Heidi Schooler is an award-winning Los Angeles-based actor, voiceover artist, writer, and producer whose career spans film, TV, theatre, and digital media.
Schooler has made appearances on shows like CSI: NY, starred in Bron Theron’s Half Dead Fred (2023), and has lent her voice to major campaigns for Walmart. Currently, she has a recurring role voicing multiple characters on Nickelodeon’s hit animated series Rock, Paper, Scissors, is a spokesperson for anemia drug Ojjaara, and acts in, writes, and produces her own storytelling show, Read to Me, Heidi, on YouTube featuring Millicent, her inquisitive sidekick that’s a mouse puppet with a silly, raspy voice.
Her short film Millicent & Me and The Apple Tree, directed by John Beaton Hill and co-starring the Millicent puppet, has earned wide acclaim, winning Best Comedy Short at the French Riviera Film Festival in Cannes, Best Musical Short Film at the Voices Rising Film Festival in New York, and Best Musical/Comedy Short at the Culver City Film Festival in California, among others.
Last year, she filmed a period feature set in the 1930s that’s now in post-production and aiming for a 2026 Cannes Film Festival debut. She was recently cast in an upcoming Netflix show; however, the specific details of the project are under wraps.
Beyond her on-screen and voiceover work, Schooler’s passion shines when discussing Read to Me, Heidi, her purpose-driven storytime show on YouTube, born from a commitment to give back to children in hospitals during her own health journey.
Schooler sums up her personal brand with two words: “eccentric grace.” The eccentricity comes through in her quirky personality, while the grace lies in a goal for her work to make a lasting, positive impact on her audience.
This week, she sat down with Alter New Media to discuss the media-tech ecosystem’s role in shaping her online presence and projects.
Hi, Heidi! Thanks for doing this interview. To start, please share a little bit about your background as an actor with us.
Heidi Schooler sitting cross-legged on a patio looking off camera / Photo by Ken Pivak
My mom’s an opera singer—I followed in her footsteps. I would go with her when I was six years old to her voice lessons, and I’d sit under the piano and eat honey candies and listen to her voice. I thought for a while there I was going to be a painter because my grandmothers were painters, but once I went to this art camp that had dance and theater, it was over. I was like, oh, this is what I want to do.
I’ve done a bunch of TV and I’ve done a bunch of film, and I’ve always done voiceover and commercials to make money, whether it’s voiceover, wacky characters, comedy characters, puppetry, or drama. People hire me to cry for stuff like CSI: NY. My brand has always been a mix of eccentric comedy and honest, emotional drama.
How did you get involved with Alter New Media?
From left to right: Founders Nadya Rousseau and Lauren Jones of Alter New Media, Heidi Schooler, and Bron Theron at the Sin City Film Festival in Las Vegas for Half Dead Fred / Photo by Ken Pivak
I met Nadya and Lauren [founders of Alter New Media] through my half-brother, who is an interviewer for a tech podcast in England. He’s always been interested in the tech or AI aspect, and he had started this podcast interviewing CEOs of different companies, [because] he felt like that’s where the wave of our future was heading. And so, he met Nadya and Lauren online, I believe through a business that they both were working with, [Alter New Media] repping the company as PR.
He met Nadya and Lauren in person here in LA when he came to visit, and then, through him, I met them. He brought them to my birthday, and we talked about some of the work that they were doing and that they were growing their business. They were doing PR, and I had just gotten cast in this film called Half Dead Fred that I was preparing to go shoot in Michigan. I kept in touch with them, and they were just great.
They wrote an article about me how I was a rising star in this movie, putting that I was shooting this film out there on several news feeds. They interviewed me, and I just thought it was so great, [because] I had an agent at the time and they weren’t really doing enough.
And that’s when we started working together!
Alter New Media is all about servicing purpose-driven brands. How does this mission align with your projects?
Behind-the-scenes photo of Heidi Schooler holding Millicent while recording an episode of Read to Me, Heidi / Photo by Ken Pivak
I love that ANM’s mission supports purpose-driven brands, because that’s what I want to do with my work: encourage, nourish, and uplift through whatever I’m acting in so that I have some kind of a positive impact on the people that are watching the work, whether through Read to Me, Heidi or the roles I play.
Read to Me, Heidi is underneath this whole umbrella of what my mission as an actor is.
I had a spinal cord tumor that was benign. It stopped me from working in the industry out here for a couple of years. There’s about four or five years in my career that looks like there was nothing, but that was me recovering. During that time, I did some producing, I got into learning other things, and I did a lot of voiceover because it wasn’t on camera.
But while I was in the hospital, I saw kids that had nobody in their room with them. There were just no parents, nobody reading to them, nothing. And some kids were in there for cancer kind of things. I was very fortunate. Mine was nothing, man. It was just benign, this little blood blister.
But I made a mental note, that when I get out of here, I’m going to give back, I’m going to try to do something for those kids so they’re entertained, and I really wanted them to be able to have something they could just pop in and see on a DVD.
So that’s how Read to Me, Heidi was born!
As you know, Alter New Media is more than just marketing and PR. Can you tell us what your experience was like working with Alter New Media as producers for Read to Me, Heidi?
Behind-the-scenes shot of Heidi Schooler behind the camera holding Millicent and recording an episode of Read to Me, Heidi / Photo by Ken Pivak
Read to Me, Heidi is supposed to be my thing that I’m giving back to people by not charging them, but if you get a thousand subscribers, YouTube will start paying you. So, [Alter New Media and I] were talking about ways we could get that done to bring in a passive income.
[Alter New Media] was repping me as PR, and then they said they wanted to be involved with helping as producers, and that’s been so amazing. They were here for the shooting, and both of them directed. One of them would edit it, which was Lauren. Lauren is an editor, as well as someone who’s adept at shooting on their own camera, the video and things. They are very adept at all of the technological things in order to get stuff posted.
[They’ve] now moved to Las Vegas, so whenever I go there, we shoot an episode, or when they come to LA, they come here and we shoot. It‘s wonderful to have them here directing and producing with me. Even if we’re not shooting something right here in LA, and I’m being the person shooting it, they’re either sending me the story to shoot or telling me to get something up there.
You can find more of Heidi Schooler’s work online at HeidiSchooler.com or her Linktree at linktr.ee/heidischooler. Watch, Like, and Subscribe to Read to Me, Heidi here: YouTube
Read another interview with Heidi here: Global Entrepreneurship Week Nevada
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To read more about Heidi and her endeavors, check out her interview on Global Entrepreneurship Week Nevada, where you can find her and the ANM team at the Las Vegas Horror Fest.
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