Despite being the child of well-known director Timothy Van Patten, Van Patten landed her first role solely based on talent, not her last name. At the young age of 8, she walked into her first audition on the set of her dad's show The Sopranos, and remembers not being treated with an ounce of favouritism. "My dad was like, 'I'll get you an audition, and then I'm out. I'm not going to do anything,'" she told W Magazine. "He wasn't there when I auditioned, and I remember being really scared." She ended up getting the role of Eugene Pontecorvo's daughter.