For nearly two decades, Heartland fans have watched Amber Marshall play Amy Fleming, a woman whose whole life runs on horses, family and hard work in the Alberta foothills.
Then you watch Amber at home.
And the gap between the two of them nearly disappears.
That came through clearly when former co-star Graham Wardle sat down with her for his Time Has Come podcast in September 2023. The episode, “Living Authentically & Going Against the Grain: Amber Marshall’s Path to Self-Discovery,” opens inside Marshall’s Country Store, her shop in Turner Valley, Alberta, and ends out in a field, the two old friends sitting quietly and watching her horses graze. Behind the camera, and flying the drone over her land, was Kerry James, who plays Caleb on Heartland.
It doesn’t feel like a celebrity interview. It feels like a visit.
“Getting your feet in dirt”
Ask Amber what nature does for her and she doesn’t reach for anything fancy.
“I think that just getting your feet in dirt, you know, it really, it grounds you,” she told Wardle. She talked about walking out to pick fresh raspberries, and about how people lose something when every meal comes from a grocery store reached by concrete sidewalk.
Her way of unwinding after a long day on set is just as simple. She calls it wandering through the field with her animals. Sitting near the horses, she said, “you can’t be stressed when you sit here.”
Most actors go home and switch off. Amber goes home and sits with the herd.
She watches them closely, too. Horses, she pointed out, think about food and water first, then shelter, then friends. They know which tree line to head for when a storm rolls in, and they have their favourites in the herd and the ones they pick on. It isn’t so different from people, she said. We’ve just made it more complicated.
The 4:30 a.m. alarm doesn’t care that she’s famous
Farm life isn’t a backdrop she poses in front of. It sets her schedule.
“I don’t like getting up every morning at 4:30 in the morning. It’s not comfortable,” she admitted. “But I do it.”
That’s a very Amy line.
Her husband, Shawn Turner, is wired the same way. When Wardle asked about Shawn’s best quality, she said “hardworking” straight away and laughed that, as they spoke, he was still out in the skid steer moving dirt. The two had just marked their 10th wedding anniversary, and they had to leave the farm to actually slow down, because staying home meant they’d never stop working. (Their horseback wedding and the farm they built by hand are their own story, told here.)
Then there’s the quiet. Between hair, makeup and wardrobe, people are around her all day on set, and she doesn’t mind. But when she gets home, she said, “I just want to sit in a field and just kind of just be with myself.” Shawn has learned that about her over the years.
Amy’s love of animals was never research
Some actors spend weeks learning their character’s world. Amber was living in hers long before the audition.
As a child she wasn’t a Barbie kid. She built farms out of stuffed animals, set them up in enclosures and even dragged her mom’s potted plants into the living room to make a jungle. Her make-believe, she said, “was very tailored to who I still am today.”
She grew up with rabbits, fish, turtles and cats, and watched Discovery Channel instead of teen shows. Today she has chickens and has kept peacocks and pheasants. The one thing she has never had is the house bird she always wanted. She’s outside too much to give one the attention it deserves.
And then there’s the squirrel.
In the first weeks of Grade 9, Amber was walking to lunch with the cool group she badly wanted to join when she spotted a baby squirrel that had fallen from a tree, dehydrated and struggling to breathe. She stopped. They told her not to touch the “disgusting creature.” One said somebody should get a stick and put it out of its misery.
She told them to go on without her, scooped the squirrel up in her sweater and carried it to a nearby vet clinic, missing her whole lunch hour.
“I’ve always helped animals. That’s who I am,” she said.
That vet clinic is the same one where she later worked for years as a teenager. She found a better group of friends soon after, and they stuck with her through high school. (Those years weren’t easy, and the barn she ran to back then is its own story.)
She moved to Alberta before she knew the show would last
Heartland premiered in October 2007, when Amber was 19. She had no idea it would run for 20 seasons. She thought it might last a couple of years.
She moved anyway.
“If I knew that the show was only going to go two years, I probably wouldn’t have moved here,” she told Wardle. “But I did move here in season two because I loved it so much.”
She felt at home in Alberta right away, and she has never really left. When work took her to St. John’s, Newfoundland, one winter, she still walked every day, but it was city walking, with city noise, and she said she felt “very unsettled.”
The foothills are where she finds her peace.
Why Amy never feels like a costume
That ease shows up on screen in small ways fans might never notice.
Scripts say things like “Amy turns to the horse and the horse licks her.” Real horses have other ideas. “All of a sudden the horse just grabs my hat and throws it off,” she said. “Like you go with it.” Those unscripted moments, she believes, make the performance more real. When she rewatches an episode, the beats that still get her are the horse ones: a join-up, a herd running, or the horse in the opening credits that reached over and nipped another one. Nobody trained it to do that.
She has also grown up alongside Amy. Fans watched Amy fall for Ty Borden, marry him, become a mother to Lyndy, and lose him when Ty died in the Season 14 premiere. Amber lived every one of those years on that set too, and she has said she’d happily keep playing Amy for as long as the show runs.
Heartland still takes acting. Amy is a character, and Amber isn’t her in every way.
But the early mornings are real. So are the animals, the fields and the quiet.
Her advice is the simplest thing she does
At the end of the conversation, Wardle asked if there was anything she wanted to leave people with.
Be true to yourself, she said. And when life gets loud, go for a walk alone. Not with music, and not with friends. Just you and your own thoughts.
Twenty seasons in, that’s still how she lives.
Amy Fleming would do the same.
