Heather Donahue, once the star of the movie Blair Witch Project, is no longer acting, but instead she has now found a new career growing medical marijuana. In 1999, Heather Donahue was unexpectedly catapulted to stardom as a co-creator and costar of the indie horror film The Blair Witch Project – who memorably filmed herself crying in terror in the genre-breaking flick. Donahue went from the hat wearing, frightened girl on the big screen is now embarking on a second act of so called gardening.
“I took all my stuff into the desert related to my acting career and burned it all,” Donahue, who turns 37 on Thursday, tells the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Well, not entirely everything was deserted, she did keep her ski cap. “That’s the only thing I kept,” she says. “I figured if things got really bad, I could always sell it on eBay.”
Her marijuana growing adventure started when she met a man from “Nuggettown,” a weed-growing mecca in northern California. She’d always loved gardening, so marijuana cultivation made sense. She ended up following her then new boyfriend into a strange new life of growing marijuana, mostly for medical purposes.
At the time of Blair Witch‘s release, Donahue said that her new found fame was “hilarious and overwhelming.”But soon she became disillusioned. “The acting projects I was lucky enough to work on weren’t always things that I felt good about putting out into the world,” she says now in a Q&A on her website “I didn’t see that getting better as I got older. I wanted to change my life, see what else was out there for me, what else I might become.”
She gave up growing pot after deciding to write about it – and after a friend got busted by the feds. Donahue questioned her new vocation; the new book, Grow Girl, tells the full story.
Donahue, who is now on a book tour, is torn about whether marijuana should be legalized. On the one hand, she’s worried that corporations might run over the mom-and-pop growers. But at the same time, she thinks it’s foolish to outlaw it.
