“Spirituality and spiritual work on oneself is no longer a choice these days, but rather a necessity. If you desire a change in your reality, first make a change on the inside,” the Slovak actor and spiritualist Silvia Šuvadová told me.
You went through a difficult period taking care of your sick father. How hard is a time like that to handle, when you know everything is heading towards the inevitable?
Those three years with my father were the shortest years of my life. As soon as I knew the end could come
at any moment, it taught me to live intensely in the present. It also taught me to live with great gratitude for each and every day. My Dad’s passing hurt me very much. Especially the circumstances of it. I finally understood that the more you love, the stronger the grief is. And mine was immense. I had to start educating myself on grief, to even be able to survive it in the first place. A course by the American coach David Kessler helped me a great deal.
And what about your mother? Where did you grow up?
My Mom still lives in Dolní Kubín in the north of Slovakia, and we have a great relationship. My childhood was amazing. I grew up in the north of Slovakia, in Dolní Kubín in the Orava region. I spent the weekends and summers in a tiny village called Párnica since that’s where my parents were from. My sister Andrejka and I were very loved. Not just by my parents, but by my grandmothers and two aunts as well. Aunt Ela and Aunt Marka, my Dad’s sisters, didn’t have children of their own, so we essentially ended up having three mothers. My sister and I are now taking care of Aunt Ela. When we were little, we would run in the fields, pick raspberries and nuts, or come up with theater skits for the other kids with my sister Andrejka. My Mom and Dad divorced when I left for Bratislava to pursue acting. I was eighteen years old back then.
You ended up becoming an actress, you played the sensual cellist in the Oscar- winning movie Kolja. What are your memories of the shoot?
I have fond memories of the shoot. I mostly recall the kindness of the actor and screenwriter Zdeněk Svěrák. We had a couple of intimate scenes together, and I was just 22 years old. He helped me overcome my fear and uncertainty. The filming was lovely, the atmosphere fantastic. It was one of the nicest shoots I’ve ever been a part of. No stress, just good times, joy, and love.
The movie The Devil's Signature will be hitting theaters soon, starring you. How would you describe it?
It’s an original movie. It’s a combination of a mockumentary and found footage, it’s a comedy, it’s a drama, the audience can enjoy themselves while also learning something. The movie tells a story about a part of our history, about things nobody knows or talks about, but it’s not just a documentary. It’s a movie about how you can start something, stand for something, and still get crushed by the system. The movie was directed by the amazing Marek Dobeš.
What’s your role?
I play Zuzana Kociánová, and I have a soft spot for her. She reminds me a little bit of myself, a little bit of my father, and a little bit of the time we all live in overall. These days, it’s utterly inevitable that such heroes exist, trying to build a new world. People unafraid to peek behind the curtain. To reveal different forms of manipulation. Zuzana is a character who changes and influences the things and people around her. I feel like every single one of us should leave behind something in this life that will change the future.
You spent sixteen years living in America? Why?
An American director who had come to Prague to shoot his movie noticed me in Kolja. Soon after that, I traveled to Los Angeles to put some finishing touches on that movie. With the first breath I took at the famous LAX airport, I felt like it was my new home. And so I gradually started arranging for actors’ work visas, and completed all the commitments in Slovakia I still had going on at the time. I ended up moving to LA in 2002.
What did this experience give you?
A new lease on life. I’m a very sensitive person, and the relationships and situations in show business are fairly difficult to process. And whenever I didn’t quite know what to do about my sensitivity, I suffered quietly, on the inside. It gradually started manifesting in my physical health, and I had a number of chronic diseases. I might have been popular in Slovakia at that time, but I wasn’t healthy or happy. That all changed in LA. Aside from acting and modeling, I turned to personal development. And I started meditating. After some time, I not only healed my body, but I also learned how to work with my emotions, and my energy in general.
How do you perceive male and female energy? Can we women ever understand men?
I think I’m still learning to understand men. My biggest breakthrough was when I understood that all my life, I’d been choosing men who reminded me of my Dad. My Dad gave me so much love. But a lot of people going through a spiritual journey as intense as mine are mostly single. Even though I feel like being single is a bit of a trend nowadays. I watched this one interview between the actresses Charlize Theron and Drew Barrymore, both of them single women. They said that they’d rather be alone than in a complicated relationship. Once upon a time, I was always in some kind of a relationship. But I think people should mostly learn to know themselves, and learn how to keep themselves company. I feel really good like this right now. We’ll see what the future brings.
What’s your worldview? What is your takeaway from life?
I believe in goodness and love. I’m convinced that great changes lie ahead. I think that neither our planet Earth nor God (the Universe) want to participate any longer in a world where money, titles, power, and fame are more important values than love, goodness, human life, and harmony. I believe that we’re entering a new age, and everything will start changing rapidly. My clients and students are among those already sensing this change. Those who yet resist, who think that we don’t need to work on ourselves, that things will keep working out just fine, those are the people that I think will have an increasingly harder time of it.
SPIRITUALIST
Silvia has been devoted to spiritualism for many years. “My Spiritual School online project, for my Slovak and Czech supporters, is my crowning jewel,” she says. “We offer memberships for a month, six months, or a year. Each week, I record new lessons, meditations, I broadcast live, and every now and then all of us also meet in person. I help take my students very high up into the Light, but then we also delve very deep into working with our emotions, aches, and traumas. A new feature is an in-person meeting, either in a group or one- on-one. Everything is in Slovak for now, but I’m planning on switching to English as well.”
CV BOX
Silvia Šuvadová (born April 4, 1973, in Ružomberok) is a Slovak actress and spiritualist. } She studied acting at the College of Performing Arts Bratislava. After that, she was a guest across different theaters – the Astorka Korzo ’90 Theater, the Nitra-based Andrej Bagár Theater, Zvolen-based Jozef Gregor Tajovský Theater, and the Slovak National Theater drama company.
She appeared in movies such as Kolja, The Devil’s Signature, or the Satan’s Stratagem trilogy. In Hollywood, she appeared in movies like Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift, or Polanski Unauthorized.
In 2002, she traveled to Los Angeles, where she ended up living for 16 years. She shot 20 independent movies and worked in the production of four different film projects.
In 2010, she became more interested in the spiritual. She studied at the Dolphin Star Temple Mystery School in North Carolina and also spent some time in India.
She returned to Slovakia in 2018. She lives in Bratislava and founded the Spiritual School.
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