NORMAL — Katelynn Shennett almost didn’t audition for “Chicago Fire,” but it’s lucky she did. What she expected to be a three-episode run has turned into a recurring role on Dick Wolf’s popular firehouse drama, now in its 10th season on NBC.
Shennett, a 2015 graduate of Normal Community High School, plays the role of Kylie Estevez, a high school student who started out in Firefighter Stella Kidd’s “Girls on Fire” program and later became the assistant to Battalion Chief Wallace Boden.
“I guess they liked the work I did, so they wanted to keep bringing me back, which was really lucky,” Shennett, 24, said in a phone interview last week with The Pantagraph. “I definitely didn’t expect to land anything like this for many years. It’s pretty uncommon to get anything major right after college, so I was pretty floored to land this role.”
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Shennett grew up in Normal, attending Fairview Elementary, Kingsley Junior High and Normal Community, and getting a taste for acting at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival in Bloomington.
She credits high school drama teacher Kevin Yale Vernon with helping her prepare for auditions before college at the Shakespeare Festival, and for sparking the idea that acting could become a career.
“She was the first to believe in me and my talent, and I began to see that I could take this beyond a hobby,” Shennett said.
Shennett majored in acting at the University of Illinois at Champaign, but admits she was still nervous to take the stage for her first show, a series of one-act plays written, directed and acted by students.
“I had major stage fright at the time. I had never considered being in front of people doing something like that, but I fell in love with the thing and I wanted to do as much as I could,” she said.
Getting over the stage fright came with practice — and it also helped her become less shy in her everyday life, she said.
“The first show I did, I was really terrified, but I had great directors who worked with me to get over that,” she said. “I found that once I was actually on stage, my initial fears would go away. … As I settled into this character and this world, the stress of it all went away because I was so wrapped up in the play.”
Toward the end of college, Shennett participated in a senior showcase where she went to Chicago and performed a few scenes for agencies and theater companies. This streamlined the transition into professional acting, she said, and it’s where she connected with her current agency.
She hadn’t lived in Chicago very long when her agency called her about the “Chicago Fire” audition. Between her three jobs and taking classes for massage therapy, she didn’t think she’d have time to film the audition. But her roommates encouraged her to go for it and helped her prepare, and a week later, she had landed the role.
Shennett, aka Kylie Estevez, joined the cast for the last two episodes of the eighth season, and has since appeared in more than a dozen episodes.
“It’s such an incredible process working with everybody,” she said. “I couldn’t have asked for a better show to start my career with. Everybody is so kind and down to earth. They want to have fun, but they’re all here to do their jobs, and there are no egos.”
She’s had the most scenes with Miranda Rae Mayo (who plays Stella Kidd) and Eamonn Walker (Chief Boden), and both actors quickly took Shennett under their wings, showing her around the set, introducing her to the rest of the cast and answering her questions.
“The team, a lot of them have been there since the first episode, so they have this unspoken language of how each scene flows and how to work together,” Shennett said. “Coming in at the middle of things was very intimidating, but they helped me fall in sync.”
In describing her character, Shennett said, “She is the assistant to the chief, so she is his right-hand man, but also she is the character that brings light into everything. A goal of mine is to infuse a bit of positivity and lightness into every scene I’m in... Kylie is a dependable and reliable character who puts her best foot forward every chance she gets and tries to absorb as much knowledge as she can in this crazy firehouse role.”
Being new to acting, Shennett said she can relate to her young character.
“It has been fun growing up with Kylie,” she said. “I wasn’t a teenager when I started in this role, but I was so new to everything. A lot of her curiosity about everything and that fire of wanting to jump in and grow and improve resonated a lot with me because I was there in a similar place. We were both new to the team and wanting to take in as much as we could.”
She especially looks up to Mayo, both as a fellow actress and in the role of Kidd. Kidd is in the minority as a woman and as a person of color in the firehouse. During the show, she is promoted to lieutenant and also comes up with the idea for Girls on Fire, a program teaching young women about careers in firefighting.
“When I came on the show, I was so excited to be on a show with so many people of color,” Shennett said. “It’s been so powerful to see these women of color and people of color in high positions of power. When I see them, I see that something like that is possible.”
Thinking of her younger self, Shennett says she often felt out of place, and seeing more roles like those depicted on “Chicago Fire” would have helped her feel like she belonged.
“Now we have this figure who is a powerful woman taking control of her life and helping other girls, and that is inspiring,” she said.
Shennett doesn’t know what’s next for her character, but she hopes to see her develop as woman and, maybe someday, a firefighter.
“I’d love to see her come into her own a little more,” Shennett said. “They’re already working to age her up, because she is a high school character. So they’re slowly trying to hint that she is entering a more mature phase of her life. I’d like to see them give her that opportunity to get involved with the action and a little more responsibility in the firehouse.”
“Chicago Fire” airs at 8 p.m. Central on NBC. The next episode, the fall finale, airs Dec. 8.