“American Pie” star Shannon Elizabeth took her lifelong love of animals international, finding purpose and her “soulmate” in the process.
“I started my charity originally in L.A. in 2001 as a dog rescue called Animal Avengers. And over time, I knew I wanted to help more animals on a bigger scale. And I went on this long quest of what, what does that look like?” Elizabeth told Fox News Digital.
It eventually became the Shannon Elizabeth Foundation, founded after the star first moved to New York in 2014 and began learning about rhino poaching and the ivory trade and looking at the world of conservation. In that process, she met people involved in the work, many of whom were from South Africa.
“And there was something that clicked in me. It was actually something I saw on Instagram. It just flipped a switch in me, and I said, this is what I need to do. These animals could go extinct in our lifetime, and I feel like this is the next generation of my charity. So I started exploring Africa.”
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She traveled on her own and “realized I want to be closer to the issues. I want to be over there. And so I kind of just packed up and moved, and I came here not really knowing what I was going to do with the charity and how I was going to help, but I felt very drawn to coming out here and kind of did an overview of people that had come into my life over the last, like five years and realized a lot of things were saying South Africa. I was meeting people from South Africa, I was meeting people that lived here, and I’m like, OK, I’m listening, something’s for me in South Africa. So that was it.”
The Texas-born star said she “absolutely” loves living in South Africa but had to make a few adjustments.
“One of the things that I realized was that you don’t have everything at your fingertips here. There isn’t an active Amazon here that you could just order whatever you want, and it made me start thinking a little more creatively in ways like, OK, I know I’m going to need to do X, Y and Z, but you can’t get that here. So, what can I substitute?”
“I became like MacGyver for things and every little cord I would hold on to because I knew I could use it for something else,” she added with a laugh. “But I found it amazing because people really helped me. They really embraced me.”
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The move also introduced Elizabeth to her now-husband, Simon Borchert, a fellow conservation activist from Cape Town.
“I had met him on my first trip out, kind of in passing through friends. And then once I moved out here, a mutual friend got a bunch of us together for a lunch, and we started chatting. He grew up in conservation and his dad’s quite a well-known conservationist. So, he actually made the move quite easy for me because I kind of just fell into, you know, the comfort of him being from here, being a local and being able to show me the ropes and explain to me how everything is. And he’s able to speak Afrikaans, which is one of the languages here. And so it really made it quite an easy adjustment for me.”
Elizabeth and Borchert live and work together from home to save on expenses for the foundation, handling the business side of charity work.
“It’s challenging, but it’s also really, really rewarding to be able to do it with someone that you love and you’re like-minded and you have the same dreams and the same goals and aspirations,” she said. “And that’s why I felt so lucky to find him because we’re mirror images of each other. We want the same things, and we’re so aligned with everything that we love in the world and love in this universe. And I feel really lucky to have found him. He’s definitely my soulmate.”
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While happy to handle the details of fundraising and making the charity work, Elizabeth said “our happy place is out in [the] field.”
“When we go to our sanctuary, we have a sanctuary about an hour flight from here. And when we’re out there, we’re camping, we’re sleeping in tents, we are up with [the] sunrise, and we’re helping the rangers, and we have a blind black rhino that we take care of and we are with him, and that’s really our happy place.”
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Elizabeth is heavily focused on her foundation, but she also still manages a career in Hollywood, booking acting work regularly and starting to work on some directorial efforts.
She landed her breakout role in 1999’s “American Pie,” and still remembers her excitement, and the injury that came with it.
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“I was so grateful to have booked that job. I remember getting the phone call that I booked it. I was driving in the car, and I pulled over, and I was right outside my house. I don’t know why I didn’t pull into the garage, but I just pulled over on the street to talk to my manager and agents because they were all on the phone, and they were like, congratulations. And I was excited. When I got off the phone, I jumped out of the car to run into my house to tell my boyfriend, and I stepped in a hole and twisted my ankle. And I got in the house and I’m like, screaming and crying and happy, and he’s like, what’s going on? He was so like, I don’t know what’s happening right now, but it was just the most amazing thing for me.”
“It’s really opened every door for me. And I don’t even know that I could be doing the work I’m doing now out here if it wasn’t for ‘American Pie.’”
That led to other roles in comedies like “Scary Movie” and “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” as well as more recent works like “A Home for the Holidays” and “Plan B.”
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Elizabeth is also grateful for the fans she’s met through conventions and appearances and seeing the impact she’s had through her on-screen work.
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“I don’t think I realized when I was doing the films the impact that they could have on somebody,” she said. “And so, being able to do these conventions now, I think almost every convention there’s a fan that makes me cry because they get so emotional. And I’m so grateful to them because I just didn’t realize that the work I was doing meant that much to people.
“I feel really lucky that I was part of people’s childhood like that or growing up or adolescence that it made such an impact that, yeah, I just didn’t realize until I started doing the convention[s].”
Elizabeth’s approach to her acting career has shifted because of her charity work, making her “want to really focus on projects that help the planet first.”
“And sometimes, to be quite honest, it’s just my way of funding myself, because I don’t take money from the charity. So I keep up my career and my platform so that I can do the work that I do, which I feel is really important. So I think of my acting as my job, but I think my charity as my mission.”
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The 51-year-old is putting her Hollywood knowledge to work for her foundation, filming a documentary about Munu, a male black rhino in need of special care, not only because of his status as a critically endangered species, but because he is also blind and cannot forage on his own.
“I think if you can do something in your life, that is your job, and it’s how you survive, but it’s also your mission and something you love. And if you can find a way to do both together, I think you’re happy, you’re winning at life … everybody wants to combine those. So I’m working really hard to make it all one.”