The first words out of Denver actor Amie MacKenzie’s mouth when she opened her front door to me last week were: “I don’t have any heat!”

Untruer words were never spoken.

“She’s cooking,” said longtime Denver stage director and producer John Ashton.

Truer words were never spoken.

MacKenzie has booked 13 legit film or television projects since the beginning of 2024, an extraordinary span of success during which she also turned an emphatic 60.

When you’re a single mother of two and a 19-year survivor of a stage 3 cancer, milestone birthdays matter. A misbehaving boiler does not.

She’s got all the heat she needs – as the world will further see on May 31, when HBO drops “Mountainhead,” a film by Jesse Armstrong (creator of “Succession”) about four billionaire pals who gather at a Park City ski resort during an international economic crisis. We’re talking, ho, hum, Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith and Ramy Youssef.

And, yes … Amie MacKenzie. (At least for one scene.)

She’s also about to be seen in “The Madison,” a new TV series starring Michelle Pfeiffer and written by Taylor Sheridan, and in a film called “The Last Day,” starring Alicia Vikander (“The Danish Girl”). The highest-profile job of them all, she’s not even allowed to talk about yet.

This after just having appeared in a 17-minute scene with Nathan Lane in “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” as what MacKenzie calls a “Gorgon” – one of a pack of invasive dinner-party guests pumping Dominick Dunne for dish on the famous murder trial.

It’s impossible to overstate how unlikely all this sudden success is at this point in an actor’s career, especially considering MacKenzie is not some teenager relentlessly pursuing the dream in some run-down Sunset Strip apartment with six roommates, like most Hollywood dreamers.

Instead, MacKenzie still lives in Denver with her rescue dog, Turtle, in an impeccable Krisana Park mid-century home ironically known in the biz as “a California modern.” The only pavement she’s pounding is as the owner of a Denver real-estate team for Sotheby’s International.

And yet, her phone just keeps ringing.

MacKenzie was not born of brat-pack stock. No, she was born in Rangely, a town of 2,800 just east of the Utah border in northeastern Colorado, and raised in Casper, Wyo.

Sure, she has performed as a stage actor for most every significant Denver theater company over the past 35 years. But, on camera, she had mostly appeared in commercials and short films before she landed a one-day gig on “Better Call Saul” in 2018.

“I booked my first episodic TV show when I was 53,” she muses. “That’s pretty crazy, right?”

Right.

“In an industry where women are often thought to have a shelf life of 35 or 40, it’s astonishing that any actress is working as much as Amie is right now – much less one who is based in Denver,” said Sylvia Gregory, proprietor of Sylvia Gregory Casting.

Gregory recently cast MacKenzie in “The Man Who Changed the World,” an upcoming film in which she plays a mother of 13 kids – 12 of them girls.

“Amie was the first person we cast,” Gregory said. “When I watched her audition, I told my associate, ‘If you want to see how it is done, watch this audition.’ It was sublime. She is a complete natural.”

MacKenzie was born of humble stock, and taught never to self-aggrandize. But even she recognizes that her story is one that anyone with a dream can take inspiration from. She’s not sure she’s worth any fuss, but she sure is sure of this:

“I am proud of my age,” she said. “I love it.”

Finding her way from Wyoming

MacKenzie hasn’t always known that acting is what she’s wanted to do for a living. “But I’ve always known that this is a thing that I can do,” she said.

Growing up in Wyoming, she added, “My family members were very much supporters of the arts. I always got the roles in the school plays. I put on shows in the neighborhood. But nobody around me in Casper would have ever known there is a career path to being on television. You never even thought about how that happens. My parents were more like, ‘That was fun – now go get your degree in math.”

She moved to Colorado to attend Colorado College, where she got her degree – in math. But by the time she graduated, she felt a need to pursue theater. She auditioned for two major grad schools. One was the Denver Center’s prestigious (but now closed) National Theatre Conservatory, where she got some prescient rejection advice.

“One guy told me, ‘We really puzzled over you,’” she said, ‘“But we all agreed that you should go to L.A. and do film and TV.’”

Maybe later. Instead, she joined that other master’s program, which was a pretty awful experience. So after a few months in New York, she “fled” back to Colorado, where she quickly found a home both as a math teacher at Denver Public Schools’ (now closed) alternative High School Redirection, and as an actor performing on area theater stages.

First was a run of musicals at the Arvada Center, including “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and “West Side Story.” Summers would bring her home to Casper for big annual musicals there. Then came marriage, sons Miles and Caden, and more theater roles when they worked around her daytime teaching job.

“I remember doing a production of ‘Nunsense,’ and there was another woman in the cast who had just had a baby,” MacKenzie said. “We called ourselves ‘The Little Sisters of Perpetual Lactation.’”

Then came a run at the iconic (and now closed) Heritage Square Music Hall, which was known for big, bawdy, and at times vaudevillian comedy shows in Golden. Jobs there were year-round, and did not come open often. MacKenzie’s did when a rising young Amy Adams (yes, that Amy Adams), left to do musicals at the (now closed) Boulder’s Dinner Theatre.

MacKenzie did not yet think of herself as vaudevillian kind of comic. “I thought they hired me because I fit into Amy Adams’ costumes,” she said with a laugh.

It was there, studying local comedy legends T.J. Mullin, Annie Dwyer, Alex Crawford and others that MacKenzie learned the fast and fine art of spontaneous improvisation. She quickly became highly sought for comic roles at area theaters.

“I spent two years at Heritage Square doing total nonsense – and it was so much fun,” she said.

In 1992, MacKenzie was “hugely pregnant” while performing in a monologue play called “Talking With…” for the (now closed) Theatre Group, which earned her a fan who eventually changed her trajectory. It was Ashton, a legendary journalist, actor, director, producer and playwright, who saw “Talking With…” and cast MacKenzie in a ridiculously fun black comedy called “Dearly Departed,” which turned into a monster hit he would stage many times and in many places between 1993 and 2010.

Perhaps the seminal role of MacKenzie’s stage career came in 2003, when the Avenue Theater christened a new location with “Sylvia,” A.R. Gurney’s popular comedy about a man whose affection for a stray dog (played by MacKenzie) threatens his human marriage.

Ashton, as he is wont to do, had a gimmick up his sleeve. Here’s how I reported it at the time:

“The opening-night electricity reached its zenith at the top of the second act. The lights came up on a guy named Greg (Ashton) in a dog park, when who should wander on stage but John Hickenlooper? Playing off one of the campaign issues that made him Denver’s new mayor, Hickenlooper casually asked Greg, ‘Do you have change for the parking meter?’ After the uproarious applause of the crowd, Greg handed him four quarters. Hickenlooper gently scratched Sylvia (Amie MacKenzie) behind the ear and said, “Nice dog” before walking off in triumph.

And as he left, the very much in-heat dog replied, “Nice butt.”

Talk about a bow with a wow.”

A cold timeout for cancer

MacKenzie got the diagnosis in 2006. By then, she was a single mom, just 42 years old. Her boys were 14 and 12. It was a rare cancer. MacKenzie fit nothing in the diagnostic profile. She was 20 years younger than the norm. She had run a marathon the year before. And yet, here she was, fighting for her life.

“Yeah, that was two years of survival mode,” she said. “The good news is that it was curable. The bad news is that the treatment was just the worst. The worst.” It was not a given that she was going to make it – until she did.

“I think the reason I did survive is because I went into it young and strong,” she said. “But it took a big toll on my body and on my family. My mom was a huge help. The kids were only in middle school, but that was actually great in a weird way. They were ready for some more responsibility, and they jumped right in and pitched in. It was hard, but we somehow made it through as a team.”

Bothing was ever quite the same for any of them. Not after something like that.

‘Every time the boys had a choir concert at East High School, I was like, ‘I’m so lucky to be here – and audibly sobbing,'” she said.

MacKenzie’s reward for not dying was booking her biggest theater gig to date in 2008, just after being given the all-clear from her doctor: An ongoing run of “Girls Only: The Secret Comedy of Women” at the Denver Center, aka the Denver Broncos of the local performing world. It’s most every local actor’s dream to one day work on a Denver Center stage, and this was MacKenzie’s time. Problem was, “I was genuinely terrified about having the energy to do that show,” she said. But she pulled it off, and she would drop in and out of various productions of that hit play around the country through 2018.

One of MacKenzie’s great friends was Judy Phelan-Hill, who played her peace-keeping mother-in-law in “Dearly Departed.” Phelan-Hill died of cancer last November at age 81.

“We were kind of cancer buddies,” MacKenzie said. “We would both say: ‘I don’t wish cancer on anyone.’ Let’s make that clear. But the silver lining with any of the hard things that you have to face in life is that they make you razor-focused on what’s important. What do I really want to be doing? And who do I really want in my life?”

Nothing better  

MacKenzie’s career has been in locked focus since 2018, when she was finally cast to play a humorless hospital administrator in a fourth-season episode of “Better Call Saul,” made by the team from “Breaking Bad.” Both shows were filmed in New Mexico.

MacKenzie had auditioned four or five times, she said, for the iconic Bob Odenkirk series that is now considered by most as among the best in TV history.

But she had a bigger hill to climb than most when she arrived at one of those auditions fully prepared, as always. MacKenzie had snared the last audition slot of the day. But soon after she began reciting her lines, the director stopped her. Someone from the show had sent her the wrong script pages. And the director had to be out of there in 10 minutes. So she was handed new pages, which she read to them cold – the only nightmare greater to an actor than performing in the nude.

She got the part – but not until the next round of auditions, and for another character entirely.

Fans of “Better Call Saul” might be surprised to learn who became MacKenzie’s best buddies on the set that day – brothers Daniel and Luis Moncada, who played the scary cousins Marco and Leonel Salamanca.

“I was trying to be very quiet, and they were like, ‘Do you want to take a picture?’” she said. “And I said, ‘Are you sure it’s OK?’”

It was OK. She made them laugh.

“I told them, ‘You guys don’t really look all that scary. You kind of look like cheerleaders. I am not buying it that you’re murderers. Can you look a little scarier?’ So they got scarier and scarier, until they totally broke. And that was a real icebreaker. I ended up hanging out with them and giving them noogies. It was so cute.”

She also got chummy with the late Mark Margolis, who played the terrifying crime boss Hector Salamanca. Margolis had his own Denver past, having performed with the Denver Center Theatre Company in the late 1990s.

“Better Call Saul” began a trickle of roles for MacKenzie that is now turning into, if not a flood, then certainly a steady stream. She now has 33 TV and movie credits. She’s appeared in 13 TV serials – all for just one episode, but in roles that are steadily increasing in size. There’s been “Messiah,” “MacGruber,” Sheridan’s “1923,” “Dexter: Original Sin” (alongside Christian Slater) and “Pulse” on Netflix.

This newest project is the one she can’t yet talk much about, except to say, “It involves some of the biggest names in the business,” she said. “I think of it as the next step, and I am lucky to be there,” she said.

In Hollywood, work begets work, and MacKenzie’s local colleagues say she is perfectly poised to ride the wave she’s on for years to come. At 60, she is the perfect age, Ashton said, for the kind of roles that are always in great demand. “If you need a lawyer, doctor or a professional woman, she’s got that kind of thing nailed,” Ashton said.

Gregory said MacKenzie’s got staying power because she is not only a great talker. She’s a great listener. “Whenever you see Amie, she’s 100% in that scene,” Gregory said. (And it doesn’t hurt, she added, that she looks like she could be Tina Fey’s sister.)

MacKenzie’s story is an inspiration for her fellow actors, Ashton said. But it should be for anyone who’s still in the game – whatever that game is.

Especially, Gregory added, for anyone who has overcome cancer – something both women have in common.

“If you know anyone who has lived through cancer,” Gregory said, “there is just a little more joy in having every day – and I hope Amie feels that.”

MacKenzie feels “like the time is right for me, in so many ways.”