This story was featured in the Winter 2019 Indulge magazine, delivered with your Peace Arch News on Friday, Nov. 15.
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For the past six years, Langley-born actress Amanda Crew has had a steady gig on one of cable television’s most prestigious networks – playing the role of Monica Hall, a venture-capital firm executive, on the HBO comedy Silicon Valley.
That show – which focuses on the successes and (often hilarious) failures of a group of young, awkward computer coders as they try to make their way in Northern California’s cutthroat tech scene – began in 2014, but is now in the midst of its final season, with the cord set to be unplugged for good after seven more episodes.
Crew wasn’t an unknown prior to taking on the Silicon Valley job, of course, having appeared in a lead role in such films as Sex Drive, Final Destination 3 and Charlie St. Cloud – the latter alongside Zac Efron – but the 33-year-old Brookswood Secondary graduate is certainly more well-known now than before she joined the HBO show’s cast, which also stars another B.C. talent – Nelson’s Thomas Middleditch.
Now, Crew – who is also an avid photographer with a website (amanda-crew.com) devoted to her work – will look to move beyond the Valley and into new roles.
She recently shot a horror movie, Tone-Deaf, and though movie roles have been rolling in, she told entertainment website cheatsheet.com that she isn’t against jumping back into the waters of television.
“I think TV’s doing some really, really cool stuff right now,” Crew said. “I feel like the landscape for TV is in a really cool space right now. When I started Silicon, we shot the pilot over six years ago and TV was a completely different place, so I’m excited to get back out into the field and see what’s out there.”
Prior to some of her bigger Hollywood roles, Crew got her start on locally-shot fare. Her first acting credit, for example, is as an unnamed sorority girl in a 2005 episode of Smallville, much of which was shot in Cloverdale and Langley. Final Destination 3, too, was filmed in Vancouver, as were other films in which she appears – John Tucker Must Die and the TV series Whistler.
More recently, Crew played Nikki in 2017’s Table 19 (starring Anna Kendrick) and Kikki Jones in the 2015 film Age of Adeline (starring Blake Lively, Harrison Ford and Ellen Burstyn) which was shot at various locations in Vancouver and throughout the Lower Mainland.
In 2011, she also returned home to MC the Langley Memorial Hospital Foundation’s annual gala.
Back to present day – or, more accurately, the future – Crew is leaving her options open.
“Everything’s on the table as far as what medium, format and as far as subject matter,” she told CheatSheet. “I’m just keen to do stuff that I’m excited about.”