Cassidy Freeman Freedom To Ride

 To drive around LA is to navigate a sprawling undefinable cityscape in which urban planners seemed to have played no role.

- Chase Reynolds Ewald

For Cassidy Freeman, though, LA—in her case, Santa Monica’s Ocean Park—feels like a neighborhood. Having moved there at age 23 after growing up in Chicago and attending college in Vermont, it’s now home, despite her constant travels. She lives in a bungalow just minutes away from both of her brothers. She walks her dog each morning, exchanging greetings with neighbors. When she meets up with a friend of a friend at a coffee shop a few blocks from her home, she takes a table on the sidewalk then spends the next two hours fielding hellos: from friends, people who bond over her dog’s unusual breed (Entlebucher Mountain Dog), passers-by who might recognize her but are too polite to say so, and one fan who calls out, “I love your work”, then, when he realizes how approachable she is, ends up delightedly posing for a photo with her.

The work he lauds ranges from her roles as Tess Mercer in Smallville and Veronica Sharpe in Razor Sharp to a recurring part on NCIS: New Orleans. But it is her portrayal of Cady Longmire over five seasons of the crime drama Longmire (the sixth and final season will premier later this year) that has introduced her to six million devoted viewers who love the excellent storytelling delivered by complex, believable characters in a contemporary Western setting. Shot in New Mexico at Valles Caldera, a location resembling the Wyoming setting of the Craig Johnson novels on which the series is based, and with a cast that has become a close-knit family, Longmire has been an incredible gift for Freeman, and one that’s hard to let go. “We could have done it longer,” she says. “There are many more stories to tell. But creatively, it’s good to move on. An ending is also a beginning.”