Meet ‘The Playboy Club’s' Lesbian Bunny: Alice

The Playboy Club has gotten a lot of buzz already for it’s Fall NBC TV premiere and SheWired has been paying attention.

Out actress Amber Heard leads a cast of gorgeous actresses in the 60s set historical drama about a tumultuous, pre-Stonewall time in America for women and LGBTs.

AfterEllen.com's Managing Editor Trish Bendix attended the network TCA previews and gathered some very interesting details about the forthcoming series. Along with some empowering comments from star Heard about women choosing to assert their sexuality and enter the workforce in droves in the early sixties, we found the info on The Playboy Club’s closeted lesbian Bunny, Alice (played by Leah Renee Cudmore) particularly juicy.

"Because it's 1961, she's' not an out lesbian," Executive Producer Chad Hodge explained. "The other girls don't know about her. But it's her secret life."

This secret life reportedly includes a “Lavender marriage” to a gay man. The faux-couple band together to “pool money for the Mattachine Society Chicago chapter --  LGBT rights group in the 1960s. Although this storyline was only a small part of the pilot, the producers say it will definitely be a big part of the show,” Bendix reports.

"It'll definitely be a part of the show that will continue," said Hodge, "And the reason it's in there is because it comes from character and it comes from who Alice is. When I first approached this material, I really wanted to talk about the inside of the club and the back of the club and the front of the club and what first impressions are and what is behind it. The same goes for a person — what do you think of a person when you first meet them? ... That's really represented when you meet Alice. You don't think she's a lesbian when you meet her. You think she's a perfect married housewife and then you realize she has a secret life that is very tied to the times and history and what's going on and that's certainly a major storyline of the series.”

AfterEllen also scored a little Q&A time with Leah Renee, the actress who plays Alice, and got her to elaborate on the fate of her character:

"Well I don't know when it's going to happen, but all the other bunnies will find out," Leah told me after the panel. "Her secret is going to come out. I can tell you that. I don't know how, I know that our next episode, which we're working on now, has some really exciting stuff for Alice. Her husband Sean is also a gay man and they're in a 'lavender marriage' — they've been friends since they were in high school. They're just kind of in this together. There's a lot of fun scenes between them."

So will she actually find love? "She definitely has somebody that she's has her eye on for a long time. I'll say that," Leah said. "I can't say if she'll be her girlfriend or not.”

Get more info on the show's TCA panel on AfterEllen.com.

The Playboy Club debuts September 19 at 10 PM on NBC.

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