After “Gossip Girl” ended in 2012, Michelle Trachtenberg’s acting career barreled on, full steam ahead. In 2011, even before the series’ conclusion, she booked a multi-episode recurring role in the dramedy “Weeds,” which starred Mary-Louise Parker as a suburban soccer mom whose cash-strapped financial situation propelled her to become a marijuana dealer. In subsequent years, she guest-starred on several TV dramas, including “Criminal Minds,” “NCIS: Los Angeles,” and “Sleepy Hollow.”
In 2013, she appeared in the National Geographic Channel movie “Killing Kennedy,” based on the book of the same name by disgraced former Fox News anchor Bill O’Reilly. For Trachtenberg, portraying Marina Oswald, Russian-born wife of presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, was among the most challenging roles that she’d ever taken on. One big reason for that, she told Fox News, was because her character spoke no English. “Before I’d signed on to it, [the script] was predominantly all in Russian,” Trachtenberg said.
What she brought to the table, however, was that she could actually speak Russian — her mother was born there before immigrating to the U.S., and she’d learned the language when she was still a child. “And I think Nat Geo was actually like, ‘There is no way! Michelle Trachtenberg speaks Russian?!'” she explained in an interview with Collider. “I basically said, ‘Okay, you don’t know this about me, so let me know it to you.’ I proved it and earned the job.”
