Every now and then, there are actresses who seem to be everywhere at once, while in the past you haven't see that much of them. While watching the season 1 box of HBO's brilliant Big Love with my wife over the weekend, I wondered for a second who that actress was playing Bill Paxton's daughter Sarah. I soon realised that I had seen her before in Mean Girls, where she plays the one of Lindsay Lohan's airheaded new friends, and then the one with the least brain mass in her head. Her character in Big Love is completely different, as her oldest daughter in a family of polygamists has a lot of inner struggles to get to grips with her feelings about what her father and mother's have more or less gotten her into. Or, as Amanda said herself in an interview with HBO: "My character is the only one that's forced into something she doesn't want to be in."
Like many actresses before her, Amanda started out as a model. When she was 11, she followed a cousin who was already modelling. Several years as a child model followed, where, amongst other things, she ended up on a couple of book jackets, after which she decided to make the step towards acting. She got an early break on soap operas As the World Turns and All My Children, and when her character was written out of the latter, she got her more or less breakthrough role in Mean Girls. She originally auditioned for the roles that later went to Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams, but got the smaller (though still substantial) part of Karen Smith instead.
2006 has been a busy year for Amanda, with roles in TV-shows Wildfire, CSI, Veronica Mars, Justice and of course Big Love (which is filming it's second season at the moment, for a season start in March), in between which she also had time to film movies Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves and high profile indy movie Alpha Dog. "I play the sex interest of Justin Timberlake, who gets kidnapped. I had to pretend to smoke weed and drink beer (actually herbal cigarettes and water). We went through a weird three-week training camp to get us acquainted and get us in shape — we had to box and lift weights and everything. It was fun but grueling. But we all became pretty close after that."
And now? More Big Love and more movies, as the first one, Daniel Myrick's Solstice, is already in production. Looks like we will be seeing a lot more of Amanda in years to come.
Comments