Heartland Season 20 premiered on CBC on October 4. Amber Marshall has played Amy Fleming since she was 19. She is 38 now.
Asked how many more seasons she could see herself doing, she didn’t hedge. “Oh gosh, another 20,” she said. Then she went further. “I’ll do Heartland till I die,” she told CBC. “This is my life. I love being in Western Canada. I love being on a ranch. I love being surrounded by my animals.”
It is a funny thing to hear in a season where Amy herself faces a hard choice about the ranch. The Season 19 finale ended with Nathan Pryce selling his ranch and proposing, with a plan to start over on Salt Spring Island, and Season 20 has Amy weighing what that would mean for her life at the ranch. You can read more about where Amy and Nathan stand. Amber, for her part, has already made up her mind about hers.
She had already answered the tired question
In January she told Cowgirl Magazine, “People ask if I’m getting tired of Heartland. I won’t be done until they tell me I’m done.” The reasons she gave were simple: “the people, the horses, the fact that I get to film in my own backyard and sleep in my own bed every night.” She added, “I’m such a homebody.”
That backyard is a real one. Her ranch outside Calgary began as an empty parcel with a little cabin on it, and she and her husband, Shawn, built the barns, paddocks and shelters themselves. She fosters dogs, and she runs the Foothills Animal Support Society, which helps animals and their families who might need access to veterinary care.
Why the set doesn’t feel like a set
That is also why Heartland doesn’t feel like a workplace to her. In a YouTube Q&A reported this spring by Movieguide, she was asked when she feels most herself. “Anytime I’m out in nature with animals,” she answered. “If I was in a studio every day, I don’t know that I would feel like myself.”
This month she put the same idea on the animals. “Horses are just living in the moment,” she said. “They don’t read the script.” That shapes how everyone works. “You cannot have a tense set with animals and expect them to perform. We have to be quiet. We have to be relaxed. We have to be calm.”
The Foothills behind them are not a backdrop trick, either. They are real, and she says they have become part of the cast. “The Heartland vista has become a character of its own.”
What “wholesome” means to her
Wholesome is a word she has leaned on for years. In a 2023 interview with TV Insider, while Season 17 was in production, she said, “I think fans are really looking for a nice, wholesome, family show that they can sit down together and watch and not be worried about the content.”
This season she gave the word a sharper edge. Season 20 introduces Winn, played by Brynn Godenir, who gallops into the first episode with horse-whispering skills to match Amy’s and a big following as a social-media influencer. Amy is wary of her at first. Marshall told the Calgary Herald why that story belongs on the show now. “Social-media culture is becoming so consuming and detracts from a lot of things that we see as wholesome, true and believable,” she said. “Especially with AI, you don’t know what to believe anymore. We experience that through the character of Winn.” Amy, she says, sees through the polish and asks, “Is that really your true self?”
She wasn’t handing the show a slogan. She was describing a life she doesn’t want to leave. “It makes you feel very complete,” she said of Heartland. “It makes you feel settled.”
A really good run
Nothing in television is guaranteed, and she knows it. “There’s a bit of unknown, but at the same time I feel very comfortable where we sit,” she said. If the series ended tomorrow, she would feel they had told the stories they needed to tell. “At the same time, we’ve had a really good run.”
She isn’t looking for the exit. She is waiting for someone else to call it.
