“It’s not your mother’s Hallmark Christmas movie,” chuckles Mishael Morgan, who recurs as Y&R’s Amanda, about her new action film, Sworn Justice: Taken Before Christmas, which drops on BET+ on Thursday, November 16. “It’s more like the black Die Hard!”
In the flick, “I play Sophie Porter, an undercover detective who just got put on desk duty because of some entanglement that she had in the past,” Morgan details. “She’s also starting a new relationship, but she doesn’t really want to commit yet, but on Christmas Eve, her new not-really-boyfriend guy ends up getting kidnapped and it seems like it’s connected to some old undercover cases. So she goes on the hunt to find him and take down who is causing all of this mess.”
Morgan enjoyed embodying the character of Sophie. “She’s definitely very tough and it was really fun and different to play this character where you really just lean into her grit and all of the dark things that have happened to her,” she explains. “If you remember Hilary [her first Genoa City alter], she was pushy all of the time, so to play somebody who’s the complete opposite was fun. Sophie controls her emotions, and any outburst happens through the fight scenes.”
But, the actress reveals, she almost didn’t take the role. “They knew who I was through Y&R and they really wanted me to be a part of it,” Morgan recalls. “I was like, ‘Do I want to do a Christmas movie?’ I feel like they tend to lean very much into the world of soaps in terms of the dialogue and the pacing, so I felt like I wouldn’t be stretching myself too much with a Christmas movie. My agent kept calling me and telling me to just read the script. I read the first page and said, ‘Let’s do it!’ ”
Morgan got to hit, punch and kick throughout shooting and came out (almost) unscathed. “I was lucky; I only got two bruises,” she reports. “This guy pushed me into the side of a wall and they taught us to jump into it, so he’s not really pushing me that hard. I got a little too committed, so I jumped too hard and after doing it five times, I had a bruise on my hip. And then I did a little bit of a roll kind of thing and I had a little bruise on my shoulder. It wasn’t too bad.”
Morgan gives props to her stunt double, who performed the heavier duty stuff. “She was so sweet and she would practice with me so I would get the moves down,” Morgan says. “I watched some of the footage and you really couldn’t tell the difference [between us]. She even moved like me and I learned that’s part of the job; they have to analyze how you move and mimic that. She was amazing.”
The project also allowed Morgan to make friends with a Y&R alum. “Vivica [A.] Fox [ex-Stephanie] played my mother and I adore her,” she beams. “We had a lot of fun working together and I learned so much from her. We talked about Y&R and how our characters were both involved with Neil. We’ll definitely stay in touch.” And it’s possible that they could reunite for a sequel. “It depends how well this one does,” Morgan points out. “If there are more movies, I would love to be a part of them.”
