Olivia Ormond: Call Her Crazy, Call Her an Emmy Winner
Olivia Ormond Is Done Being Told She's Crazy: The Two-Time Emmy Winner Turning Medical Gaslighting Into Cinema
Two Emmy Awards, a critically acclaimed one-woman show, and a short film that premiered at HollyShorts. Writer, director, and performer Olivia Ormond is making art out of the things people would rather not talk about — starting with what happens when doctors refuse to believe women about their own bodies.
There's a particular kind of horror in knowing something is wrong with your body and being told, repeatedly, that it's all in your head.
For filmmaker Olivia Ormond, that horror wasn't fiction. It was lived experience. And rather than allow it to remain another story of a woman being dismissed, doubted, and quietly defeated, she turned it into Call Me Crazy, a darkly comic exploration of chronic pain, medical gaslighting, and the desperate human need to be believed.
The result has taken Ormond from the Hollywood Fringe Festival to Edinburgh and, most recently, to the screen, with her short film premiering at HollyShorts in August 2026.
But Ormond is hardly a newcomer finding her feet.
A two-time Emmy Award winner whose career spans documentary, commercial filmmaking, theater, and narrative cinema, she has spent years developing a distinctive storytelling language that combines psychological complexity, emotional realism, and flashes of surrealism.
Her work repeatedly returns to one deceptively simple question: What happens when the world refuses to recognize the person you know yourself to be?
With Call Me Crazy, that question becomes both painfully intimate and darkly funny.
And with her first feature planned for production in early 2027, Ormond is taking those concerns into even more ambitious territory.
Film Daily sat down with the filmmaker to discuss the Emmy wins, the uncomfortable comedy of chronic illness, why Fleabag remains a creative blueprint, and the complicated business of turning personal trauma into something an audience can actually feel.
From Emmy Awards to the stories nobody wants to hear
Ormond's filmmaking career began with writing, a discipline she had been drawn to long before cameras entered the equation.
Poetry and short stories eventually gave way to the collaborative possibilities of film and television, where the act of storytelling could become something larger than a solitary creative exercise.
Recognition followed, including two Emmy Awards.
Yet rather than settling into a single format, Ormond continued moving between disciplines, working across documentary, commercial projects, theater, and narrative film.
That versatility is central to her approach.
She is less concerned with creating beautiful images for their own sake than with understanding what happens beneath the surface of human behavior.
It's an approach that helps explain why Call Me Crazy feels like such a natural extension of her wider career.
The subject might be deeply personal, but the creative ambition is unmistakably cinematic.
When your own body becomes the battleground
Medical gaslighting is a particularly insidious form of dismissal.
Unlike an obvious confrontation, it often accumulates through small interactions: a skeptical expression, a symptom minimized, an explanation rejected, a patient made to feel that the problem is not their illness but their insistence that something is wrong.
For someone living with chronic pain, those encounters can become as psychologically exhausting as the physical symptoms themselves.
Ormond understood that experience firsthand.
But she also recognized something that might seem surprising: its potential for comedy.
Call Me Crazy doesn't treat illness as an uninterrupted procession of suffering. Its central character, Emi, wants intimacy, power, desire, and an ordinary life.
Her illness keeps interfering.
And sometimes, the only way to survive that interference is to laugh at its sheer absurdity.
That tension between the tragic and the ridiculous became the foundation of Ormond's creative breakthrough.
Film Daily interviews Olivia Ormond
Finding her voice — and winning Emmys
Film Daily: You've built a career across documentary, commercial work, theater and film. How did you first find your way into filmmaking, and when did you realize storytelling would become your profession?
Olivia Ormond: "I've always been a writer." Growing up, she wrote poetry and short stories, but filmmaking offered something different: the chance to build worlds collaboratively. The visual and collective nature of film and television drew her toward the medium.
Film Daily: You're a two-time Emmy Award winner. What did those wins represent for you at that stage of your career, and how did they change the opportunities or confidence you had as a filmmaker?
Ormond: The recognition confirmed that her work could have an impact across different formats. Beyond opening professional doors, the awards encouraged her to experiment with unconventional ways of telling stories and expanded her understanding of what storytelling could achieve.
Film Daily: Your work repeatedly explores trauma, identity and self-reclamation. Why have those themes remained so central to the stories you choose to tell?
Ormond: "I'm drawn to moments when someone's understanding of themselves is challenged," particularly when other people invalidate their experiences. Her interest lies in the struggle to recover one's voice, identity, and sense of reality.
Film Daily: You've worked between New York and Los Angeles and across very different creative disciplines. How has moving between those worlds shaped your visual language?
Ormond: Working across two major creative cities, as well as documentary, commercials, theater, and film, has changed her priorities. Character and behavior have become more important to her than simply producing attractive imagery.
Film Daily: Your work often combines emotional realism with surreal or heightened imagery. How did you develop that balance, and what can surrealism express for you that straightforward realism cannot?
Ormond: Heightened imagery allows her to reveal a character's internal emotional reality. She wants audiences to recognize the world onscreen while occasionally experiencing it through the character's subjective perspective.
Call Me Crazy: Turning medical trauma into dark comedy
Film Daily: Call Me Crazy comes directly from your own experience with chronic pain and medical gaslighting. At what point did you know this intensely personal experience needed to become a piece of art?
Ormond: Keeping the experience to herself eventually stopped being useful. The anger and absurdity of being told her symptoms weren't real demanded another outlet.
Theater allowed her to reclaim control of the narrative. What began as a way of processing her own experience developed into a conversation with others who had also been dismissed.
She realized the story wasn't exclusively about illness. It was about losing authority over one's own reality.
Film Daily: What was the hardest part of turning something you actually lived through into a story with structure, humor, characters and dramatic momentum?
Ormond: The challenge was allowing herself to create a story rather than merely document events. Real experiences rarely arrive with satisfying dramatic structures. She needed to identify the emotional truth beneath what happened, while embracing the genuine absurdity of some of those experiences.
Film Daily: Call Me Crazy began as a solo stage production. Why did theater feel like the right place to tell the story first?
Ormond: Theater offered an immediacy that other formats couldn't reproduce. Standing alone before an audience made her vulnerability unavoidable.
Crucially, the audience became part of the central conflict: they had to decide whether they believed the person telling the story.
Film Daily: This was also your first experience writing and performing your own work onstage. What did acting teach you about storytelling that directing from behind the camera never could?
Ormond: Performing gave her a much deeper appreciation of actors' vulnerability. Experiencing a scene from inside a performance, rather than observing it through a camera, made her more empathetic as a director.
Film Daily: The play went from the Hollywood Fringe Festival to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and received a remarkable critical response. What did you learn about the story from watching audiences encounter it night after night?
Ormond: The response demonstrated how a deeply specific experience could resonate far beyond its original circumstances.
Audience members approached her with stories of being dismissed by doctors, partners, and people close to them. The common experience wasn't necessarily illness, but disbelief.
Film Daily: One review memorably described the play production as "Fleabag only better." What was your reaction to that comparison, and what do you think audiences were responding to?
Ormond: "I was thrilled. Fleabag is the blueprint."
For her first play to receive that comparison was particularly meaningful. She believes audiences responded to the combination of crude humor, emotional honesty, and raw intimacy.
Film Daily: Humor is an important weapon in Call Me Crazy, despite the seriousness of its subject matter. How did you find the line between making people laugh and preserving the reality of chronic pain?
Ormond: Humor was never optional.
Emi uses comedy to survive, but also to conceal how badly she is suffering — both from other people and herself.
The jokes provide relief without erasing the seriousness of her circumstances. They allow the character, and the audience, moments of breathing room.
From the stage to the screen
Film Daily: Medical gaslighting can be difficult to dramatize because so much of it happens through conversations, disbelief and accumulated experiences rather than a single dramatic event. How did you make that experience cinematic?
Ormond: The key was translating apparently insignificant interactions into emotional experiences the audience could actually feel.
Instead of simply showing repeated instances of dismissal, she wanted to communicate their cumulative psychological impact.
Even an ordinary, flirtatious interaction becomes complicated when someone no longer feels comfortable or normal in their own body.
Film Daily: When adapting Call Me Crazy from stage to screen, what did you deliberately change rather than simply translating the play into another medium?
Ormond: The theatrical version is explicitly autobiographical: she performs as herself and communicates directly with the audience.
Film required a different relationship.
By creating Emi as a separate character, Ormond transferred the question of belief into the fictional world. Instead of trying to convince theatergoers, Emi must convince the people around her.
Film Daily: The film compresses much of its emotional journey into one night at a roadside motel and an unexpected encounter between strangers. What attracted you to that setting and that structure?
Ormond: The motel offered anonymity, impermanence, and separation from Emi's everyday existence.
Two strangers without shared history could speak with unusual honesty. Their encounter becomes a confrontation with how profoundly Emi's life has changed.
Film Daily: How did you approach the visual world of the film — cinematography, color, production design and sound — to communicate experiences that are largely invisible to everybody except the person living through them?
Ormond: Rather than make chronic pain visually spectacular, she wanted the film to remain grounded.
Physical details, sound, and the surrounding environment communicate Emi's bodily experience without turning her suffering into a special effect.
Film Daily: Because the story is autobiographical, how did you decide what belonged to Olivia the person and what you were willing to give to Olivia the character?
Ormond: Creating Emi meant accepting that the character needed her own desires, imperfections, and autonomy.
She couldn't exist simply as a representation of Ormond's medical history. Allowing Emi to become a distinct fictional person ultimately made the storytelling more truthful.
HollyShorts and the power of being believed
Film Daily: Call Me Crazy premiered at HollyShorts in August 2026. What did reaching that milestone mean after taking the story from lived experience, to the stage, and finally to the screen?
Ormond: The premiere marked an emotional transition.
A story she had first lived, then performed alone, had become a collaborative film interpreted by an entire creative team.
Seeing it reach audiences in its new form felt like releasing something she had carried for years.
Film Daily: What conversations have audiences had with you after seeing Call Me Crazy, particularly people who have experienced chronic illness or struggled to have their symptoms taken seriously?
Ormond: Those conversations have been more meaningful to her than reviews.
People have shared experiences of being accused of exaggerating or imagining their symptoms.
The recurring response that stays with her is: "I thought I was the only one."
Film Daily: You have described your work as being concerned with underrepresented voices. What does authentic representation actually require from a filmmaker beyond simply putting those experiences onscreen?
Ormond: Representation requires complexity.
Characters need contradictions, humor, desire, and agency rather than existing merely to illustrate a social issue.
Emi is not simply a patient. She wants to be desired, powerful, and larger than life, while navigating the divided existence that chronic illness imposes.
Film Daily: You've now worked as a director, writer and performer. Has becoming an actor changed the way you intend to direct performers in your future films?
Ormond: Completely.
She now understands the vulnerability involved in allowing someone else to interpret a performance. Her approach has shifted toward exploring the possibilities within a script rather than expecting actors simply to reproduce what she originally imagined.
What's next for Olivia Ormond?
Film Daily: You're developing your first feature for production in early 2027, this time exploring mental health and its effects on relationships. What can you tell us about the story and the world you are creating?
Ormond: The feature will examine mental health, contemporary hyper-individualism, and the difficulty of loving another person while maintaining a sense of self.
Although very different from Call Me Crazy, it continues her exploration of people struggling to understand themselves and their relationships.
Film Daily: Looking across the work you have already created — from your Emmy-winning projects through Call Me Crazy — what do you now recognize as the defining characteristics of an Olivia Ormond story?
Ormond: Her stories focus on people who want to be understood, particularly those carrying experiences that aren't immediately visible to others.
Dialogue is especially important because people reveal themselves through conversation, sometimes precisely when they're trying to conceal something.
Her ambition is for audiences to leave with a different understanding of another human being.
As she puts it: "If there's one thing I hope defines an Olivia Ormond story, it's that you leave feeling like you actually met someone."
Film Daily: You've already moved successfully between documentary, commercial filmmaking, theater and narrative film. As you enter this next stage of your career, what do you want to build that you haven't had the opportunity to make yet?
Ormond: Her next objective is to complete a slate of feature films over the coming years while continuing to develop her work as an actress, writer, and filmmaker.
Why Call Me Crazy matters beyond the screen
There is something particularly unsettling about the central premise of Call Me Crazy: the possibility that a person can lose credibility simply by insisting on the truth of their own experience.
It's a subject that extends far beyond medical treatment.
Disbelief can operate inside relationships, institutions, workplaces, and families. The person seeking recognition becomes trapped in an exhausting cycle of explanation, while those with the power to validate their experience remain unconvinced.
Ormond's decision to approach that dynamic through comedy is what makes the project especially interesting.
Emi isn't presented as a saintly victim whose only purpose is to educate the audience about chronic illness.
She's complicated. She wants sex, attention, power, and pleasure. She wants to be seen as something other than a diagnosis.
And the comedy comes partly from the collision between those perfectly ordinary desires and the extraordinary disruption of living with chronic pain.
The motel setting sharpens that conflict.
Away from familiar surroundings, Emi encounters someone who doesn't already know her history. For a moment, she has the possibility of defining herself without the accumulated baggage of her illness.
But escaping a familiar environment doesn't mean escaping the body she inhabits.
It's a compelling dramatic contradiction, and one that explains why the story needed to evolve beyond its original theatrical form.
Onstage, Ormond could confront the audience directly. Onscreen, she could build a world in which belief, intimacy, and misunderstanding become the drama itself.
Conclusion: Olivia Ormond isn't asking for permission to be believed
From two Emmy Awards to the international fringe circuit and the HollyShorts screen, Olivia Ormond has established a career built on moving between disciplines without abandoning her central creative interests.
Her next feature, planned for early 2027, suggests an expansion of those concerns from the individual body to the complicated psychology of contemporary relationships.
But Call Me Crazy remains an especially revealing example of her storytelling philosophy.
It takes an experience defined by powerlessness and transforms it into an act of creative authority.
Ormond cannot rewrite what happened to her. She can, however, decide what that experience means as a story, who gets to hear it, and how it makes them feel.
And in a culture where people experiencing invisible illness are still fighting to be taken seriously, that creative decision carries considerable weight.
After all, the most disturbing question in Call Me Crazy isn't whether Emi is telling the truth.
It's why she has to work so hard to convince anyone.
