“And so I was learning all this stuff and healing and finally looking into it a bit more, and it just occurred to me, well, if we’re all struggling or we know someone or we will know someone, why are we still afraid to talk about it?”
I had the pleasure of talking with Kelly O’Malley, an actress, writer, and producer who understands how far a single life can reach beyond the people closest to it. Several months after her father died by suicide, she visited a bank near his home. The teller recognized her last name and asked about him. “Where is he? I haven’t seen him in a while.” O’Malley had to explain what had happened. Months later, another person called, having only just learned of his death. These encounters stayed with her. They revealed something both painful and strangely beautiful about the connections people leave behind, and how difficult it can be to speak openly when those connections are broken.
That tension sits at the center of O’Malley’s work. She founded A Light in Dark Places, a nonprofit that uses theater to encourage conversations about suicide prevention and mental health. Now, with WAKE, her first feature film, she has brought those concerns into a dark comedy about semi-estranged siblings reunited by their father’s death. The film finds humor in the very circumstances that people often struggle to discuss. For O’Malley, who has spent years confronting the silence surrounding suicide, the question remains disarmingly simple: “Why are we still afraid to talk about it?”
Her route to filmmaking was hardly predetermined. Growing up in Frisco, Texas, with three younger sisters, she sang, played piano, competed in horseback riding, and organized elaborate performances for neighborhood children. At seven, she staged Spice Girls concerts that could stretch into two-and-a-half-hour lip-sync extravaganzas. Participation was apparently competitive. “I was very selective,” she remembers of recruiting her friends. Her parents invited audiences, and O’Malley suspects the adults needed some encouragement to sit through the entire show.
Creativity was encouraged at home, but a career in the arts was another matter. Her father worked in construction, continuing a family business with roots stretching back more than a century in Chicago. At Southern Methodist University, O’Malley eventually chose to study film and television alongside religious studies, drawn to questions about faith, culture, and the different ways people make sense of their lives.
Her father’s death interrupted her education and changed her direction. After taking time away from school, she discovered acting, eventually moving to Los Angeles to study at the Stella Adler Academy of Acting & Theater. She initially imagined that leaving Texas might allow her to begin again, somewhere she was no longer so closely associated with her family’s loss. Instead, acting classes, particularly their emphasis on movement, voice, and physical awareness, brought her into closer contact with feelings she had tried to contain. She had imposed deadlines on her own mourning, as though six months or a year ought to be enough.
Theater eventually became a way to bring those private experiences into public conversation. Through A Light in Dark Places, O’Malley began presenting short plays, working with other organizations to develop responsible messaging around suicide prevention. She remembers trembling during the first production, confronting the vulnerability of openly acknowledging her father’s death. The experience also introduced a new responsibility: other people began sharing their stories with her, requiring her to recognize the boundaries between helping others and protecting her own emotional well-being.
WAKE, co-written with director Devon Michaels, extends that exploration into a more complicated fictional family. O’Malley drew from her memories of her father’s death, particularly the disorder, uncomfortable remarks, conflicting needs, and unexpected moments of humor surrounding the funeral. But the film is deliberately fictionalized. She gave herself a brother she never had, reshaped family relationships, and created characters from combinations of people she knew. “I took what I knew and then I put it in a bowl and mixed it up,” she explains.
Some inventions carry particular emotional weight. Having missed the opportunity for a meaningful goodbye with her father, O’Malley rewrote the film’s ending to explore one. Other characters became acknowledgments of people whose kindness remained with her, including a woman who helped her family pack up their home after the loss. The film’s ensemble includes Cole Sprouse, Penelope Ann Miller, Chris Parnell, and Sasheer Zamata. Securing the early commitments of Sprouse and Parnell helped attract other performers to a modestly budgeted project built around an uncomfortable subject.
O’Malley plays Rose, a protective, sharp-tongued sister whose attempts to hold everything together sometimes make matters worse. She recognizes aspects of herself in the character, although she considers Rose less empathetic. Another character, the controlling Aunt Sheila, reflects a more mischievous kind of self-examination. “Sheila is me without therapy,” O’Malley says. Her real aunts, she quickly clarifies, are considerably kinder. Beneath the jokes is a difficult realization about bereavement: people can hurt one another while sincerely believing they are doing their best.
That willingness to allow contradictory truths into the same room distinguishes O’Malley’s approach. Her Catholic upbringing and religious studies background also inform the film’s treatment of faith, where harsh judgments about suicide coexist with a compassionate priest. She is interested in the distance between religious ideals and the ways people sometimes apply them to one another.
Away from production, O’Malley describes a quieter discipline: walking, watching birds at her feeder, and protecting a weekly day of rest. She has come to appreciate the Sabbath principle that work should emerge from rest rather than rest being whatever remains after work. It is a revealing counterweight to someone who has spent years turning an intensely personal loss into public creative work.
O’Malley cannot resolve the discomfort surrounding grief through a single film or theatrical production, and she does not pretend otherwise. What she can do is make space for people to encounter it, sometimes through tenderness, sometimes through a painfully familiar family argument, and sometimes through laughter. Her conversation offers a closer look at the personal history behind WAKE, the complicated relationship between creativity and healing, and what happens when an artist decides that difficult stories deserve to be told.
Yitzi Weiner: Kelly O’Malley. So nice to meet you. Before we dive in deep and talk about your amazing work, our readers would love to learn about Kelly O’Malley’s personal origin story. Can you share with us the story of your childhood, of how you grew up, and particularly the seeds and the genesis of all the amazing creativity that has come since then?
Kelly O’Malley: Wow. Yes. I’m from Frisco, Texas, which is a suburb outside of Dallas. We moved there when I was five, and I have three sisters. I grew up singing and playing piano and riding horses. I used to compete, and we were a very close family. My dad’s family would come and visit us all the time, and my mom’s family lived in the Metroplex. And so growing up with my cousins who were older than me and feeling cool around them, and then being the oldest of my siblings, I don’t know, it was really fun. There was just a lot of play growing up, like a lot of make-believe, and I did Spice Girls concerts. I got all my friends, not all, I was very selective.
We had to learn the concerts, and my parents would invite their friends over, and I’m sure they actually bribed them with alcohol, but I was seven and I would perform a two-and-a-half-hour lip sync. So that was the kind of stuff I got up to, and I didn’t really know, I guess, where I wanted to land. I grew up where my dad was in construction, and the company he had was from our family. He started his Texas branch, but it’s been in Chicago for over 100 years. And so he grew up with like, “Oh, business, and you’re going to run the business, you’re going to get into construction because everyone in the family’s done that.” So I never really was presented art as a feasible career path, even though it was very much encouraged as a hobby. And so then when I went to college, I went to SMU, so I didn’t go too far from home.
It took me some time to find my major. I ended up double majoring in film and television, and then my second major is religious studies, because I love challenging my own faith and I love learning about different cultures, studying culture and history through the lens of religion. I think it’s really beautiful and fun.
And so somewhere along the way, well, my dad died, and when he died, I took some time off school to settle everything. I don’t know, I had some weird epiphany that like, oh yeah, actors are real people. So, I took a class and then I loved it and I kept going, and left home and came out to LA and studied for, I think, two and a half, three years at the Stella Adler Academy of Acting & Theater on Hollywood and Highland, and that’s how I ended up here. I feel like I’m monologuing. Okay,
Then I started a nonprofit. My dad died by suicide. I didn’t say that earlier. Yeah, that was big. And my parents had been divorced. My mom has, off and on, had her struggles, and as you get older you see a little bit more perspective maybe, but we were all with my dad. He had custody of us, and so it was a lot.
And so when I came out here and I was studying acting, I think a piece of me was thinking like, oh, I’ll leave the Dallas area and I’ll just start over. I’ll be this girl, like I’m not connected to this loss. My dad was well-loved in the city we grew up in. So it was hard being there for me. His company built a lot of the roads, and I was living 15 minutes from the house he had built that we had to sell, and it was just too much for me.
And so, yeah, living out here, I thought I was going to start over, but you can’t really run from grief and trauma. So, that was a great lesson. And acting is awesome because, and I think everyone should take a beginning acting class, because we did a lot of movement and voice work just getting into your body. And that’s when I learned and really had to challenge a lot of the anxiety and grief I had been holding. It’s like I let myself grieve and I put a cap on it. I remember being like, “Oh no, it’s been six months. Well, now it’s been a year. This is too much. You have to go over here now.” And it was like I was just creating problems for myself.
Through the few years there, I just had this idea of, well, I think it’s, I might follow up on this stat, but I want to say someone dies by suicide every 40 seconds in the world or something. Something pretty big or pretty shocking, and that’s reported. And then there’s, I think, four attempts for every completed suicide, and each one impacts like a hundred people, they say. And when I learned that, that really resonated with me because I remember going to the bank by my dad’s home like three or four months after he passed, and the teller saw my last name and she was like, “Oh my gosh, are you related to John? Where is he? I haven’t seen him in a while.” And that’s how she found out. And I got a call from someone that he had sponsored in an Ironman like eight months after the fact telling me he had finally heard the news.
And so, it’s just interesting how much our lives, it’s actually really beautiful how much our lives, and I know that’s not just limited to suicide, but just how much our lives really impact and ripple around. I think it’s really cool. And so I was learning all this stuff and healing and finally looking into it a bit more, and it just occurred to me, well, if we’re all struggling or we know someone or we will know someone, why are we still afraid to talk about it?
And I had experienced a lot of that, people in general being nervous around me once they found out that he died by suicide and not another way. So I started a nonprofit where I used theater to raise suicide prevention awareness. Yeah, we do short plays. I work with different foundations to make sure our messaging is safe and on point. And so I started doing that. It’s called A Light in Dark Places. And that was really healing. And now I’m here.
Yitzi Weiner: So beautiful. And Kelly, you’re an amazing storyteller and I’m grateful for your trust in sharing the story with me. So you probably have some great stories from your career. Can you share with our readers one or two stories that most stand out in your mind?
Kelly O’Malley: Yes, that feels like a hard question. One or two. Well, I think getting to do Wake has been incredibly humbling, and I feel like I’m living a bit of a dream, that people care.
And I think getting those first early yeses, I don’t know that this is like a cool story, but getting those first early yeses from Cole and Chris were huge. Like they really changed the trajectory of who else we were able to bring in and the quality in the ensemble. It opened a lot of doors for us, and it’s amazing that so many talented people with these long careers like Penelope, like Willow, that they said yes to this small-budget movie because they liked the script, they liked the messaging behind it, and they found it important. And I felt that was really validating because so often it’s hard to get people to want to engage with the topic. They get uncomfortable, and so I don’t know that that’s a good story, but that was a really cool thing. Yeah.
Yitzi Weiner: That’s great. There’s a saying that sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Do you have a story about a funny mistake that you made when you were first starting acting and the lesson that you took away from it?
Kelly O’Malley: Oh my god. Let me see if I can put this one to words properly. I think I’ve learned there’s a lot of pressure to perform and get out of your head, and I think I just learned to be nice to myself and kinder to myself.
I don’t know, I’m just having this one memory of how I took an acting note very literally. I was doing a scene and I was juggling a lot of items, and the teacher shouted at me to “probe” my scene partner, and she meant vocally, like with an action. And I was just so nervous and anxious and I didn’t slow down, and I remember I was like a baby giraffe walking for the first time because I took it literally, like I was trying to find a way to poke this guy.
And it was really embarrassing, and then I laughed at myself. And that’s important, laughing at yourself. Don’t take yourself so seriously, especially in the rehearsal process, like you’re just finding stuff out.
Yitzi Weiner: It’s great. It’s a great story. There’s a related idea that no is not rejection, but redirection. Do you have a story like that where you got a no to an opportunity, but that led to an even better opportunity?
Kelly O’Malley: I don’t have a specific one, but I do believe, and through my nonprofit I got to really experience this outside of the acting process because I had a cause to be behind: every no is just getting to the next yes. And it’s not personal. You don’t want the nos to be the yeses if they weren’t meant to be, because you’re not going to get the work or you’re not going to be able to deliver the level of work that you either want to receive or that you want to give.
So I kind of love a no because at least it’s clarity, and then you pivot to the next thing. It’s the “maybes” that are hard.
Yitzi Weiner: What’s been the most challenging project or role you’ve taken on so far?
Kelly O’Malley: I mean, I think I want to say it’s producing Wake and finishing it. But part of me feels like it might have been the very first A Light in Dark Places, because it was the first time I was putting myself forward as standing in that spotlight, because it wasn’t about me, but just standing in this space or taking on standing in the grief of it, I guess, or being open about it and saying like, “Yeah, I lost my dad and I’d like to do this show and we’ll talk about it.”
And I think moving into that space and having people want to share their stories with me and learning what I’m comfortable with, where my lines are, I think that primed me for everything I’m at now. And that first one was very challenging, and I think it taught me I can do things. I can make things happen. And when I have people around me that I trust and who care for me and who care for the storytelling and the art form, a lot can happen. And I think that first time, I remember just shaking and it was so vulnerable. And Wake is very vulnerable in a different way because it’s on a bigger scale. But I think that first one taught me I can survive the bigger scale, if that makes sense.
Yitzi Weiner: So let’s talk about Wake. So is this your first movie you’ve ever written?
Kelly O’Malley: It’s my first feature film. Yeah. I’ve done two shorts,
It’s unbelievable. Like I can’t imagine that, just like first shot. That’s unbelievable. So, how much of this is autobiographical?
Kelly O’Malley: It’s very loose. I think a lot of the themes and the feelings and the feeling of the day are. I think some characters might be little love letters to people in my life, specifically Rachel, played by Sasha Compère, and Uncle Brian, played by Chris Parnell. I think they’re love letters, too.
Rachel is, we had someone working with us in the house, and her and I went on to pack up the house together and we went through it together, and she could have jumped ship and she didn’t. She stayed with us till it was done instead of just jumping to find the next job. And that always really stuck with me. And there have been other women in my life like that, where when you’re young, you don’t realize they’re hired, right? They just become part of your day-to-day. And my bonds with those women have been stronger and carried through past that. And I kind of wanted to honor that and explore their place.
And then with the uncle character, I think he’s a bit of my dad and my uncles and a few friends of my dad’s. I think he’s mixed in there. And so basically, it’s like I took what I knew and then I put it in a bowl and mixed it up, and I made things more specific and threw in archetypes. I’m one of four, and I don’t have a brother, but I always wanted a brother. So, I gave myself a brother. I did not get to really say goodbye to my dad in a meaningful way for me, and that caused me problems down the line. And so I rewrote the ending so we could do that.
And yeah, I think writing it with the 10-plus years perspective, I keep saying 10-plus because I’m in denial that it’s been 15 years and I don’t want to say it, but it was just 15 years a week ago. So yeah.
And I think it is in essence, but my aunts are much kinder than Sheila, although I love Sheila. I think Sheila is me without therapy. And I love that her and Rose are both these little control freaks trying to come at it. Like I wanted that female foil for Rose, so we elevated that role up. And Penelope has this beautiful balance of making sure she’s not a villain. Like she really just thinks she’s doing the best thing. And that’s important because that’s what I really think I learned: all of us probably hurt each other throughout that time, but we were all doing the best we could in these unimaginable circumstances that had never happened.
And the older I get, the younger I realize people in my life were. And I’ll say some of the stuff the wake attendees say, that stuff is like almost verbatim. Yeah, it just was maybe at the house the day of instead of at the actual funeral home. But that stuff’s pretty spot-on. Yeah.
Yitzi Weiner: I’ll tell you a secret. I’ve actually never been at a wake before.
Kelly O’Malley: Neither had Devon, our director, until a few years back. Yeah. And my experience is that the first deaths that I experienced were all in the Catholic side of the family. And so there was the wake, then there’s the funeral. And it wasn’t until my grandpa on my mom’s side passed that I remember being like, “Okay, so I have to get on a plane tomorrow. Like, what’s the thing?” And they’re like, “We’re going to take a month. We’re going to be okay. We’re going to do a memorial. There’s no rush.” I was like, “What do you mean?” I’m so used to everybody just rushing, so it’s a Methodist side, I think.
But yeah, wakes are interesting. They’re very long. They can be very beautiful. I think the idea is it’s a vigil over the body, but they can also just be exhausting.
Yitzi Weiner: Did your theological training come into play when you wrote it?
Kelly O’Malley: Not directly. Not directly. I realize though that when you’re writing, I don’t think you always know what you’re writing thematically. And I know I have the aunt talking about the grandma, and both of them talking about how, “I hope he’s not in hell,” because we got a lot of that as Catholics. But the priest is there, and the priest actually shows up and he’s kind, and I wanted to explore that because my experience is a lot of the congregants for me growing up and through my journeys, they sometimes take things very harsh and literal and they forget that it’s real people.
And my Hebrew Bible teacher at SMU, I loved him, he would start every class with a joke because he said, “If you can’t find humor in religion, it’s not healthy.” Like you got to have this shared humor, you got to be able to laugh at it a bit. And it reminds me of Father Duesman growing up, who would come over and he was so fun. This one time in particular, we had this St. Patrick’s Day party and it was during Lent and it fell on a Friday. So the Catholics aren’t supposed to eat meat, and my mom had catered it with fajitas and shrimp for the Catholics. And Father Duesman comes over and he goes, “Ah, I’m going to give a special dispensation because we can’t let all the Protestants have all the good meat.” Like, what are we doing? And that really stuck with me. So, yeah, I think having them vocalize these beliefs, but then having the actual priest show up and be kind and be gentle, that was really important to me.
Yitzi Weiner: How is your personal character, Kelly, similar to the character you play, Rose? How are you similar and how are you different?
Kelly O’Malley: I think in real life I’m probably a mix between Cassie and Rose. Rose gets to say the things that I don’t get to say, although I have said some of those things, not in the script, but I can be a little harsh or direct, and that’s not kind. And so I’ve been working on that, reflecting on that, and getting to play Rose is really freeing actually, getting to just say the stuff. But she doesn’t have as much empathy as I have for the others. Like she’s very focused. And I think that’s all she can be in that moment. It’s a really hard moment to be in, but yeah, I think she’s definitely a little sharper than me, a little consistently sharper than me.
But she also cares about her siblings. And I think that plays for me as well, like wanting to feel protective. And sometimes when you’re the protector, you overprotect or you do it in a way that’s detrimental or maybe hurts the other people even though you think you’re doing something good. So kind of looking at that, I think she gets to be quippier than me. She gets to be snarkier than me. It’s fun. I’ve had my moments, but she consistently gets to be that, and that was fun to explore.
But it’s hard when you’re an actor. I’m saying this stuff and I look over and I’m in the scene and there’s Chris Parnell, Uncle Brian, looking at me and he’s disappointed, and you have to stay in character, but the little actor flag in the back of my head’s going, oh no, I’m sorry. I don’t want to be in trouble. I didn’t mean it. So, it was fun getting to just kind of lean into that as an experiment.
Yitzi Weiner: Did you find the experience of writing and creating the film cathartic or healing, or did you find maybe it opened up old wounds again and kind of picked at a scab?
Kelly O’Malley: I think it was both. It was nice because I had my writing partner, Devon. So, I came up with most of the characters and I came up with like, this is the first act, this is the second act, and then we’re going to end in a heist. The first image I had was the water over the head. And that’s based on me dunking my head in a pool on the day of, and wondering what that would have been like had I done it there instead with an audience, because it was so logical.
So then I brought it to Devon, who has so much more writing experience than me. For me, this is my first script. And we worked on it together. And so, it was cathartic in some ways. And then there were times with some of the harder scenes that were harder for me because I’d have to go into it, which was of value because I could tell him, “No, no, no. It’s this. This is the feeling.” And some of those harder scenes, I would talk them out and walk them out for him, and then he would translate and come up with these beautiful words to put, or take little phrases from me and be able to expand on them because they were really hard to go into.
And then we both were working on the drafts and so it starts to blur together, but the initial part was really hard, I think. But overall it was cathartic, and just having people respond to it is really cathartic. Getting to say goodbye in a different way, getting to celebrate or explore an experience, and celebrate family being chaotic and needing to connect and the seeds of coming together, I think overall was really cathartic more than harmful.
Yitzi Weiner: It’s great. Amazing. What message do you hope society can take from the motifs of the film?
Kelly O’Malley: Well, we’re all going to experience grief, and as hard as it is, we have to face the pain of it. But we don’t have to be alone in it. And I think if we can slow down and look at our own needs and take care of those, then we can meet each other’s needs and really move forward and heal together.
Yitzi Weiner: That’s great. Beautiful. This is our signature question. Kelly, you’ve been blessed with a lot of success and you must have learned a lot from your experience. Can you share five things that you’ve learned over the years, maybe sometimes the hard way, that someone starting out today can really benefit from?
Kelly O’Malley: Yeah.
- First, surround yourself with people who know more than you and be willing to learn from them.
- Second, don’t be afraid to delegate. I’ve learned that the hard way many times.
- Third, it’s better to just put yourself out there and try something than to wonder if you could have done something.
- Fourth, you don’t know what impact your story is having on people. Like you don’t know. So even if you’re telling something that helps one person, that’s a good thing.
- And fifth, not everything’s going to be for everybody, so it’s fine. Just like what you’re doing.
Yitzi Weiner: Okay. Amazing. Can you share some of the self-care routines that you do to help your body, mind, and heart to thrive?
Kelly O’Malley: Time in nature is a big one. I like to watch birds. I’m not like an official bird-watcher yet, but I have a feeder and I like to watch them.
Walking, just any kind of physical movement. When I have days where I can’t get out of bed, because it happens, I just tell myself, “Well, just go for a 10-minute walk. And if you still feel like you can’t do it, fine.” Most of the time, the 10-minute walk turns into a 30-minute walk, and then I feel better, and then I call a person, and that’s really good.
I love a face mask and a bath. And I think guarding my time, making sure to guard your time so that you do have time for yourself and you don’t get so caught up in the appearances and in the “have-tos” because you have to have time.
It reminds me, I really love the Sabbath and this idea that your work should come from your rest instead of your rest coming from your work. And I think that’s really important, whatever that means to somebody, just take a day and guard that time and you’ll feel renewed.
Yitzi Weiner: That’s amazing. Do you keep the Sabbath?
Kelly O’Malley: Yeah, I do. I pick one day. Not every day of the week, I pick one day a week, though. And I make sure I guard it. I don’t work on anything. There’s been a few in a busy season where I’m like, “Okay, it’s a half day.” Even if it’s something you’re specifically carving out, I prefer to take the full day, and it’s a fight sometimes, but it’s important in the long run, I think.
Yitzi Weiner: This is our final aspirational question. Kelly O’Malley, because of your great work and the platform that you’ve built and the organization that you lead, you’re honestly a person of enormous influence. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? Because you never know what your idea can inspire.
Kelly O’Malley: Well, if I could inspire an idea or a movement that would help people, I think I want to continue pushing on for mental health and suicide prevention awareness: that there’s no shame in struggling, and that when we build community and we listen to each other, there’s a lot of connection and common ground we can find. And that it’s really profoundly important that we start treating mental health like actual health, and that we take away the lens of shame around it because there shouldn’t be any. We’ve been conditioned that way, and it’s led to a lot of isolation for people and it furthers divides, and I think that would be it. Yeah.
Yitzi Weiner: Kelly, how can our readers watch the film? How can our readers watch any of your work? How can our readers support you and your organization in any possible way?
Kelly O’Malley: Well, the film is doing the festival circuit right now. So, it’ll be in St. Louis on November 13th, and this isn’t announced yet, so I don’t know when this will go out, but it’ll be in New York on December 4th at a mental health awareness event. So we’re working on distribution. They can follow us on @wakefilmproject on Instagram for those updates, and they can follow me as well, Kelly O’Malley, @kellomalley, because I post there, too.
And then my nonprofit is A Light in Dark Places. So I have a short film up on the website there that’s alightindarkplaces.org if they’re interested in.
And there’s an Instagram for that as well, @alightindarkplaces.
Yitzi Weiner: Kelly, it’s been an honor to meet you, truly. I wish you continued success and good health and blessings, and I’d love to do this again next year.
Kelly O’Malley: Me, too. This was so awesome to talk to you. Thank you.
Yitzi Weiner: My pleasure. You’re doing great work and I’m so impressed with what you’ve done.
Kelly O’Malley: Thank you.
Kelly O’Malley on Why We’re Still Afraid to Talk About Suicide was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.