Amber Marshall on her ‘Heartland’ Family, Dealing with Loss, and Finding Love Again

When Heartland showrunner Heather Conkie attended Amber Marshall’s wedding, she brought along a notebook. By the end of that year, some of what she saw at the wedding was written into the show.

This is common for Heartland. After 19 seasons and more than 270 episodes, the line between Amber and her character, Amy Fleming, has mostly disappeared. Amber, now 35, lives on a ranch in Alberta all year. She doesn’t do it for the show—it is simply how she prefers to live. She works with horses daily. When she is acting, she doesn’t have to pretend. She uses her own life experiences for her acting. “When it comes on screen I can say, I’ve been there and experienced this,” Marshall says. “I know exactly how I handled it emotionally and can bring that into my character.”

Where Real Life Meets the Screen

Based on Lauren Brooke’s popular books, Heartland follows the Bartlett-Fleming family across generations on their ranch in Alberta. It is the longest-running weekly TV drama in Canadian history. The show started in 2007, and its audience has only grown over the years. When Season 16 arrived on UP Faith & Family in the United States, it quickly became one of the most-watched shows on the platform.

For Amber, the cast has felt like a real family for a long time. For example, the twin girls who play Amy’s daughter, Lyndy (Ruby and Emmanuella Spencer), joined the show at six months old. They are now nearly seven. Amber has watched them learn to walk, talk, and even ride horses.

However, the cast has also faced real-world heartbreak.

Actor Robert Cormier joined the show as Finn Cotter, who was set to be Amy’s first real love interest after the death of her husband, Ty Borden. Amber and Robert spent a lot of time planning where their characters’ story would go. But in September 2022, Robert tragically died after a fall at the age of 33.

Production paused. Marshall has spoken about how this loss changed the daily lives of the cast and crew—a reminder, as she put it, of how little warning life gives. For viewers, Cormier’s death closed a story they had only just begun to follow. For Marshall, it meant she had to keep playing a grieving character, a role that required her to return, day after day, to sad feelings that were hard to act out.

A Fresh Start in Season 16

Season 16 finally gives Amy a chance to breathe and look toward the future. For the first time since Ty’s death, Amy is allowed to seek happiness. While Amber won’t say if Amy will end up with newcomer Sam Langstone (Shawn Roberts), she shares a story about a friend of hers. This friend lost her husband but eventually found love again with a neighbor. Amber suggests that grief doesn’t fully go away, but it does fade enough to let new things, and new people, into your life.

Amber’s ranch lifestyle is not just for social media or her career. She genuinely loves being outdoors and doing physical work with her horses. When asked how long she wants to keep doing the show, her answer is simple: as long as it keeps going.

And Heartland shows no signs of stopping. When fans tell Amber why they love the show, they almost always say the same thing: it is a wholesome series that grandparents and grandkids can watch together in the same room. Creating a TV show that appeals to the whole family for nearly twenty years is a difficult thing to do, but Heartland has found a way to make it work.