4 minute read
Mädchen Amick
Mädchen Amick
By Gloria Morrison Photography: Elizabeth Messina
Whenever Hollywood shrugs off the straightjacket imposed by right wing radio hosts and others—shut up already just because you’re famous!!!—it gives the rest of us inspiration to think outside the box. Mädchen Amick is an amazing example of it.
Mädchen Amick is a mover. Not only in the sense of that glib way journalists have of dubbing celebrities “movers and shakers,” but an actual mover, as in moving from home to home, town to town, shuffling from coast to coast through the years.
But it’s a journey through personal experience, something that’s close to her heart, a charity that she supports and endorses that resonates and opens our eyes.
She is an ambassador for Bring Change to Mind, an organization co-founded by Glenn Close, aimed at ending the stigma around mental health through multimedia campaigns, storytelling, and youth programs.
When Amick worked with Close on the FX series Damages—as well as working with Mariel Hemingway in the mid-90s on Central Park West—she learned of their close association with mental health issues and how they were both affected.
Glenn Close had started the charity, and was doing work in Washington to help through legislation, because her sister and nephew were diagnosed with mental illness and Hemingway had produced a documentary about her famous family’s mental history.
Enter the organization called Bring Change to Mind, focused on destigmatizing mental illness so the conversation can start.
Around this same time, Amick’s son started struggling in college. After many blind alleys, he was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which led to finding treatment and going in and out of hospitals. It looked like substance addiction at first, but it was actually due to medications he was taking.
She went through a good six years of having no mental health coverage and everything out of pocket, it enraged her that it was happening to not just her family, but other people nationwide.
Fast forward to present day: she’s an ambassador for Bring Change to Mind, raising awareness on mental health issues in our society. Which raises so many questions concerning healthcare and providing the public with security, protection, and safety.
“As a country, we are still beholden to a capitalist way of governing, so it allows insurance companies and the medical system to profit off patients being sick, not patients being healthy, So there’s no preventative coverage in place. Everything is let’s just wait until the patient is sick and then we can throw really high-priced medications at them as a fix instead of stopping it before it even gets there. I very much believe in more of a social healthcare system where the government provides for it.”
Which provides a great segue to this interview, I happen to catch up with her in Canada (which has the very healthcare system she promotes.) The Riverdale star is currently in Vancouver while filming the show but goes backand-forth to LA constantly. It’s here where her all the other stops in her life become interesting.
“We’ve lived all over. Santa Barbara, San Francisco, New York, Connecticut, Hawaii. I would say I really, really love being in Santa Barbara. And I also really loved San Francisco. But then Manhattan. There’s nothing better than Manhattan. It’s the best.”
You’ve seen Amick before, most notably as Shelley Johnson in David Lynch’s cult television series Twin Peaks in the nineties and in the prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and its revival series Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017.
“I work in Vancouver, Canada, and they have a little bit of a hybrid. They have the provided healthcare system and then you can also supplement on top of it. It’s still not all the way there—I don’t think it works perfectly—but at least if something catastrophic happens to you, you’re not going to die because you don’t have the funds to save your life or someone else’s life… And that’s what our country is. Everybody is already stretched too thin and then they can’t pay for that policy and then they don’t go to the doctor for preventative stuff or they end up in the emergency room and the government pays for it anyways, so what are we doing, guys?”
Amick’s childhood was filled with music and entertainment, starting with her father, playing the bass and trombone in a band called The Bobby McGee Band that traveled the world playing on military bases. She grew up on the piano and played upright bass, which led to dance in high school and eventually joining drama class, where the acting bug got her and she moved to LA at a young age to give the dream a shot.
“So my parents were really amazing, and I moved out at 16 by myself, got emancipated, rented a room from this acting couple and I just started pounding the pavement. I signed with Elite Models. I got a commercial agent, I got a theatrical agent, and just auditioned from morning until night. I got work pretty quick. Between modeling and commercials and music videos, that paid the bills, and then about a year later was when I started getting real acting roles.”
In the business since 1987, Amick is now set to direct episode 19 of Riverdale. “I jumped through all the hoops, did the workshops, shadowed everybody. They’ve been really supportive, and I’m about to direct episode 19 of this season...
To read the rest of this story head to https://issuu.com/newyorkmoves4
