The Real Difference Between Amber Marshall and Her TV Self

People write to Amber Marshall about their horses all the time. The horse won’t load, the horse bucks, the horse has some habit nobody can fix. They write to her as if she were Amy Fleming, the girl on Heartland who can calm any horse in Alberta.

Her answer is always the same. “I tell them to contact a trainer,” she told Maclean’s in March 2021. “I’ve had horses my whole life, and I know more than the average person, but I’m not a horse whisperer.”

So how different is she from Amy? Less than you’d think. In her own words, the biggest difference is that Amy only has eyes for horses, while Amber loves every animal on her ranch the same. And Amy gets the drama, because TV needs some.

“Amy’s got these blinders on for horses”

She got the question straight out on the Hallmarkies Podcast in July 2022, while Season 15 was airing in the U.S. What’s the biggest difference between you and Amy?

“We’re very similar in a lot of our core values,” she said. “Amy is a little bit more horse obsessed than I am. I’m very animal obsessed. Like on my farm, I love my chickens and my dogs and my cats just as much as I love my horses.”

Then she got to the part every Heartland fan will recognize. “Amy’s got these blinders on for horses. She’s like, it’s horses or nothing. And for me, I go out and spend just as much time giving my cows neck scratches and pets as I do with my horses.”

She’d said almost the same thing a year earlier, in that Maclean’s interview. “I get the most enjoyment being out in the field with my chickens pecking around my feet, my ducks quacking around, my cows sniffing my back. That’s my world. Amy doesn’t care about the cows or the chickens.”

The cattle come up again and again. In 2025 she joked to Cowgirl Magazine, “I love working with cattle… Amy somehow always gets out of that.” Helping neighbours move cows, or checking her own little herd at calving time, is something else to her. “That’s my meditation.”

The drama belongs to Amy

The other difference is one she puts down to the job. “I think that Amy’s a little bit more dramatic maybe than myself, because she has to be, because it’s television,” she said on the podcast. “That’s what I always say, is if there’s not drama then it’s boring.”

Amy has lost her mother, gone blind for a while, become a mom and lost her husband. Amber doesn’t need any of that at home. On the same podcast she said the stories that push her furthest are the ones she’s never lived. Playing Amy pregnant, she had to ask Michelle Morgan and others what a Braxton Hicks contraction even was. Playing blind meant talking to people who’d lived it. The horse stories, she said, she’s “usually pretty trained” for.

She wouldn’t take Amy’s life

Maclean’s asked her the big one in 2021, right after Ty’s death in the Season 14 premiere. Would she want Amy Fleming’s life?

“No. Absolutely not,” she said. “I’m able to have my horses, my cows, my cats, my alpaca and this menagerie around me. I have the most amazing husband and the most amazing friends. I sometimes feel Amy is lacking in the friendship department because she’s so consumed with her horses.”

That husband is Shawn Turner, the man she married on horseback in 2013, and you can read their story here. The friends are the ranchers she’s met since moving west. In a 2019 Q&A on CBC’s Heartland blog, she said her friend Kerilee runs 600 head of cattle, and that she helps out “as much as I can.”

“We’re just one and the same”

Ask Amber where Amy ends and she begins, though, and she has trouble finding the line. “I always struggle to find big differences between me and my character,” she told Maclean’s, “because I feel, over the years of being on this show, the writers have adapted Amy to be more like Amber. And the more I live in Alberta on a ranch, the more I become like Amy. It’s this bizarre world where the two merged into one.”

She said the same thing to CBC in 2019: “I believe that over the years my character Amy has become more like myself and vice versa. The writers seem to gravitate to stories that happened in my real life.”

It goes all the way to her dreams. When the Hallmarkies hosts asked if she ever dreams as Amy, she laughed it off. “Amy and Amber are very similar, so I feel like I’m always dreaming in Amy, because we’re just one and the same.” If she played someone walking around a foreign planet in space boots, she said, maybe she’d dream about space boots.

Her animals cross over too. Her dog Remy is on the show, and her miniature horse Talon plays Monty. “It’s sort of that idea of your life merging into your work,” she said. For more on how close her real days are to Amy’s, see Amber Marshall’s real life, right down to the 4:30 a.m. alarm.

The horse who grew up with her

The place where the two really overlap is Spartan. In 2019 she told CBC that Amy and Spartan’s stories were her favourites. “The horse who plays Spartan is named Stormy and he has been playing the role since the first season,” she said. “Rightfully so, him and I have formed quite the bond.”

Stormy was only about four and a half when Heartland started, which she said was very young for a horse on a film set. By 2022 he was 20 and had spent “almost his whole life” on the show. Other look-alike horses did the rearing, falling and lying-down scenes, but Stormy was the one she rode.

Then arthritis caught up with him. “He was sore… and starting to get grumpy. I said, ‘This isn’t right for him,'” she told Cowgirl. Since Season 17, Spartan has been played by Hawk, her own Quarter Horse, who lives on her ranch and shares her June 2 birthday, as she notes on her store’s animals page. Here’s the whole story of Stormy, Hawk and Spartan.

Twenty seasons later

Amber was 18 when she got the part and 19 when Heartland premiered in October 2007. She’s 38 now, and Season 20 started on CBC on October 4. The girl from London, Ontario, who found her refuge with horses, lives on her own ranch south of Calgary, the kind of life she was cast to pretend to have.

She isn’t going anywhere. “I’ll do Heartland till I die,” she told CBC News this month, and you can read more about why she won’t leave the ranch.

Amy will keep the drama and her one-track love of horses. Amber gets the rest: the cows, the chickens, the friends and the quiet evenings at home. As she said in 2022, “when you get down to it, I would say that myself and my character are very similar.” It’s the “very similar” part, with a whole barnyard of difference, that fans love.