Jan Brady Actress Knew She Nailed Her ‘Brady Bunch’ Audition With These Six Words originally appeared on Parade.
Before she was Jan Brady, the quintessential middle child of television history, Eve Plumb was a 10-year-old actress with a secret weapon: she could read a room. Now, in a new book excerpted by PEOPLE, Plumb takes fans inside the fateful audition that changed her life, pinpointing the exact six words that sealed her destiny as a Brady.
The story unfolds on a Los Angeles afternoon inside a small studio office bungalow. The young actress found herself facing two of Hollywood’s most powerful television producers: The Brady Bunch creator Sherwood Schwartz and veteran director John Rich. For many children, the situation would be intimidating. For Plumb, it was another day at the office.
“I was in a small room with adults who created television shows,” Plumb writes. “I was comfortable being there, the only child in the room, because I had been in similar situations for four years already, starting at age 6.”
Plumb details how her years of experience taught her to gauge the reactions of casting directors. “I could almost always tell when I made television producers feel like they found the right child actress for the role, whether it was a commercial, a TV pilot, or a made-for-TV movie,” she explains. “Eager to please, I learned early in my career how to read the room, follow suggestions and “imagine” myself into being the little girl described in the audition breakdowns.”
Sitting on the couch across from Schwartz and Rich, Plumb watched as the two men conferred, not speaking to her, but about her. Then came the moment of truth. In a quick exchange, the producers uttered the six words that confirmed what Plumb’s intuition already suspected.
“Well, she looks like our girl.”
That sentence was the key that unlocked the role of a lifetime. But who, exactly, was “their girl”? The answer reveals the casting strategy that would make the Brady family feel so authentic on screen.
Related: Barry Williams Says This ‘Brady Bunch’ Kid Was the Most Troubled
“Their ‘girl’ who they thought I resembled was Florence Henderson, the actress who would play my TV mom,” Plumb recounts.
It was the resemblance to the future Carol Brady that cinched the deal. With those six prophetic words, the middle daughter of one of America’s most iconic families was found, and television history was made.
Jan Brady Actress Knew She Nailed Her ‘Brady Bunch’ Audition With These Six Words first appeared on Parade on Aug 8, 2025
This story was originally reported by Parade on Aug 8, 2025, where it first appeared.