Heartland fans can’t wait for the return of Mallory
Jessica Amlee grew up on popular show, but has branched out with other roles
On Feb. 1, Heartland’s Facebook page posted a picture of a young woman whose face was mostly obscured by clapperboards.
It linked to the CBC series’ official blog, which teased the return of a “past favourite” for the Feb. 12 episode of CBC’s family drama. It did not take much detective work for fans to figure it out. For one, many recognized actress Jessica Amlee, who played gossipy neighbour Mallory Wells from 2007 to 2013, hiding behind those clapperboards. For another, the now 22-year-old actress is one of the few, if not only, major cast member to have left Heartland during its 10-season run.
So it’s not surprising that the announcement, later confirmed with a more direct post, was met with no shortage of social-media giddiness from Heartland’s devout fans. It ranged from the grandmotherly (“Our little Mallory has gone and all grew up on us.”) to the wistful (“I have waited so long for this moment”) to straight-up rapturous (“OMG! OMG! OMG!.)
“They would try to keep me off the radar when we were shooting in Millarville,” says Amlee, now back in Los Angeles. “They kept me away from people because they wanted it to be a secret leading to the surprise. I hope that they’re happy I’m back, not ‘Oh no, Mallory’s back. Not this again.’ I hope the audience receives me well because I think the scripts are written really well and I think they’ll like it. I’m excited for the surprise.”
Not that it’s really a surprise at this point. But while the cat is certainly out of the bag, the exact reason Mallory Wells has returned to the familiar embrace of the Bartlett Ranch remains a bit of a mystery, at least for most of the first of two episodes that deal with the homecoming.
Mallory left the picture early in Season 7 to go to Paris with Jake, the young cowboy she had fallen for. And as many Heartland devotees have deduced on social media, the return does have something to do with her love life, although we won’t reveal details here. But we can say that the first episode begins with Mallory looking very different than she did as a nosy 12-yearold neighbour in 2007.
“Mallory comes in like a whirlwind,” Amlee says. “She tries to convince everybody that she is doing well, but there’s a lot more under the surface that is happening with her in regards to why she left Paris in the first place and what she left behind there.”
Amlee was born in Maple Ridge, B.C. and was a busy child actress before landing the role of Mallory. She played the role from 12 to 18, literally spending her formative years in front of the camera.
But in 2013, she made the tough decision to leave the show.
“Heartland was very stable, which was great, and it was a great job for a young person, but I needed to expand myself and see what I’m made of,” she says. “I felt like I got the hang of Mallory. I needed to challenge myself in other ways.”
While still a teenager, she trained at the Groundlings school in Los Angeles, which is run by the improvisational comedy troupe that counts Phil Hartman, Will Ferrell and Melissa McCarthy as alumni.
A flurry of auditions followed and she began to win roles, including many that took her far from Mallory Wells.
She played the lead in the 2015 TV movie Kidnapped: The Hannah Anderson Story and played a creepy imaginary friend to a tech savant played by India Eisley in the pilot for the TV thriller, Socio.
“When I first moved here, I was expecting a lot of dirty looks in the casting rooms and I was expecting competitiveness,” Amlee says. “But what I eventually found is that there is a lot of people, but everybody here is here for a reason and I feel like we’re all in it together. So it wasn’t as scary as I thought it was going to be.”
Last March, she landed a lead role in the Netflix original series, Greenhouse Academy. It’s about a school of elite students enlisted to “thwart an evil plot.” Amlee describes it as Harry Potter meets Degrassi. Over the summer, she shot Greenhouse Academy in Tel Aviv, playing a juvenile delinquent named Jackie who is recruited after showing a talent for robbing banks.
“The difference between Jackie and Mallory is immense,” Amlee says. “Jackie is super tough, she doesn’t talk to anyone. She will fight someone if she has a problem with them while Mallory will talk it out. Mallory is super-loving and open and tries really hard, where Jackie is more of an introvert with a hard shell to crack.”
The new series is likely to keep Amlee busy, which means there are no firm plans at this point for Mallory to return beyond the next two episodes. But the actress says she would love to return to the ranch when the timing is right.
“It’s kind of cheesy because Mallory is coming home, but at the same time I felt like I was able to come home, too, to a safe, wonderful, fun environment to play with a character I hadn’t played with in awhile,” she says.
“I’m so glad that I did it because it just gave me a different perspective. Leaving as a teenager and coming back at 22, I realize now how fortunate I was to be surrounded by these people.”
Leaving as a teenager and coming back at 22, I realize now how fortunate I was to be surrounded by these people.