Amalia Williamson is a very familiar face to fans of the hit Sullivan’s Crossing series, having played the regularly recurring character Lola Gunderson for the first three seasons, with her story arc only just concluding at the start of Season 4.
Next up for Williamson is a starring role on Acorn TV’s comedic thriller mystery, You’re Killing Me, where she plays Andrea Walker, aka Andi, a young true crime podcaster with a real eye for clues, who teams up with Brooke Shields’ novelist Allison Chandler to solve the murders that keep happening in the little New England town where Chandler lives.
Via Zoom, Williamson spoke with us about how this role was everything she ever dreamed of playing.
Andi is a character both new and yet familiar. Tell us what your impressions of her were when you were approached about this project.
AW: This project felt like a dream to me. This character is everything that I ever wanted. She is funny and witty and so smart. Like Nancy Drew. I grew up reading Nancy Drew and always wanting to play a little sleuth. Nancy Drew, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Those are my dream roles. Less vampires in this, but we definitely tick the Nancy Drew box.
You’ve got the comedy aspect of things. I love comedy, and I’ve really leaned into that lately in my career.
And then the seriousness of solving mysteries! It was just a dream role for me from Day One.
Can you speak to the process of landing the role?
I got the audition. I did the audition with my husband. He was my reader: he played Allie. Clearly, he did an okay job ’cause I got asked to tape again. There were some notes, changed things up a bit, made her a little less “girly.” I think I approached the role with a little more pink than they had in mind.
They said to edge her up a little bit, so I did. And then, after that, was the chemistry read with Brooke!
Funny story about that. I was in Vancouver a couple days before I had the chemistry read, and I got the worst food poisoning that I’ve ever had in my entire life. I had a bad oyster, and I love oysters, but haven’t had one since. It was terrible.
So I was trying to read the pilot and having to run to the bathroom… it was terrible. This might be TMI, but it was kind of a funny story because I was still dying when I did the chemistry read.
But I managed to do it, and Brooke was awesome! I didn’t really know what I was going to get with an icon like Brooke Shields hopping on a call with me. She was so lovely from the get-go. Conversation flowed. Everything felt really organic. We bounced off of each other really quickly.
It was like a week after that, a few days later, that I hopped on a Zoom like this with Robin (Bernheim, the show’s creator), and then Brooke popped in. The video’s been released now, and she offered me the role. I sobbed. I was so excited.
You’re Killing Me films in Nova Scotia, just as Sullivan’s Crossing does. How do you feel the setting contributes to the mood of the show?
It’s such a part of the story. We’re in this little, tiny community. It’s similar to Cabot Cove in Murder, She Wrote, which I grew up watching. It’s one of my favourite shows. I absolutely love Angela Lansbury.
You’ve got this community of quirky characters. There are so many of them that are so fun to watch in the show. Connie (Laura Kohoot) and Norman (Gabriel Burrafato), these larger-than-life characters that live in this small community, and you never know who’s the bad guy. It adds to the quirk and the comedy of the show.
And then Nova Scotia’s just so beautiful! We’re replicating Maine here, and I think we did a great job of that. It’s just such a lovely place to film. The community there is lovely. The people are so nice! Truly, the nicest people in the East Coast. I love filming there. It’s a dream.
How did you manage the filming of the six episodes in the series? Was it blocked out episodically, or were you filming in overlapping sequences?
We did two-episode blocks. It made things a little easier to do it chronologically. But it was quick! We had a quick turnaround. We had some night shoots, and then, towards the end — y’know, Nova Scotia does get quite cold, especially at night — we were bundled up, layered up, we had a lot of heat packs that we went through, but we made it work.
Both you and Brooke have several scenes in the series requiring stunt work. Was that your first time filming action sequences?
Oh yeah, definitely. I did a few of my own little stunts myself. In Episode 2, I hoist Brooke up onto a tree. I did a lot of that… actually, the whole thing, I did myself. And that was fun to navigate. We did some falls together. I love to do stunts. I would love to do more action. They felt really good and safe.
Brooke and I had so much fun. We would just giggle the entire time. When I’m knocking her over onto a mat, as soon as they called “Cut!” — it was supposed to be really serious — we were just giggling. Those were fun to do.
The writing for the show includes some remarkably self-aware comedic moments, especially regarding the sheer number of murders occurring in Founders Cove.
Yeah, it’s hilarious. The writing was great from Day One. You didn’t have to do anything, change anything. I think Robin really — especially when I was cast — wrote for my voice too, so reading it was seamless.
So, building on that thought, did you find Andi in yourself or yourself in Andi?
Both. Oh, definitely both. She is everything I have ever wanted to play. I love that she’s a little sleuth. She’s definitely better with the clues and the evidence than I am. I think Brooke and I would both say that the hardest lines to learn were when we got really, really technical. They were hard to wrap your head around.
But it was great. I was drawn to her from [the beginning]. She had the murder-mystery sleuth aspect, and then the comedy aspect. I love her.
It was a little surprising that You’re Killing Me solves its mysteries episodically. Some viewers might’ve expected more of an Only Murders in the Building long arc season-long mystery plot. What did you think of the show’s pacing when you were reading the scripts?
I just ate up those scripts when I got them. I was so excited to read them and genuinely did not know who the murderer was, and I’m pretty good at guessing that. I’ll watch a movie, and I’ll know right away. But with these, Robin writes so well, and we had an amazing team of writers: Phoef Sutton, Lee Goldberg, and Derek Thompson.
The pacing felt so organic and natural to me, and I love that every episode is a new murder. It keeps things so fresh and exciting. It’s hilarious that we are in a small town, but there are so many murders that all of a sudden start happening. I love that that’s so fishy and the Murder, She Wrote-esque aspect of it.
I wish we had twenty episodes.
Finally, how would your character, Andi Walker, pitch You’re Killing Me to the audience?
She would say something like, “Buckle up, it’s killer. You’re in for a great ride!”
You’re Killing Me streams on Acorn TV with new episodes every Monday until June 22.
