[Watch the video interview on Youtube here]
*This content talks about mental health, depression and suicide.
Film Courage: When did you decide you were going to be not only the lead actress in Night, Mother but also a producer?
Sheila Houlahan, Actor, Singer, Producer and Writer: That whole thing feels like a fever dream at times. I’ll tell you the story, it’s 2020 and the film industry has shut down and died. We are all out of a job, all of a sudden everything was halted, we’re at home, that’s all. By July I was like as fun as this is, I’m dying inside because for me since this is my calling, if I don’t get to do it every day, I really do feel like I’m atrophying. I was like well okay I can at the very least work on something, I can become better as an artist and work on my craft. I reached out to a dear friend from my opera days, Ellen McLain, who is a super internationally famous voice actor. She was GLaDOS in Portal and Portal 2 and voices is like half the characters in Dota 2. She’s voiced an incredible body of work and is an amazing woman and also was an opera singer. She was my boss for a small local opera gig in Seattle. I’ve always admired her as an artist and reached out to her. I was like Hey, let’s chat on Zoom sometime. So we’re chatting and catching up and I was like You want to just kick around to play? I would love to just kind of work on character and maybe look at this in a different way so that when this time is up I’m not just like well I was sad, something came out of it. She said sure, I love that, that’s a great idea. Let’s do it. Let me think about that.
The next time we met she was like Hey, I found this play, it’s perfect. It’s for two women, it’s called Night, Mother and I was like Whoa! because Night, Mother was a play that was there for me during a really hard bout of my own depression. There was this lightning moment that kicked off where I was…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BIO:
Sheila Houlahan is a Webby Award Winning Indian-American actor, singer, producer, writer and advocate.
Sheila played the supporting role “Paige Callahan” opposite Denzel Washington in the Warner Bros. feature “The Little Things”, which was written and directed by John Lee Hancock. She also has a role in the Michael Bay thriller “Ambulance”.
In 2021, Sheila was the executive producer for a feature film adaptation of Marsha Norman’s Pulitzer-winning play “Night, Mother” in partnership with Twitch.tv; this film was a “hybrid” film, mixing pre-recorded segments with live performance that was recorded and edited in front of a live audience. Over 8000 people watched “Night, Mother” live, and since then, the film has received critical acclaim and has been screened at 68 festivals in over 24 countries. “Night, Mother” has over 64K views on it’s flagship Twitch.tv channel and has been praised for its’ fresh, innovative approach to filmmaking winning over 60 awards including the Webby Award for Virtual and Remote Entertainment & Media.
Sheila is a Celebrity Champion for Project HEAL, a nonprofit organization that helps people suffering from eating disorders source affordable treatment options and pay for treatment. She is also an ambassador for Ability Magazine’s platform AbilityE, a casting portal that seeks to increase inclusion and representation of differently-abled talent and creatives on both sides of the table in Hollywood.
WATCH ‘NIGHT, MOTHER’
CONNECT WITH SHEILA HOULAHAN
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