There are some kids who grow up knowing they want to be a teacher, or an astronaut or a veterinarian. For Madison Shamoun, there was no denying, her future was in the spotlight.
“The joke is that I came out of the womb singing and dancing and I think my overwhelmed parents were just like, ‘What do we do with her? She’s got a personality, and energy, and a willfulness,'” Shamoun tells GRAZIA USA. “So they just put me into every performative extracurricular that was known to man, from dancing to ice skating, cheerleading, tennis, musical theater — they just threw me in.”
But it was acting that had a hold on her. “I just loved acting. I was that kid that would come home and watch Anne of Green Gables on PBS and watch all the reruns and memorize every single line and then force the kids in my neighborhoods to put on shows with me. When I was 13, I told my dad, ‘Okay, I want to act. So for Christmas I’d like an agent.’ So I don’t know, I think I’ve always been this way.”
After earning two National Youth Theater Awards for Best Supporting Actress, for her performance as Lucy in 13 in 2013 and Motormouth Maybelle in Hairspray in 2015, she attended University of California Los Angeles and earned a Bachelor of Arts in Acting for Theater, Film, and Television. She cut her teeth in more stage and film productions while in college, and recently earned guest star roles on ABC’s Black-ish, Netflix’s BlackAF, and Disney’s Sydney To The Max. She also appeared on FX’s Better Things and in Maren Morris’ music video “Girl.”
While she doesn’t consider one accomplishment her “big break,” being a part of Black-ish will always hold a special place in her heart. “Something that felt really substantial to me, or just really fun was doing Black-ish, because that show had been going for six years and it was such a big success and it had people like Tracee Ellis Ross in it and so when I got to be on that set and work with those individuals, I was like, ‘This is really cool.'”
There’s another role she may start qualifying as another career-changer, after starring in Amazon’s newly-released TV series, The Lake, alongside Julia Stiles.
“She was great,” Shamoun says about working with Stiles. “We had such a good cast, just great people who were perfect in their roles. I keep saying, it felt like summer camp because we were isolated amid COVID-19. So all of us were just geeky actor people hanging out in the summer, just trapped together on an island. It was fun.”
Another aspect that made it feel like summer camp were the bugs. “The weather in Canada, I will say was so humid and there were so many bugs. I think they have some BTS footage and bloopers of me just screaming and freaking out about the bugs. I’m sure you’ll see that at some point. I had 14 bug bites all over my body and they were covering them up with makeup, it was so funny.”
In the comedy-drama, Shamoun plays Billie, the daughter Justin (played by Jordan Gavaris) gave up for adoption. He tries to reconnect with her after he returns home to the family cottage, now occupied by Justin’s step-sister Maisy-May (Stiles).
For Shamoun, portraying Billie’s relationship with her birth father and how it changes over time was her favorite aspect of the role. “For the first few episodes, she’s really reluctant and they have this scoring, going back and forth, and she’s kind of resentful. And then by the end of it, their relationship totally turns into something else and they become best friends and they realize how similar they are. They get really, really close and I don’t think she could imagine her life without him. That was the most fun — showing the arc of Billie and Justin and getting to play with that.”
The Lake was recently renewed for season 2, and fans can see Shamoun in other projects, including the CW’s All American. As her career starts to heat up, she’s doing her best to take time to pause and appreciate the journey.
“Everything just moves so fast. I’m just so busy and there’s so much going on all the time that I don’t take as much time to stop and congratulate myself or appreciate my inner child as I should,” Shamoun says. “13-year-old Madison would die if she knew that adult Madison was on the CW. She used to watch The Vampire Diaries and Smallville with her parents and be like, ‘I want to do that one day.’ And I’m in All American on the CW. I didn’t really take any time to kind of just stop and appreciate that until the episodes came out. So months later I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I did that. And 13-year-old Madison would be so proud.'”
As for what’s next, there’s no genre or role that doesn’t interest her. “I just want to do everything. I want to do voiceover for Disney Pixar movie. I want to be the lead of a Marvel or DC superhero movie. I want do Indie horrors and I want to do drama. There isn’t anything that I’m not looking forward to doing. I want to just do it all.”
