I am happy to see that Ashley Judd has a new TV series. She has been Missing from action herself. What has she been up to?
—Clayton Carter, Gulfport, Miss.
Just because Judd hasn’t been knocking out film projects doesn’t mean she hasn’t been busy. The 44-year-old California-born, Kentucky-raised actress went back to school and earned a master’s degree in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 2010.
“While I was in school, people were sending me a lot of television material, but it was either try to get an ‘A’ in health and human rights or read a script,” she says, “I figured, ‘I’m in school. I might as well go for the grade.’”
But after her graduation, her agent called her with the perfect project: a 10-episode, action-thriller series, shooting in Europe, about a mother, a former CIA agent, searching for her kidnapped son.
“I’d had a very sedentary life until I began filming Missing,” she says, so knowing she had to get in shape for her fight scenes, she adds, “I just got on my yoga mat with a few teachers I really like and who I trust. I’ve got good muscle memory, and it came back. It was a way not only to be really in my body and flexible, but to make sure I stayed safe and didn’t get hurt. And then it was just time to fight. And I love to fight. I find it easy and rewarding.”
Her memoir, All That Is Bitter & Sweet, was recently released on paperback.
Found in: Celebrity Q&A
