Her breath-taking look, her raspy yet soft voice with a flare of New York, Canadian and British accents, her talent, her education and her life experiences all-together—combined are the ingredients that make Samantha Michelle a big star in the making.
Samantha, originally from Toronto, Canada, is driven and motivated to do anything she sets to achieve. At 17, she moved to the Big Apple following her dream of studying at ‘a big American university to become really smart’ right out of high school. “New York is such a huge part of who I am,” she says strongly. “It’s where I discovered acting, it’s where I became seriously academic…I threw myself into it, and just fell in love with the city.” She soaked up the city, the fashion and the people, but it was when she saw the classic Cameron Crowe film Almost Famous that she fell “madly in love” with Kate Hudson’s character Penny Lane, and the deeper meaning of acting. “When I watched it for the first time, I just fell in love with it. And this one scene became my anecdote to everything. Whenever I was sad, I would just YouTube this one scene, and it had this remarkable effect on me!” She explains further, “So I thought, I want to make stuff like that, let’s see what that’s about.”
She enrolled in an intensive one-month acting program, which consisted of actors and filmmaking students in New York, knowing nothing about theater or having even seen a full-length play. She had her first audition in front of filmmaking students and “I guess the audition went really well, because I ended up doing three films from that. My first weekend acting, I was a suicidal whore on Friday, a Bond girl on Saturday and a peace-loving hippy on Sunday. And it was just so much fun! I loved the whole process of it,” she reminisces.
That summer, she studied at a bilingual acting studio in Paris. “It became very much about how to access truth and connect to material in an emotional way, and exploring a bit of method acting, and that was very cool and cathartic…spiritual and psychological.”
Samantha is extremely intelligent and motivated in so many ways. In her second year at NYU, she discovered a program to build her own major. With the permission of the dean, she was accepted to pave her own path of academic classes, while studying acting and theater on the weekends. “I think my hodgepodge kind of training is really effective,” she says. Then she had another dream, to attend Oxford University in England. “When I got there I fell madly in love with everything! I was so happy there, I stayed for another term, but I still didn’t want to leave. So I decided to stay on for a third term just for shits,” she says with a giggle.
She continued to study Shakespeare and like everything else she ‘fell madly in love with it.’ On top of all that Samantha shares, “I’ve always been extremely passionate about charity work,” and during her time in England, she decided to put together an international tour charity/fashion show titled The Oxford Red Dress Couture Ball.
Samantha explains a story to me of when she was receiving an award to honor her academic success. Running late, she decided to go in the clothes she had been wearing all day; a see-through white lace top with a jean mini-skirt, knee-high socks some crazy go-go boots and a big leopard coat. “So I thought this should be interesting. My parents see me in my leopard coat and go-go boots shaking the hands of these big academic people…and my parent’s were like who is our daughter?” she laughs. “What is this girl about?” She continues to explain. “People have these ideas that if you’re academic and you love knowledge and books and reading that you’ve got to be frumpy and serious.” On the contrary, “If you’re sociable and like to dress up, people think there is no way that you’re going to wake up in the morning and write brilliant things.” What Samantha says to that? “F*** those categories, I’m going to be what I want to be, and do what I want to do, and I don’t really care whether or not it makes sense to anyone else.”
“Because the truth is…whether I’m wearing a leopard jacket or gray blazer, have nothing to do with the quality of the thoughts in my head.”
And that is what makes Samantha so brilliant. Her acting career is just getting started with some big projects in the making. We know Samantha will shoot for the stars, and when she shoots—she doesn’t seem to miss.
By: Rachel Shapiro
Read the article on: The Rising Hollywood
Samantha wrote to me after reading the article:
"I just read the article! your words are so unbelievably kind...Thank you so so much! You're such a talented writer and I hope to have the privilege of being interviewed by you again sometime in the near future!" xx Samantha
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