Horse Camp is a heartwarming story of a young girl’s adventures at summer camp. I really enjoyed talking to Jordan Trovillion, who plays Kathy, a shy girl who goes from having no friends to having one close friend to abandoning that friend when she is accepted by the camp’s mean girl clique.

Your film brought back a lot of memories of my own camp experiences, especially the songs.

That’s fantastic! That was one of the coolest thing about making that movie. It was going back and kind of remembering things that I don’t didn’t even know I had forgotten.

Were you a horseback rider before you made this film?

I rode a couple of horses when I was young. We lived out in the country and my neighbor across the street had horses and so we would occasionally go riding but I didn’t ever attend horse camp and I didn’t ever take formal lessons. We went on trail rides. Riding horses is not as easy as it looks but I think a big important part of being able to ride a horse is not to be afraid of it. And I think horses are super cool. I was afraid of them when I was a kid but I had kind of gotten over it by then. And the girl who played Stacy in the movie, Kristen Ryda, she had attended the camp and she was a counselor. She was the one who taught me how to ride horses. So we actually got along great! She was very helpful and super informative and so with a teacher like that I don’t think anybody would have any trouble riding.

I’m glad to hear that because she did a very good job of being mean in the film.

She’s so good! She has a really good little like kind of angry rat face. She’s so nice though in real life. She’s a really great woman.

Why do you think it’s important to explore the theme of mean girls and bullies in a movie like this?

I think that sometimes as adults we forget how difficult it is to be a kid and to be in a huge group of people who are creating their own social networks and cliques and what it feels like to be excluded, and how difficult it is to maintain all of your relationships in their priorities in a crazy environment like your high school or horse camp or middle school or a club or anything like that. I think that it is important to highlight these lessons, for young girls to be able to be nice to each other, to know when it is time to apologize and know where your priorities lie. And it’s confusing as a kid. It is an important thing for girls to have role models and have representatives of things that they can remember and called back to when they find themselves in these difficult situations. And again we have lots of lasting scars and it is very important to have something to lean on in situations like that.

One of the things that was particularly good in this film is that it shows not just that we all have to deal with the mean girls in our lives but with our own temptations to become a mean girl ourselves.

Exactly. And anyone who was met with some success of anything big or small knows the feeling of kind of getting that power and the seduction of it. Even in my life in making the movies,being able to see my face on a poster and interviews and it makes me feel like I’m an important fancy person for the day. And it’s like when my best friend calls me and is like, “Hey I need you up here, it is awkward, don’t worry about it but I need you to come up right now” I’m really grateful that I am the person that she calls for something like that because of the relationship that we form not because I’m a fancy person.

Parallel to that is one of the things that was most refreshing about the film — most movies about teenage girls include a makeover but in this one you get a makeover and then a make under.

That was a really important thing for the movie. There is a difference between being made up and being gorgeous and being a real person. There is a difference between taking care of yourself and not caring about what you look like. And it is true that taking care of your appearance and putting on a good face can make a difference in your life but this should not be your entire life.

What was it like to be all glammed up?

It felt like there were birds on my face. I couldn’t even breathe it was so weird. It was a lot of makeup and made my face feel very heavy.

Another thing I liked in the film was the relationship between Kathy and the girl who was her real friend.

Rachel Sowers is an amazing actress and is wonderful to work with and she is very much like her character. She is down to earth and chill and very low-key. And so we were filming the scene at the end when I’m was giving her the Camp Princess crown and she had been with Terry Mcglasson all day and had gotten herself to the place where she did in the set to cry. I had smoke blowing into my eyes the entire scene so I was already really teary. And I looked over at her and her face is all wet and she’s crying and so I started crying and she started crying harder. And so we had to just hug it out after that as it was very emotional.

What’s your next project?

I have a movie coming out that is sort of in the process of release called A Matter of Faith. And for the last several years I’ve been working on a show called Comic Continuum which is like Access Hollywood for dorks.