Judd found a new world of filming for ‘Missing’
Ashley Judd came back to a filmmaking world that was vastly changed from what she remembered when she started making her upcoming “Missing” series for ABC after a spell away from the cameras.
“With the digital revolution on the set, it takes very little time to change the camera for different setups,” she reports. “Everything moves very quickly. I’d be on my way back to my trailer, and they’d say that they were ready.” Thus, she says, she “had to be prepared — very emotionally prepared” throughout long and intense shooting days.
“That was actually the biggest adjustment for me,” says the erudite star, speaking of jumping into her first television series, “and I think that’s more related to the fact that I retired for five years.”
Ashley took time away from acting to complete her masters of public administration degree at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government — she attained the degree in 2010 — and to put her energies into an array of humanitarian and social justice causes. She has served as a global ambassador for YOUTHAIDS. She’s campaigned for wildlife preservation. And she has an ongoing mission against gender violence.
When asked what sparked her to change, she recalls that a turning point came “When I found out in 1988 that in the commonwealth of Kentucky at that time, it was still legal for a husband to rape his wife. That was quite a moment — and the law was changed, which is why I read about it in the newspaper. And I’m very proud to say that I’m now working with Dr. Carol Jordan, who is a professor at the Center for Research on Violence Against Women at the University of Kentucky, and who was key in changing that law.”
Now Ashley’s activist and actress lives will have to coexist. Her series, debuting March 15 on ABC, will be a hit. As you may already be aware, it’s a globetrotting action thriller — filmed in real locations, big-screen style, for the small screen — in which she plays a mother trying to find her college student son, who has been abducted in Europe. Ashley pulls off playing her former CIA operative character brilliantly.
To find out more about Marilyn Beck and Stacy Jenel Smith and read their past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.