Shawnee Smith (born 1969) is an American actress and musician best known as Amanda Young, Jigsaw’s survivor turned apprentice in the Saw franchise.
Quick Specs
| Born | Shawnee Rebecca Smith, July 3, 1969, Orangeburg, South Carolina; raised in Los Angeles |
| Horror | Meg Penny in The Blob (1988); Amanda Young in Saw (2004), Saw II (2005), Saw III (2006), Saw VI (2009) and Saw X (2023); The Grudge 3 (2009) |
| TV | Linda in Becker (1998-2004); Jennifer Goodson in Anger Management (2012-2014); host of VH1’s Scream Queens (2008) |
| Music | fronted Fydolla Ho; one half of Smith and Pyle |
| Honors | Young Artist Award nomination for The Blob |
| Years active | 1982-present |
Who She Is
Shawnee Smith was born in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and moved to California with her family in early childhood. She grew up in Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley and graduated from North Hollywood High in 1987. Her childhood was spent “pounding the pavement,” as she put it. Her mother would pick her up after school with a change of clothes and a hairbrush in the car and drive her to auditions for commercials, film and dance. “It’s a numbers game,” she said. Her first TV job was a McDonald’s commercial.
At 15 she was cast in a Los Angeles stage production of To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday. Her co-star Richard Dreyfuss noticed her in rehearsals and suggested she be given a lead. She won a critics’ award for the part.
The Work, and What She Did in It
Her feature debut came at about 11, as one of the dancing orphans in John Huston’s Annie (1982). Small parts followed in Iron Eagle (1986) and Summer School (1987), where she played Rhonda, the pregnant student in Mark Harmon’s remedial class.
The Blob (1988): her first starring role. In Chuck Russell’s remake of the 1958 film she plays Meg Penny, a cheerleader who becomes the resourceful co-lead alongside Kevin Dillon. Getting the part was its own action scene. Russell’s audition was brutal, and she acted out a big set piece in his office with the couch standing in for a truck. “I fought for that role,” she said. It earned her a Young Artist Award nomination. She then helped John Candy’s detective find her kidnapped sister in Who’s Harry Crumb? (1989) and played May Cornell in Michael Cimino’s Desperate Hours (1990).
In the early 1990s she took a three-year break. She had outgrown teenage roles, and work was hard to find. Her return included two Stephen King adaptations. In the 1994 miniseries The Stand she played Julie Lawry, the unhinged survivor who crosses paths with Nick Andros and Tom Cullen and later turns up in Flagg’s Las Vegas. She was a waitress in King’s 1997 The Shining miniseries. She also guested on The X-Files, had a cameo as a biker girl in Leaving Las Vegas (1995), and sang a jazz number, “I Fear,” as Sandra Grant in the Wes Craven Presents remake of Carnival of Souls (1998).
Then came six years of sitcom. On Becker (CBS, 1998-2004) she played Linda, the cheerful, scatterbrained aide in Ted Danson’s medical office, and she was in the main cast for the show’s entire 129-episode run.
Saw (2004): she said no at first. Then the producers showed her Leigh Whannell’s proof-of-concept short, with Whannell in the jaw trap, and she changed her mind on the spot. James Wan had been “a fan of mine from when he was young,” she said, so they asked for her. Amanda Young is a drug addict and, at that point, the only known survivor of a Jigsaw game. She escaped the reverse bear trap, a hinged device locked on her head that would rip her jaws apart when the timer ran out, by cutting the key out of her cellmate’s stomach. The film was shot in 18 days on about a million dollars. Smith shot all of her scenes in one day, with the flu and a 102-degree fever, and said she “put it all to use in the scene.” The trap was “super heavy and crudely made,” and it was loose on her head. “I literally held that thing with my teeth,” she said. “Luckily, I have jaws of steel.” Her face in that trap became the image that sold the film.
Saw II (2005): Amanda turns up as another victim in the nerve-gas house and gets thrown into a pit of syringes to fish out a key. Smith dreaded the scene, but reasoned that “all I had to do was just get in it and look for the key and it would take care of itself.” The ending reveals that Amanda has become Jigsaw’s protege. Smith was four months pregnant during the shoot and kept it quiet. She pushed for the short hair, the loose hospital clothes and the wrist coverings partly to give herself “wiggle room.” Those choices became Amanda’s look for the rest of the series.
Saw III (2006): now John Kramer’s caregiver and accomplice, Amanda kidnaps Dr. Lynn Denlon and locks a shotgun collar on her. The collar is wired to John’s heart monitor and fires if he flatlines, so Lynn has to operate on his brain to keep him alive. We learn Amanda has been rigging her own traps so nobody can escape, because she no longer believes people can change. She refuses to free Lynn, shoots her and is shot by Lynn’s husband. As she dies, John tells her the test was really hers, and she failed it. “Saw III to me was a love story,” Smith said, about “the relationship between John and Amanda.” Her brutal fight with Donnie Wahlberg’s detective was the first thing she shot on the film. Wahlberg helped stage it and taught her to fight at half speed. Playing a woman “like 5’3, a hundred pounds” who has to overpower a grown adult, she put on John’s hoodie and carried groceries. “It gave the effect of skulking,” she said.
Saw IV and Saw V used archive footage of her. Saw VI (2009) brought her back for newly filmed flashbacks filling in Amanda’s history with John and with Detective Hoffman. In Saw X (2023), set about three weeks after the first film, she returned in full. Amanda, in the pig mask, kidnaps the fake cancer-cure scammers who conned John in Mexico. Director Kevin Greutert mirrored her with Gabriela, a fellow addict, so that Amanda’s sympathy for her becomes “the seed of her possibly doubting John Kramer’s philosophy.” The film bridges the “sad junky” of Saw and the rebel of Saw III. Amanda is not in the mid-credits scene.
Around the Saw films she kept a steady horror schedule. She starred in and executive-produced FEARnet’s six-webisode 30 Days of Night: Dust to Dust (2008), her producing debut. She hosted and mentored the first season of VH1’s Scream Queens (2008), whose winner got a role in Saw VI. She played Dr. Francine Sullivan, a psychiatrist killed by the curse she investigates, in The Grudge 3 (2009). From 2012 to 2014 she played Charlie Sheen’s character’s ex-wife in FX’s Anger Management. More recently she starred in and produced the slasher Bloodline Killer (2024).
Music is a real second career. In the early 2000s she fronted the punk-metal band Fydolla Ho, co-founded with bassist Robert Trujillo, then of Suicidal Tendencies. Their album Untied came out in December 2001. With actress Missi Pyle she formed the desert-rock duo Smith and Pyle, whose album It’s OK to Be Happy (2008) was produced by Chris Goss at Rancho de la Luna in Joshua Tree, with a guest spot from Jerry Cantrell. She sang on Hydrovibe’s “Killer Inside” for the Saw III soundtrack.
Cool Verified Facts
- The feature film’s bear trap was rebuilt in aluminum because the solid-steel original from the short was too heavy. Even so, it was almost too much for her while she was sick.
- In 2019 she recorded a cover of “Abracadabra” with Eagles of Death Metal because Jesse Hughes overheard her singing it in a studio bathroom.
- She once called herself a “scaredy-cat” about horror and found the Saw films hard to watch. By 2025 she was calling the genre “a really interesting reflection on humanity.”
- The press took to calling her a scream queen, and in 2008 VH1 built a whole show around her with that title.
Signatures, Habits and Behind the Scenes
- Her rule for trap scenes: “There’s only one way to do a Saw movie, and that’s balls to the wall.”
- She never played Amanda as a simple apprentice. She saw the bond as “a true friendship and a real partnership.” When Whannell pitched Amanda as a supervillain, she pushed back: “I’m not that actress. I have to approach a character from the inside out.”
- She and Tobin Bell rehearsed Saw III by walking the streets of Toronto together, sharing meals and arguing philosophy, because “that’s what John and Amanda did.”
- She is a prankster. During their last serious scene together, she spent half an hour trying to set off a whoopee cushion under Bell. It never went off, and he finally asked, “Shawnee, where are you?” She also hid boiled eggs in director Darren Lynn Bousman’s chair bag for two days.
- She has said family came before music. “Between being a mom, and working, and growing another baby, I have not had time to give attention to music for a while,” she said in 2005.
- Her take on it all: “I just feel incredibly lucky to be a part of film history. I mean, it’s like winning the lottery.”
Why She Matters
The filmmakers say Amanda holds Saw together. Writer Marcus Dunstan called her “a tremendous viable, emotional thread throughout the narratives.” Co-writer Patrick Melton said they couldn’t have told the Hoffman and Kramer story without her. The franchise’s defining image isn’t Jigsaw. It is Amanda in the trap, the victim who believed the game saved her, and through her the audience steps into Jigsaw’s philosophy. Smith found the tragedy in devotion: a woman at rock bottom who finally had “someone to love and to sacrifice for.” Victim, secret apprentice, failed heir, and finally restored in Saw X, Amanda is the series’ most tragic figure. After years of comedy on Becker, “people just didn’t want to see me for drama,” Smith said. Amanda changed that.