Megan Park has had an unusual career considering that, as a kid, her family home had no TV. Growing up in a small Canadian town, she developed an interest in the arts and attended theater camp during the summer. “I really enjoyed it,” she says. “I met other artistic people there and felt like I found my community.”
By 16, Park was auditioning in Toronto, and after graduating high school, she convinced her parents to let her defer university for a year to study acting in Los Angeles. “My first audition in L.A. was for The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and I got the part,” she says.
Park enjoyed playing Grace Bowman on the ABC Family series alongside Shailene Woodley from 2008 to ’13, but she felt something was missing. “Shailene is one of my closest friends, and when the [2011] Alexander Payne movie The Descendants came around, Shailene was like, ‘This is my part. I have to get this.’ She worked so hard and got the role. She had this passion, this fire in her. I didn’t feel that about acting.”
Even so, Park stayed busy, appearing in dozens of TV series and films. One actress-writer she worked with noticed that she was always full of ideas and suggested Park consider writing or directing. “I thought you had to go to film school, that you had to understand cameras, that you had to have watched every classic movie — which I certainly had not, growing up without a TV,” Park says. “I didn’t feel qualified to write or direct, but why not try?”
So, she wrote a pilot, with no concept of act breaks or formatting, using Microsoft Word. “The second I started writing, it became a passion,” Park says. “I stayed up all night. I couldn’t stop. It never felt like work in the way acting did."
CBS bought her pilot and paired Park with a showrunner, though the series never got off the ground. Around that same time, she started directing commercials and music videos. Directing, like writing, was fun.
Her breakthrough came with the 2024 film My Old Ass, which Park wrote, directed and executive-produced. That film — starring Aubrey Plaza and Maisy Stella and set in the idyllic lake community of Muskoka, Ontario — was produced in collaboration with Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment (Barbie, Saltburn). When she created her first series, Sterling Point — a coming-of-age story for Prime Video in which twins inherit a private lake island — Park and LuckyChap returned to returned to Muskoka and used much of the same crew.
Megan Park on the set of Sterling Point
“We’d learned everything is triple the amount of time when shooting on water, so we were able to plan the schedule in a better way. Muskoka has specific limitations that other places don’t, so we went into it knowing that,” Park says. “We didn’t want the show to feel like ‘My Old Ass: The TV Show,’ but there was something about making a summer show in this area that just feels so right. But it’s such a different story, and we showcase the world in a different way.”
Working with younger actors on the eight-episode series brought Park full circle. “I adore and respect the actors. I’ve been in their situation. I know how vulnerable and difficult it can be,” she says. “I also rely on the young actors as a litmus test for what feels authentic to them. When I was a young actor playing a teenager, I often felt like I was saying or wearing things that didn’t feel real to what an actual teenager would be doing, saying or wearing.”
Now writing another pilot and working on a Zoë Kravitz–led film (also produced by LuckyChap) that was acquired by Apple Studios following a bidding war, Park says she has no pressing desire to return to acting: “I truly feel like acting was the pathway to what I’m supposed to be doing.”
Sterling Point is now streaming on Prime Video
This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, issue #9, 2026, under the title "Homecoming."
