Elizabeth Smart confronts 'worst nightmare' on the set of her upcoming film

ALT LAKE CITY — Elizabeth Smart walked into a trailer on the set of Lifetime’s “I Am Elizabeth Smart” and ran into her worst nightmare.

“I just remember I saw him and it was just kind of like this moment of being taken aback because he looked so much like Brian Mitchell,” Smart said during an interview with the Deseret News.

It wasn’t Mitchell, the man serving a life sentence for kidnapping Smart 15 years ago. It was actor Skeet Ulrich — the man portraying Mitchell in the upcoming film about Smart’s nine months in captivity — in costume, preparing to start filming.

“(Ulrich) was lovely and kind, but it was just so surreal because he looked so much like (Mitchell), but he was just so opposite in mannerism and personality that it was just kind of a parallel world, parallel universe, kind of feeling,” Smart said.