Orlando actress Jennifer Bonner has a thing or two to show you about Kissimmee

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Kissimmee has long stood in the shadow of Orlando, despite being geographically closer to Walt Disney World and other major attractions. The Kissimmee Experience (thekissimmeeexperience.com), an unscripted YouTube series from Osceola County’s tourism authority, is now in its third season of shifting that perception with help from famous visitors and local host Jennifer Bonner, who will be a familiar face for Central Florida’s long-time theater and theme park fans. I recently reconnected with Bonner — who was a member of my Empty Spaces Theatre Co during the mid-aughts — to catch up on her journey from costumed chipmunk to Guillermo de la Cruz’s drinking buddy.

Growing up in a tiny Maryland town with “less than 700 people [and] no stoplights,” Bonner’s career path was sealed at age four upon seeing Linda Carter as Wonder Woman on TV. “I was like, ‘Mom, that’s who I want to be when I grow up.’ And she was like, ‘Well, honey, she’s an actress, so she’s just pretending to do it.’ I was like, ‘Well, then that’s what I’m gonna do.’ And I’ve never changed.”

Dissuaded by her teacher mother from running away to Hollywood at 18, Bonner got a full ride to nearby Frostburg State University. “Because it was a small school, I got a lot of opportunities that I wouldn’t have gotten at a big school to play a lot of different characters,” she says. A flyer posted in the music department introduced her to the Disney College Program, leading to her post-graduation stint in Florida working as “very good friends with Chip and Dale.”

“It was a good experience for me,” Bonner recalls of her college program experience. “I also knew that my town, being as small as it is, people don’t leave; I’m one of the only people that ever left. So I knew if I went back, I would get stuck.” Instead of returning home, she settled in Central Florida and landed her first area acting gig at Pirates Dinner Adventure playing “Treasure” both on International Drive and at the Buena Park, California, location. She was seen in numerous roles at Universal and Disney, most memorably as one of the nine original instructors in Hollywood Studios’ much-missed Jedi Training Academy.

Securing that role over nearly 600 other auditioners gave Bonner the confidence boost to book her first screen role, an industrial film for Publix, which soon led to her playing a mother in Killroy Was Here by writer-director Kevin Smith. “I got there, and I remember [Smith] came out to meet me right away and he knew my name. I was like, wow, I’ve done things for months, and people haven’t known my name,” says Bonner. “At one point, I was doing a scene, and I heard him go, ‘Well, that’s in the film.’”

Since then, you may have seen Bonner on Peacock or Amazon in Hallmark-style romcoms like Love on the Reef and Let Love Grow. “We have 14 days to make a movie. We shoot like nine pages a day,” says Bonner, who credits her stage experience for handling the breakneck schedule. “I truly can’t imagine if you didn’t have that kind of [theater] training, I don’t know how you would get through it, because it’s a lot and the crew moves so fast. I had a blast; it was fun!” Her latest film, Michael Brant DeMaria’s The Twilight Café, is currently touring the festival circuit.

Closer to home, Bonner was tapped as the host of The Kissimmee Experience by director Nick Floyd after taping an audition in which she improvised taking Benedict Cumberbatch to Sleuths Mystery Dinner Shows [ed. note: R.I.P.]. That bucket-list outing hasn’t materialized yet, but the show — which she describes as “a way to write a love letter or postcard to Kissimmee, without selling it hard” — has led to other surreal experiences, such as practicing stunts at Pirates with WWE wrestler Chelsea Green and strolling around Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge with Ahsoka Tano voice actor Ashley Eckstein.

“We went to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, and we learned that I’m a much better pilot than she is, so that was a lot of fun,” says Bonner. “She crashed [the flight simulator] many times. I was like, I’m not gonna do any better, and then I landed.” (Experience Kissimmee has over 1,000 partners across the region, including outside the city.)

More recently, Bonner spent a memorable day with What We Do in the Shadows co-star Harvey Guillén, visiting EPCOT’s Mexico pavilion and I-Drive’s Icebar Orlando, as well as the family-owned Skate Reflections roller rink. “I think Harvey was the person I was most nervous about because I had just watched What We Do in the Shadows,” Bonner says. “He is the sweetest human being [and] we just got to geek out about theater.”

Despite her on-screen success, Bonner — who also taught theater and worked in arts education — is contemplating a return to the stage. “Theater will always be my first love. It just fills you up in a way that other things don’t,” Bonner says, citing Belinda in IceHouse Theatre’s Noises Off and Dionyza in Orlando Shakes’ Pericles as past highlights. “When you’re doing theater, you go on a ride [and] every night the emotional roller coaster is there … but for film and TV, you never know what scene you’re going to do, so you really have to be able to tap into your emotions. So that’s been a very exciting challenge for me.”

For her latest move, Bonner recently co-founded Luv U Productions (@luvuproductions) and has written multiple screenplays — romcoms, horror, action-adventure and a Christmas story based on her grandmother — with initial plans to release a series of vertical video shorts featuring local actors Will Hagaman, Derek Ziegler, Kylee Benson and Mark Edward Smith. “We want to do it here, because there’s so much talent in Central Florida,” says Bonner, “and we want to show that to the world.”

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Orlando actress Jennifer Bonner has a thing or two to show you about Kissimmee

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