Miami Living Magazine

JoAnna Garcia Swisher

Miami Living Magazine features the best Miami has to offer. Click on any magazine below and enjoy. You can download our free app on iTunes. Ideal for iPad and iPhone users.

Issue link: https://digital.miamilivingmagazine.com/i/785703

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 127 of 205

She was taken great care of, especially during her bouts of morning sickness (Nick and she conceived Sailor halfway through the filming of the movie). "Tracy Morgan, I fell madly in love with him. Ice Cube is the dreamiest. Charlie is the sweetest, most loving co-star you could ever imagine. They were just great people. Jillian Bell, I just laugh at everything she says." I saw an early screening of the film and it's hilarious. If you need a good laugh, this is a must-see. "I've been lucky to have a career in comedy. It's nice to make people laugh. It's also nice to laugh when you're at work, so that whole experience was awesome." As a child JoAnna aspired to be a tennis star, but when she no longer saw a career in it, she took a page from her next-door neighbor's book and enrolled in improv classes. After a few classes, she auditioned for a play, got the part, and from that landed agents. "I just really loved performing in that moment. At that time, Florida was a hot bed for our industry and there was a lot of opportunity and so with Disney, Nickelodeon, and all of that around I was able to do what I love, but also maintain a real sense of normalcy, which was super important to my parents." JoAnna commuted from Tampa to Orlando to work on some of the 90's hottest TV shows, including Clarissa Explains it All and Are You Afraid of the Dark? (1994-1996). Before the kids were born, JoAnna, Nick, and a couple of their best friends went to Harry Potter World and took a stroll down memory lane while there. "It butts up against what was Nickelodeon Studios. I don't normally do this, but Nick will walk down memory lane all the time… He's like, 'C'mon, I want to take you where it all began for you.' I was, strangely, so emotional about it. It smelled the same way and has this memory of just an awesome time in my life. But my dressing room that I had there is a broom closet now," she laughs. "It's kinda like a reality check. Relax, Jo. Chill out. But I had a moment." JoAnna took a break from acting to attend Florida State University and have some fun. It wasn't long though before the sports psychology major realized how much she missed acting. "I knew there was nothing that I loved as much as that." So she left school and moved to Los Angeles. The day she arrived, she landed a role in a made for TV movie in North Carolina. Upon her return to L.A., she secured an agent and ended up on Party of Five a couple of weeks later. "It sort of happened really quickly for me. Obviously, my career has been very steadily built, but I think that immediately I understood I made the right decision." And if her daughters want to follow in her footsteps, she'll allow it on one condition: that they act on Nickelodeon or the Disney channel, since the networks provided such a great environment for her growing up. Emme is just now starting to understand what mommy does for a living. When JoAnna's 3-year- old was asked the question, she replied, "She goes out to L.A. and sits." (The narrative was posted to her Instagram.) "As offended as I was by that, I was actually sitting in my trailer for 6 hours that day waiting. The schedule was really backed up. Well, she's actually not wrong," she says with a big smile, then laughs. A few weeks ago, JoAnna and her family returned to the set of ABC's hit series Once Upon A Time in Canada to reprise her role as Ariel and get the "street cred she deserves" from her daughter, who is all about Disney princesses. "Emme came alive," she explains animatedly. "One of our A.D.s took her into my set, where I have all of my treasures, and he allowed her to pick a little treasure. Her eyes were so big. And meeting Princess Jasmine… She was literally feeding Emme cake. She got to meet Jafar, Aladdin, Captain Hook… I said, 'Nick, I could cry.' He's like, 'I'm going to cry.' He was with her. It was just this moment where this whole fantasy world that they see in cartoons came alive in the most real way for my daughter. I feel like a really cool mom that I could give her this really special moment." She takes a sip of her coffee. The smile never leaves her face. Playing Ariel, who she characterizes as "tough as nails," requires her to work with a stunt double. But JoAnna's ready to tackle these stunts herself. "I'm like, 'Oh, I got this!' and then I slowly start sinking in my Ariel tail. And they're like, 'You might die.' And I'm like, 'No, but I got it. It's fine.'" She lets out a laugh. "In my mind, I'm super graceful and I'm killing it as a mermaid, but maybe in reality it doesn't read that way… I'm going to start taking some stunt classes so I can." Every anecdote JoAnna shares is fraught with intense adulation for her co-stars and loved ones. If you believe Audrey Hepburn's musings to be true: "You can tell more about a person by what he says about others than you can by what others say about him," then you'd immediately realize that you were in the presence of a genuine class act after

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of Miami Living Magazine - JoAnna Garcia Swisher