Malena Cunningham Anderson flipped this script: She played a retired television news anchor home-bound in Atlanta during the COVID-19 shutdown, settled into blissfully married life with an attorney husband, and shuttling her aging mother to three-days-a-week dialysis treatments and doctors’ appointments.

It was a role of necessity, a caring role, though not a role the longtime real-life anchor at Birmingham’s WVTM 13 wholly relished.

“Two years ago, I was sitting on my back porch,” she shared recently. “I said, ‘God, I can’t take this another day. You’re gonna have to find me something to do. I’m about to go crazy.”

Cunningham walks by faith. She walked away from television news in 2004 and into a successful role as an author, consultant, and business (fitness center) owner in Birmingham. She walked into a role managing communications for Faith Chapel Church, while still handling her varied businesses. She walked away from Birmingham in 2014 for love and a move to Pennsylvania, near her new husband’s law practice and family.

“[He] asked me not to work for a year,” she says. “I thought he was gonna have to put me in an asylum because I had never not worked. That was crazy for me.”

She (they) soon walked back south to be closer to her mother in South Carolina, who was becoming ill and would eventually move in with her daughter and son-in-law in Atlanta.

She walked onto that back porch in that COVID spring of 2022—and prayed out loud. “You have to speak things,” she says, “that be not.”

What Cunningham spoke that day—”… find me something to do…” —was not. Not yet.

Within a week, she received a random email (“…which wasn’t random,” she says) that proved to be, shall we say, the opening credits for a new script, a new real-life storyline. It was from a casting coming looking for folks to work in the background on the set of The First Ladies, a Showtime series with Oscar-winner Viola Davis portraying Michelle Obama.

“I don’t know how they got my email,” Cunningham says. “It wasn’t a whole lot of money, but I said, “Shoot, I’m sending my picture in. Anything to get me out of the house.”

She got the initial background gig and was on the set with iconic long-time actress Michelle Pfeiffer. “I was actually in a scene with her, but it got cut,” Cunningham says. “The very next day, that same casting company texted and said, ‘Can you do background on the set of Cobra Kai? I was like, ‘What the …’?”

Fast forward to 2023; like really fast. In an unusually short span in the fickle and frustrating ecosystem that is Hollywood, Cunningham is a working actress.

This month she appears in five of eight episodes of the upcoming series Judge Me Not, which is slated to premiere Thursday, May 25 (on the ALLBLK streaming service) and is loosely based on the life of creator, writer, and executive producer Judge Lynn Toler (Divorce Court). Cunningham portrays the main character’s mother, making her a lead supporting character.

In Night Nurse, a Lifetime production, Cunningham, 64, also plays the mother of the main character.

I share her age because a) she unabashedly shares it and b) she perceived it as a barrier to acting, even as opportunities began to manifest.

On the Cobra Kai set, she met a young actor who mistook her for an actor on a Tyler Perry project. “I said. ‘No sweetheart I don’t even know what I’m doing. It’s my second day doing background,’” she says with a laugh. “‘I just go where they tell me.”

The actor offered to connect Cunningham with his agent. “Nobody does that,” she says. While on set, Cunningham launched a text. It read: Hey, I’m sitting here with Joseph. He said I need to meet you.

The agent asked for pics; Cunningham sent selfies. What’s your background? the agent responded.

“I said, ‘Well, I’m a retired news anchor.’ She said, ‘Call me tomorrow.’”

A week later, Cunningham signed with the agency—though still with trepidation.

She told the agent: “’I’m old. I’m in my 60s. and I’ve never acted.’ She said, ‘Do you know how many times I get calls from producers and casting directors looking for someone who could play a news anchor who used to be a news anchor? I need you. And look at television. You are the age range of mom, grandma, doctor, lawyer, judge, and teacher.’

“I’d never thought about that.”

Soon after the Cobra Kai gig, she was booked as a, yeah, news anchor on the quirky Hulu film Honk If You Love Jesus, starring Sterling K. Brown (“This is Us”) and popular comedic actress Regina Hall.

“I got paid for two days because when I showed up on set, [they] forgot to shoot my scene,” Cunningham says. “They apologized “profusely” and said they would write a part for me, so ‘Can you come back tomorrow?”

The next day, Cunningham was an employee in a hat store where Hall’s character was looking to make a purchase. “So, I was on set with Regina for like four hours shooting the scene,” says Cunningham. “She was fabulous. You would’ve thought we went to high school together; we got along that well. She told me her journey of how she wanted to be a news anchor but ended up dropping out of school and acting and I said, ‘Well that kind of worked out for you.’”

Cunningham three times auditioned for a role in Queen Sugar, the award-winning OWN drama by filmmaker Ava DuVernay and executive produced by Oprah Winfrey. It aired for seven seasons.

“Unfortunately, I didn’t get the role,” she says. “But that’s a big deal to get to audition for somebody like Ava DuVernay. Remember, I’m still a new actor, and I’m auditioning for these kinds of people.”

Cunningham’s first network role was as a reporter in Fox’s The Resident, which aired last year. She was rebooked to return as an anchor the following season. Although they had no scenes together, Malcolm Jamal-Warner, of The Cosby Show fame, was a castmate. “We were in hair, makeup, and the green room together,” she says, “He was extremely nice and a big intellectual.”

Castings can be clandestine. Actors, Cunningham says, often don’t know the title of the project for which they’re auditioning. An acting classmate once asked her if she knew someone who could play a reporter, that a friend was working on a film and needed someone for such a role.

Cunningham assumed it was a student film. “Yeah, for sure, I’ll do a student film,” she thought to herself. “I don’t mind doing that.”

She met the casting director at an Atlanta Starbucks, which she found odd because this was still during amid the throes of COVID-19 and auditions were rarely held in person. Even odder, once she arrives, it was clear the person she met, who turned out to be the film’s producer and director, was not a student.

“I meet this middle-aged white guy,” she recalls. “I’m looking at him like, ‘Okay, maybe he has a second career too because I’m not a spring chicken and I’m just getting started.’”

At a juncture, the guy pulls out an iPad and says, “Let’s step across the street because there are some woods there.”

“I’m looking at him funny,” Cunningham says.

“I just want the woods to be behind you,” he says.

On the iPad was a scene calling for a news reporter. “There’s breaking news,” the guy says. “These girls are missing the search on. What would you do?”

“I went into news reporter breaking news reporter mode,” Cunningham says. “I did that a couple of times, then he asked me to interview him like I was interviewing a family member of a missing girl.”

Easy.

“We’ll get back with you,” the guy said,

A couple of weeks later, Cunningham auditioned again; she got the role. “Then I found out it was not a student film,” she says.

In October, Cunningham is slated to appear in the 50th-anniversary remake of The Exorcist, starring Leslie Odom Jr. “Okay,” Cunningham says with a laugh, “So, this is what’s been happening with me and my two-year acting career.”

She credits much of her success to her 23 years behind the scenes and on camera in television news—and faith.

“You have to be spiritual,” she says of this new journey. I’ve been on set with people who swear I’ve been acting ten or twenty years. ’You’re a natural,’ they say. ‘You never mess up.’ It comes from being a news anchor. I was live every night. We don’t get to go, “Oops, let me start over, Take two.’

“It’s one and done. I don’t know how to mess up.”

Yet surely knows how to flip a script.

More columns by Roy S. Johnson

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Tell me why, Republicans; or do silence and gun deaths speak for you?

I got it wrong; Republicans actually do want us to vote

I’m a Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary and winner of the Edward R. Murrow prize for podcasts: “Unjustifiable,” co-hosted with John Archibald. My column appears in AL.com, as well as the Lede. Stay tuned for my upcoming limited series podcast Panther: Blueprint for Black Power, co-hosted with Eunice Elliott. Subscribe to my free weekly newsletter, The Barbershop, here. Reach me at [email protected], follow me at twitter.com/roysj, or on Instagram @roysj