Not long after Pretty Little Liars ended, Ashley Benson took a year off. She desperately needed some time out.
Time out from Hollywood, from the scrutiny that comes with fame, but most of all, from work. “I wanted a break,” she tells me over the phone from LA. It’s lunchtime there, and she and her boyfriend, rapper G-Eazy, are home after a morning hike.
“Coming off a show after so long and doing TV continuously throughout my whole life... I needed to take a mental break.”
It’s no wonder. When the final episode of the teen drama Pretty Little Liars aired in June 2017, Benson had filmed 160 episodes across seven seasons over seven years. She was exhausted, and decided to relocate to New York.
“It was the best thing I ever did,” she says. “I didn’t work for a year and studied directors I wanted to work with and looked at actresses who inspired me, who came from TV and made it into film. I started to compartmentalise my wants and needs.”
The break did wonders for herself-confidence, and allowed her to focus on her priorities for her future career. It was the same year she became a founder of sunglasses company Privé Revaux with Jamie Foxx and Hailee Steinfeld.
She now splits her time between LA and New York. Similarly, being forced to slow down during lockdown over the past year has given her another dose of much-needed reflection.
“I wrote two scripts and am about to start filming one,” she says. “That’s super rewarding.”
This year, she will also star in a new film, The Birthday Cake, with Ewan McGregor. “It’s been interesting working on projects that I normally wouldn’t have time to focus on.”
It’s hardly surprising that she enjoys the downtime. Benson, now 31, has been working almost consistently in the industry since she was five years old. She grew up in Orange County – her father owned grocery stores, while her mum looked after Benson and her sister Shaylene at home.
Benson started dancing professionally when she was three (“Tap and ballet,” she recalls), which then led to modelling in dance catalogues, and by the age of seven, she had been signed by Ford Models.
Soon she was landing TV adverts and minor roles on shows like The West Wing, and then at 14, she won the role of Abby Deveraux on soap opera Days Of Our Lives.
Her friends at school should have been delighted for her success. Instead, Benson was bullied. “Kids can be mean and jealous,” she remembers. “At the time, it wasn’t cool to be on TV. Every week, I was working on commercials and all the kids would see me.
"I got bullied and hated it. But I was really proud, and it made me more determined to get on a TV show. My parents said if I did, I could be home-schooled. So I tried and tried and tried, and when I did, it was the best day of my life.”
Landing a part on a mainstream soap opera was exciting, especially for her parents, who were lifelong fans. “At that point, my mum was taking me to set and it was funny
for me to meet people she grew up watching. I didn’t know who any of them were!”
Her time on the soap opera was invaluable. “You film three episodes a day. It was crazy to be thrown into that environment at a young age. I wasn’t prepared for it. I thought we’d do a couple of takes here and there, but you only get one take. So it made me learn to memorise my lines quickly. I was completely intimidated.”
After three years on the show, she left to pursue other projects. She landed various film roles, as well as the part of Mia on teen show Eastwick. The day she discovered that Eastwick wasn’t being recommissioned for a second season in 2010, she got a call from the producers of Pretty Little Liars.
“I didn’t think anything of it,” she says. “I was a bit bummed that my show got cancelled. But then I met with them, and a week later, I was in Canada filming the pilot. I thought it would be a successful show, but you never know. So for it to become what it was was crazy!”
Pretty Little Liars followed the lives of four high-schoolers whose clique starts to fall apart when one of them disappears. It won multiple awards, and launched the careers of the likes of Lucy Hale and Shay Mitchell.
“I see that as my college years,” says Benson. “We were together for seven years, and I saw them more than my own family.” She’s still very close friends with Mitchell and her other co-star, Troian Bellisario, although the pandemic has made seeing one another difficult.
“We all live by each other,” she admits. “Minutes away. So it’s very funny. I want to see them, but I also have to be mindful right now, even though I’m getting tested weekly [for COVID-19]. It’s a scary time for everyone. I’ve never met Shay’s baby, and she’s like, ‘You have to see her!’ They’re like my sisters and they always will be.”
During its seven-year run, Pretty Little Liars covered some important storylines, including Mitchell’s character Emily coming out, which has been highly praised for its authenticity.
Benson, who was previously in a relationship with model Cara Delevingne, says it is storylines like this that make her proud to have been on the show.
“I’m not quite sure how many shows had that before ours,” she says. “[It’s important], especially in this day and age, to just be your true self and not feel judged by how your heart feels and by who you are as a human being, and who your soul connects with. I certainly feel that way about myself. It’s who I connect with.
"It’s not about a gender or anything like that. And I think that’s really important for people to understand. There is no reason that somebody should get bullied or talked about or shut off for who they love. I think acceptance right now is everything, and the more we can educate people about these topics, the better it will become for everyone.”
Benson has always been extremely private when it comes to her personal life. But when she started dating Delevingne in 2018 (they met on the set of the film Her Smell), her relationship came under a lot of scrutiny. She admits she finds the attention difficult at times.
The hardest to deal with is “people’s opinions”, she says. “If gossip comes out and stories are completely false, what can you do? I’m not going to sit out there and be like,‘This isn’t true, this is what’s really happening.’
"The most annoying part is having to sit back and be quiet while everybody talks about you and you have to deal with it. People can say whatever they want about me, but unless you know me, you don’t really know anything at all.”
When she and G-Eazy – real name Gerald Earl Gillum – were first spotted together last year, she received a backlash on Instagram from fans accusing her of cheating on Delevingne. Delevingne took to her Instagram Stories to defend her, saying, “To everyone hating on @ashleybenson please stop. You don’t know the truth, only her and I do and that’s exactly how it should be.”
Benson remained silent. The actress says she’s very careful when it comes to what she shares about her life.
“I usually keep my relationships private,” she says. “You obviously can’t help if you get photographed together. [But] it’s more sacred that way. Those private moments are for you and your partner, and I think it’s best not to be over-exposed, and you can really protect your relationship if you’re not exploiting it.”
At the time of going to press, there were reports that Benson and G-Eazy had split. But when we speak they are very much together and she is happy to open up a little. Just last year she featured on his track All TheThings You’re Searching For.
They also did a cover of Radiohead’s Creep. “That was a random thing,” she laughs. “We’ve been doing a lot of things together in quarantine. Who knows if it will ever be released or not, but we’ve done 30 songs! That’s been really nice, because when you don’t have anywhere to go, it’s really nice to get something out of it.
"He’s taught me a lot about music.” She spends a lot of time in the studio watching him. “We always talk about whether we’d release anything or not. Again, that’s really nice for us to have for ourselves.”
They’ve also been doing regular date nights. “We do little jazz nights– listening to jazz and pretending you’re in a restaurant. But you’re not, you’re at the dinner table.Anything to liven things up. You find ways to make it enjoyable. "Even during lockdown, Benson has been hounded by paparazzi. She’s used to it, but it’s irritating.
“I can’t leave my house without getting followed every day,” she says. “I don’t want photos, and it’s annoying. It’s a complete invasion of privacy. In New York, I walk to get my coffee and take the subway. I never get bothered. If I do see some photographers, they’re so nice that I’ll just give them a thumbs down and they’ll leave [me] alone.
"Whereas here [in LA], they’ll harass you and keep following you until you get into a car accident. I’m very lucky that I could buy a place [in NewYork] and live both lives on either coast. When I get sick of NewYork, I go to LA, and vice versa.”
Benson tries not to let the attention get to her. She sees a therapist regularly to stay on top
of her mental health. “Therapy is good. I believe in it very strongly. It’s always good to talk with someone about anything you’re dealing with, whether it’s positive or negative.
"It’s good to talk to a third party about what’s going on in my life.” Keeping a small group of friends has been key, too. “I need to be surrounded by positive people. I have an amazing core group. That’s the best thing that’s come out of quarantine, having this very solid foundation of friends who have my back, and I have theirs. It’s really nice to have that support for all of us.”
Since finishing Pretty Little Liars, Benson’s focus has been indie films, like Her Smell, which is where her passion lies. It was her co-star on the latter, Elisabeth Moss, who got her the role in the film after a chance meeting. “I met Elisabeth in Cannes at a birthday dinner and she was telling me that she was a fan of Pretty Little Liars and Spring Breakers [the 2012 crime film Benson starred in with James Franco and Selena Gomez].
"I think she’s fucking incredible,” says Benson. “We got talking. She was like, ‘What do you want to do after finishing Pretty Little Liars? When I was on Mad Men, I didn’t know.’ She gave me a lot of advice on how to break the mould of staying in the same lane, acting-wise, and taking risks and saying no to most things.
"So we really gelled on that.” Moss then invited Benson to be a part of the film. “I was like, ‘OK, I’m never going to hear from her again.’ I was filming Her Smell a year later.”
Having her business, Privé Revaux, on the side has allowed Benson to be selective about what she does. In 2019, the company recorded net sales of around £14 million, and it continues to grow. “I always see myself acting for sure, and producing,” says Benson.
“[But] I always want to have different companies under my belt, because if I can make money in that, then I am able to do the indie films that I gravitate towards.”
Moss isn’t the only Hollywood actress who has been pivotal in Benson’s career. Before we speak, I notice that Jennifer Aniston has liked nearly every single one of Benson’s Instagram posts.
She chuckles,“It’s so funny! We talk, we’ve been trying to get dinner since before the pandemic. We have lots of mutual friends in common and we talk here and there.” Does she lean on the likes of Aniston for advice?
“Reese Witherspoon, and her, and different people that I’ve come to know –we’re not best friends, [but we] see each other at functions,” she says.
“Just seeing how they’ve handled themselves, and how normal they are having been in the industry since they were young – the two of them are so gracious and warm and welcoming, and it’s always a good thing to see them. I lookup to them very much.”
So, given how selective Benson is about what projects she takes on these days, I wonder what it takes to grab her interest work-wise. “I love to be challenged,” she says. “If I sit
on my arse and pick things that I could do with my eyes shut, it’s not satisfying for me.”
With two of her own films in the works and music potentially on the way, not to mention her entrepreneurial side hustle, nobody can accuse her of sitting on her arse, that’s for sure.
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