Jana Kramer is dishing on “Gaslit by My Husband: The Morgan Metzer Story,” the new Lifetime movie that she stars in and executive produced.
“Extra’s” Mona Kosar Abdi spoke with Jana, who is also getting ready to say “I do” to Allan Russell!
Jana is “about a month away” from exchanging vows with Allan.
She dished, “We have the dress. It’s getting altered soon, hopefully. It’s gonna be a really small wedding, and I’m just so excited. He’s a wonderful man. He’s an amazing father.”
Jana shared that she and her girlfriends went to a showroom in New York to try on wedding dresses, admitting that she was a little “whatever” about it at first.
She recalled, “I was like, ‘What do you guys think? I don’t know.’ But it was more fun. I never got to do that part of trying things on.”
Kramer has been outspoken about negative public perception of her getting married again. She said, “I shouldn’t feel shame around it.”
Jana continued, “I think what’s hard is people only know what they see written in the headlines. It doesn’t feel good to hear, ‘Oh, this is gonna be her fourth.’ No one knows that I was 19, that was when I met my abuser. I didn’t even know him. We went to Vegas. To me, I always say I’ve been married one time. That was to my children’s father [Mike Caussin]. And, you know, that is a marriage. We fought, we tried hard. I’m not gonna call a Vegas wedding and a week wedding a marriage because to me, that’s not.”
She reflected, “I think that’s the piece about my past that I’m like, it doesn’t look good on paper, but I’m also not gonna fault the girl who fights for love and that picks herself up after being abused and being cheated on and continues to believe that there is hope, love, and a good person out there.”
Jana stressed, “I’m very grateful, and I want people to know that there is hope after some dark journeys.”
As for how she deals with the haters, Kramer answered, “I have to always remember what my truth is, what my intentions are… Listen, I think we’re always a work in progress. Like, I’m constantly learning, constantly evolving, and, you know, as long as my four walls are happy and there is love in there, I really have to just shut the outside noise out.”
Jana and her husband-to-be just welcomed their first child together, a son named Roman, in November. She also shares Jolie and Jace with ex-husband Mike Caussin.
She gushed, “He’s almost 6 months now, which is just crazy. He is a very happy, just healthy, little baby boy. It’s everything. We’re so thankful.”
Months after giving birth, Jana was back to work on the set of “Gaslit by My Husband: The Morgan Metzer Story.”
She said, “What I love that is everyone’s very flexible too… I’m grateful for my ex and everybody in the situation and for my fiancé, where we can go, ‘Okay, how do we make this work for the family?’ Because I’m very much like, ‘If I’m going to do this, I’m a better actress when I have my family with me,’ so it was also just cherry on top that my daughter acted in the movie with me.”
Jana gushed that she was “proud” of Jolie, sharing, “I just loved how confident she was. It was beautiful to see her kind of step into her own and know she was doing a good job.”
Jana even had “age-appropriate conversations” with Jolie to discuss the heavy themes in the movie, like domestic abuse. She said, “I didn’t tell her all the stuff that happened in there, but I was able to age-appropriately tell her what’s right, what’s wrong, what a man should never do, you know, what is acceptable, what is not acceptable. So, that was good teaching moments that we were able to have on set.”
Kramer also opened up about how the story was similar to her own domestic abuse experience and wanting to give a voice to victims, as well as one scene that was particularly triggering to film.
She commented, “Though it was Morgan Metzer’s story, it was so similar to my story of my domestic abuse background. What I realized from that is it’s not just Morgan’s story; it’s not just my story. It’s so many women’s stories out there, and I wanted to be able to play this part and to give voice to those women that need it the most, that could maybe help them see the signs in their relationship or the gaslighting where it kind of sneaks in with one doubt here to then question your sanity and reality there. I wanted to be able to use pain from my past to help other people.”
For the movie, Kramer had to film an attack scene, which was hard for her to deal with at first. She said, “It was one of the scenes where I asked my therapist, I’m like, ‘I don’t know how I’m going to be in the scene. Am I going to get triggered again? And do I want to feel that again?’ And so my therapist, she basically was like, ‘You’re not doing this for you, you’re doing this for the women that need to see this.’”
The scene was still triggering for Jana. She noted, “It got to a point where we had to yell cut on set because I went into just a full-blown panic attack because your body does remember that, and it was scary. I didn’t like it. But I also had to remember what was reality and why I’m telling the story.”
“Gaslit by My Husband” airs Sunday, June 9, on Lifetime.