Anna Cathcart on ‘The Middlebridge Mysteries’ and Filming ‘XO, Kitty’ Season 3

Get your headphones ready, XO, Kitty fans. Season 3 of Netflix’s hit YA show is still a ways away, but Anna Cathcart (Kitty Song-Covey) has been busy cooking up something special in the meantime. The 22-year-old actress stars as the voice of Violet in Audible’s The Middlebridge Mysteries.

The Audible Original is a spinoff to The Mistletoe Murders, which ran for three seasons on Audible and sparked a Hallmark adaptation. Cathcart voices Violet Wilner, a criminology student at Middlebridge University who puts on her amateur detective shoes after getting tangled up with some mysterious crimes on campus. Eric McCormick (Will & Grace), Emilija Baranac (To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before), and Mason Temple (Ginny & Georgia) also star.

Cathcart is no stranger to voice roles, having been in animated projects like Descendants: The Royal Wedding (2021), Star Wars: Visions (2021), and Monster High (2024) — not to mention, she’s slated to take part in The Angry Birds Movie 3. Still, she admits it was a big change going from filming a live-action show like XO, Kitty to narrating an audiobook.

“Even just from the start of reading the script, it was so obviously different,” she tells The Nerds of Color over Zoom. “There [weren’t] descriptions of what things look like, what colors things are. None of that’s in here, because it’s all just up to the imagination of the listener.”

“When I was performing it, I was picturing a whole universe in my mind,” she adds. “I’m like, ‘I know what Violet’s outfit looks like right now. I know what Violet’s dorm room looks like.’ But as a listener, you’re picturing your own dorm room, you’re picturing a whole other universe. And that’s really fun to think about. It’s a really engaging way to be a part of a story.”

The Nerds of Color sat down to chat with Cathcart about The Middlebridge Mysteries, the joys and challenges of recording an audiobook, what podcasts she listened to while filming XO, Kitty Season 3, why she wouldn’t trust Kitty to be a “true investigator,” and much more. Check out the full conversation below: