Emily Rebecca Swallow is a celebrated American actress who is most well-known for her role as The Armorer in the popular Star Wars series The Mandalorian.
EMILY SWALLOW BIOGRAPHY: AGE, EARLY LIFE, FAMILY, EDUCATION
Emily Swallow was born on December 18, 1979 (Swallow: Age 43) in Washington, D.C. She was raised in Sterling Virginia, as well as Jacksonville, Florida.
While attending Stanton College Preparatory School in Jacksonville, Swallow started acting in numerous amateur, college and professional theater productions. She wound up graduating from the University of Virginia in 2001 with a Bachelor of Arts in Middle Eastern Studies, where an acting teacher took note of her incredible talent and passion for singing and acting and encouraged her to pursue it further. She proceeded to study in order to get an MFA in acting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
EMILY SWALLOW BIOGRAPHY: CAREER
While Swallow is best known for her appearance in the hit Disney+ Star Wars series The Mandalorian, she is also very well-known for portraying Amara in the horror series Supernatural, Dr. Michelle Robidaux in the drama television series Monday Mornings, and for playing FBI Agent Kim Fischer on CBS’s hit mystery series The Mentalist.
In an exclusive interview with uInterview, Swallow revealed her first acting experience, along with her first experience acting that made her decide she wanted to pursue it as a profession.
“Well, my first acting experience ever wasn’t the one that made me decide I wanted to become an actor professionally,” Swallow stated. “But my first acting experience ever that I remember was playing, oh my gosh, it was the best, because I was playing a caterpillar that turned into a butterfly in the school play. And my mom made me a costume. So, I had a black leotard and some butterfly wings that she made, but then I also had a caterpillar costume that I got inside, and the caterpillar costume opened up and then I was a butterfly. I mean, it was spectacular,” Swallow recalled. “My mom’s an amazing seamstress and she would make all of my Halloween costumes. She made me so many incredible costumes. I really got spoiled.”
“Since that was such a good answer,” Erik Meers, founder of uInterview chuckled. “You’re going to also tell me what was the acting role that made you decide you wanted to do it professionally.”
“There wasn’t one moment that made me go, ‘oh I want to be an actor for the rest of my life,'” Swallow confessed. “It was a few little things here and there when I was in college, because I didn’t major in acting in college, but I was spending most of my time in the drama department while I was majoring in something else. And I guess there was this one show, there’s a show that I did called The Skin of Our Teeth. It’s a Thornton Wilder play. It’s a three act show and it’s so ridiculous and so challenging, and I was playing the lead character and it was just killing me because it was, it’s a really good play, but I was having so much trouble with it. And I realized like I did not have the tools in my little, you know, actors toolbox to be able to do this just based on instinct.
“I knew if I was going to go any further with acting, I needed more training,” Swallow remarked. “And I said, ‘okay, well if I’m going to do more training, I guess that means I want to do this as a career. That seems like a really big commitment.’ So, it was sort of like being totally, feeling sort of conquered by this play to the extent, and I will tell you one thing that happened during this play. So, the character Sabina, who I was playing, she talks to the audience. And I remember, and it’s a very long play. It’s like three-hours long, and I remember one night when I was talking to the audience at the end of the show, and I say, ‘So now our play is done.’ And somebody in the audience goes, ‘Thank goodness.’ And that let me know that perhaps we were not as successful as we would have liked to be with the presentation of this particular production. So, I knew that there was more that I wanted to learn about being an actor. And so that was part of what made me decide to go to grad school and to equip myself with more tools, and since I was going to make that commitment, I might as well go out and try to do it for a living and make some money at it.”
EMILY SWALLOW BIOGRAPHY: PERSONAL LIFE
Swallow has been married to American stage actor Chad Kimball since August 2018. They do not have any children, but are the owners of two lovable dogs. One is a frenchton and the other a pug-bull mix.
