After Shannon Elizabeth shot to fame in “American Pie” and set pulses racing, she didn’t stick to the Hollywood script — she headed to South Africa.
The actress, who played the sultry exchange student Nadia in the 1999 hit, packed her bags at the end of 2016 and never looked back. In 2018, she launched her conservation charity, the Shannon Elizabeth Foundation.
“When I first went out there, and I came back, I was living in New York at the time,” the 52-year-old told Fox News Digital.
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“And I remember this moment of standing at a crosswalk,” she said. “Everybody’s looking down at their phones, or they’re on their phones. The crosswalk changes, and everybody just starts rushing each way. Nobody’s paying attention except to whatever is in their hand at that moment.”
“I just had this feeling come over me of feeling like I had just been to Africa, and the problems there felt so real — and they are real,” she recalled.
“It’s a war that’s happening with wildlife, and people are in need there. And it just felt like my phone and the work I was doing here just weren’t as important at the time. I just felt like I needed to be closer to the issues. I needed to go over there and try to figure out what I could do, that I wasn’t making a difference here. That’s when I decided I’m going to move.”
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Elizabeth has always had a passion for helping animals in need. After “American Pie,” she launched a dog and cat rescue, Animal Avengers, in 2001. For more than 10 years, the Houston, Texas, native ran that organization in Los Angeles. But the urge to do more never left her.
“I knew I wanted to do more and do something on a bigger scale or help more animals,” she said. “And eventually, all roads were leading me to South Africa.”
In 2015, Elizabeth learned about an ivory and rhino horn crush in New York City, a high-profile effort to destroy illegal animal products and send a message against poaching. She was intrigued.
There, the star met several conservationists from South Africa. Soon after, she found herself traveling overseas, immersing herself in the issues affecting the country and its endangered species.
“I just wanted to understand what I could do to help,” she said. “I love the U.S., but I also love exploring. I love other countries. I love other cultures and learning. And I think for a long time, I was immersed here. I knew what it was like here, and I just wanted a change. I just wanted something different and to feel like I was doing something more important than just working on myself.”
After connecting with conservationists in South Africa, Elizabeth said they’ve helped carry out rhino horn trimmings, a process used to make the animals less of a target for poachers. The work didn’t end there.
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“We’ve put a girl through her doctorate,” Elizabeth shared. “It was her doctorate to be an ornithologist, so she works with birds. We’ve paid salaries, especially through COVID, to a lot of different rangers and anti-poaching teams, bought food for anti-poaching dogs.”
“We were doing quite a bit, and then a blind black rhino found us that needed help,” she beamed. “He was our inspiration to build a sanctuary. So, we’ve been taking care of him for the past few years. We’re now looking to expand that.
“We have some LOIs (letters of intent) with local partners of what’s needed in the area that we’re in. And so, we are trying to expand now to be an orphanage and rehabilitation center and have some holding bomas (safe holding areas) to be able to move animals to other areas of Africa for range expansion and genetic expansions.”
There’s plenty that Elizabeth misses about her life in the U.S. Still, she has zero regrets about making the leap to help vulnerable wildlife in South Africa.
“I absolutely love New York, and I love it when I’m here,” she said. “There’s something really magical about New York. The people, the food, the energy — I miss that. And there’s a part of me that misses being able to get anything you want, whenever you want.”
“I think a lot of people, when they hear that I’m living in South Africa, they imagine you’re living in the bush,” she laughed. “Even though our sanctuary is in the bush, my base camp is in Cape Town. It’s beautiful. But I think a lot of people only imagine Africa with lions walking around on every road you go.”
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Following the success of “American Pie,” Elizabeth appeared in popular comedies in the early 2000s, including “Scary Movie,” “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” and “Love Actually,” among others.
But it was “American Pie,” which followed a group of high school friends determined to lose their virginity before graduation, that skyrocketed her to fame. The comedy starred Jason Biggs, Alyson Hannigan, Seann William Scott and Eugene Levy, among others.
“The audition process for ‘American Pie’ was difficult,” said Elizabeth. “I was scared. I was really scared.”
“And in the audition, it was the opposite of what you saw in the movie,” she smiled. “I had to dance for Jason instead of him dancing for me.”
“I’d never done anything that big,” she reflected on her breakout performance. “But I was auditioning a lot at the time, and I was so excited when I got the role.”
Her signature accent for Nadia came by accident.
“I was in an acting class at the time when, a few weeks before the audition, I tried to do a French accent for another character I was trying to play,” she said. “I was working with someone who was in the class, and he said, ‘Remember when you tried to do the French accent in class? Do that. It sounds Russian.’”
Following the film’s success, Elizabeth, who jumped into modeling right after high school, shot to sex symbol status overnight. But to her, being a pinup was just another role to play.
“Because I had done so much modeling, and you do a lot of underwear shoots and bathing suits and things like that, I think falling into the role of Nadia… it felt like I was doing another modeling shoot in a way,” she explained. “I didn’t think of her as anything else. I was just playing a character. I wasn’t really thinking too much about it. I was playing the character that’s on the page.”
“I’m not somebody [who’s] super comfortable in my own skin, to be honest,” she admitted. “But, you just overcome that. When you have to turn it on, you have to work because I do love working. I do love acting. So you just let everything else go.
“I tend to be quite a shy person, but when I need to turn it on, I need to let the shy go. I flip a switch and do that. And then when it’s over, the switch goes off again, and I go back into shy mode.”
In March, Biggs, 47, told the New York Post he would love to return to the franchise. As Elizabeth embarks on her next adventure off-screen, she’s curious about what Nadia would be up to today. Like her co-star, she’s not ruling anything out.
“I would love to see a film where it’s all about Nadia back in her home country and what she does there, and following her around, seeing her day-to-day life now,” Elizabeth gushed. “I think that would be so much fun.”
