the #MeToo movement began,” she says. “It was before people talked about it. Honestly, seeing how our script came to life in the news every single day was miraculous. We were actually in rehearsals during the lab when #MeToo broke, when the Weinstein stuff came out, everything. All of that happened while we were in the rehearsal room. Every day we came into work and there was a new headline about these incredible women coming forward and sharing their stories. There was no way that wasn’t going to inform both my performance and also the way the script grew and evolved.”