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Cameron Inman has recently landed a breakout role in the supernatural drama ‘Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches’. The show, starring Alexandria Daddario, and based on the bestselling series of the same name, premiered on AMC+ in January this year. It follows Daddario’s character Rowan, a neurosurgeon, who discovers that she is descended from a long line of witches. Rowan finds herself catapulted from the rational world of medicine to the magic of the story. In defiance of the challenges of the acting industry and the stereotype of the 'tortured artist', Inman has followed a similar path. She balances the logic of a career as a dental hygienist with the unpredictable but intensely rewarding world of acting.
Inman plays ‘young Dierdre’, a pregnant and abused girl from a long line of witches. Dierdre is “a misunderstood teenager because her Aunt Carlotta is keeping her [forcibly] in this house and keeping her naive and… unaware of exactly what her powers are.” This scenario that Inman feels “a lot of young women deal with on a daily basis” is part of what drew her to ‘Mayfair Witches’. Initially, Inman points out that her own youth was nothing like this. However, she does draw on her own real-life experiences in her portrayal of Dierdre. ‘I have experienced trauma, so I think it's important for me to pull from those situations and bring it into what I’m doing so it comes across as real and authentic”, she says. Like many young women, Inman has had uncomfortable experiences with men: “I was travelling, and we stopped at a friend’s house. We were drinking, there were older men there, and I [felt] super uncomfortable. Someone did something they shouldn’t have done." Inman was sixteen or seventeen years and chose not to say anything about it at the time. She says: “you’re scared to death, you think it's your fault, and it's really not".
Perhaps Inman feels a personal responsibility to other women who are treated poorly to portray their experiences with authenticity. However, Inman refuses to be defined by her trauma. She finds it very therapeutic to relive it in her acting, but she’s eager to point out that ‘Mayfair Witches’ “is female empowerment. [Almost] everyone I worked with was a female in power, and I just thought that was so amazing because a lot of … the business is male-dominated.” Inman’s acting has been influenced by her personal experiences of sexism, but it doesn’t rely on it. What it does rely on is Inman’s desire to authentically portray the empowerment of women, even if they have been persecuted in the past.
Drawing on negative experiences could easily contribute to the unhealthy mindset of the ‘tortured artist’. However, with the guidance of Antonia DeNardo, Inman’s “rock” and acting mentor/coach since childhood, Inman has ensured that acting is about having “an amazing experience”. Inman started to take acting more seriously aged sixteen when she went with DeNardo to LA for six weeks for pilot season. Even so, the emphasis was on having a good time. Her first role didn’t come until she was twenty, but she notes that people often don’t realise “how hard it is to even get in the room”. Instead of dwelling on the roles she didn’t get, Inman celebrates “the amount of call-backs, director’s meetings, [instances where it was] between me and one other person. That’s an accomplishment in itself”.
Despite these achievements, this immersion in the acting industry took its toll, and Inman eventually decided to take a mental health break from acting. She spent close to three years travelling, learning Spanish while staying with her family in Spain where her father was born. “Immersion is the best way to learn a language”. This immersion is also apparent in Inman’s acting method. She draws on and immerses herself in her character, but she is no longer wholly immersed in the acting industry. Travelling allowed her to soul-search and she realised that “finding a routine that’s balanced” was what she needed. Instead of throwing herself straight back into the full-time whirlwind of auditioning, Inman trained as a dental hygienist. She said: “I’ll still audition, there’s no reason I can’t”, and it was when she was nearly finished with her training that she landed her break-out role on ‘Mayfair Witches’. “I was able to film and finish school”, she says, in testament to the idea that balance is everything.
Finding a balance between happiness and the depth that comes with trauma is something that Inman has definitely achieved. Her repeated use of the word “phenomenal” to describe the support of her acting coach, the direction of ‘Mayfair Witches’, and the performances of the actors that inspire her (Christian Bale, Meryl Streep, Lily James) makes her positivity infectious. She says “It's hard not to fall into that state of depression of, ‘Okay, what's next?’ But that's just how this job goes. I think a lot of people do feel a little bit tortured, you never know when your next job is coming so you just have to be positive and fill your day with other things. You can't just be waiting”. This reflects the way that Inman fills her time outside of acting. Even down to the way that she watches TV, she’s doing it actively, constantly analysing and talking “about each episode in-depth after it, the set, the acting, the costume design, the location, the director, everything”.
Inman’s talent for pulling from her own life experiences without letting them define her makes her one to watch. She’s full of life, and a champion of the issues close to her heart, from ending hunger for women and children to breast cancer and suicide awareness. With a few new things “coming down the pipeline”, Inman is proof that immersion in life is just as, if not more, important than an immersion in the acting industry.
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Connect with Cameron on: Instagram
Watch her show 'Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches' on: AMC+
