Willa Ford made a risky — and ultimately successful — career change after riding the wave of pop superstardom in the early 2000s.
With Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera emerging as major music acts in 1999, the 18-year-old Ford (real name Amanda Lee Williford) was initially signed to Atlantic Records under the stage name “Mandah.” Record executives eventually used her real last name as inspiration for an alternative moniker, “Willa Ford,” to avoid confusion with another emerging pop princess, Mandy Moore.
Ford soon landed a coveted opening act slot for the Backstreet Boys’ “Into the Millennium” tour in 2000 before the release of her debut single, “I Wanna Be Bad” the following year. The single garnered solid early success, but Ford had the unfortunate timing of releasing her follow-up single, “Did Ya’ Understand That,” on September 11, 2001.
During a 2017 interview with Billboard, Ford reminisced about how her career trajectory was partially derailed by the September 11 terrorist attacks and the global events that followed.
“Everything that happened that day froze; the world stood still, as it should have,” she recalled. “My second single didn’t do well because anything that launched that day kind of got canned. I know that sounds silly, but on radio they slate things, but it really fell to the wayside. I didn’t think it was a big deal because we were making a new album anyway.”
Ford recalled her string of bad luck continuing when her record label was sold and the executive who’d championed her career left the company.
“I felt like this pop machine had taken me and put me in the wash cycle and I had been spinning out of control,” she recalled. “I wanted some time to refocus myself. I started re-evaluating what I was doing.”
Throughout the early 2000s, Ford became a spokesperson for Pantene Pro-V’s ProVoice campaign and filled in as a guest host for MTV’s TRL and Say What Karaoke, before landing her own short-lived web series I Bet You Will in 2002.
At the same time, her love life garnered plenty of headlines while she was dating Backstreet Boys member Nick Carter. After the couple split up in the early 2000s, Ford admitted to the Associated Press that the high-profile relationship was difficult to navigate.
“We learned a lot together. We went through so much at such a young age,” Ford said. “We were put in front of all these people so quickly and were so ridiculed.”
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The singer added: “I think at the end of the day, he knows that I caught the brunt of it. Like, I really got the bad part because I wasn’t the boy band celebrity at the time. I think he feels bad that it happened.”
While her brief romance with Backstreet Boys member Carter remains a hallmark of early 2000s pop lore, Ford’s two marriages were decidedly lower key. She was with hockey player Mike Modano from 2007 to 2012, before tying the knot with retired NFL star and community activist Ryan Nece in 2015. Ford and Nece welcomed son Elijah Everett Mandel in 2016.
Ford was never able to recapture the momentum from “I Wanna Be Bad,” so she made a transition into acting without ever releasing a second album. Ford landed the title role in the direct-to-DVD movie The Anna Nicole Smith Story and starred opposite Gilmore Girls’ Jared Padalecki in the 2009 reboot of Friday the 13th, which made nearly $100 million at the box office. She has continued acting — often in TV guest roles — up to the present day.
Ford pivoted her career once again in the late 2000s to work as an interior designer for A-list clients such as Steve Aoki and French Montana, with her work being featured on The Kardashians’ star Scott Disick’s short-lived E! docu-series Flip It Like Disick. She told The Hollywood Reporter in 2019 that she hoped to inspire other women with her career transition.
“I want to empower other women and let them know that it’s OK to pivot careers,” Ford explained. “Even if you don’t have a college degree, you’re still worthy of making a transition. I’ve been told, ‘You were a pop singer. Why should I think of you as an interior designer?’ Well, you should take me seriously because I’ve worked my tush off, and it’s been seven years now that I’ve run my own company.”
As Ford reflected on her “pivot” away from music, she suggested that many don’t understand “the schedule that you keep and how much everybody needs from you slowly chips away at you.”
“There are multiple reasons [why I left music behind],” she insisted. “Look, you need to have success with your singles. That’s one reason I left. But I had come to a point where I couldn’t do it anymore. I remember breaking down and calling my mother on the phone. And I said to her, ‘I don’t feel right anymore, Mom.’ And she said, ‘You pack your suitcase and come home right now.’ And so I did.”
Ford went on, “I left New York, got on a plane and went home to Florida. I needed to take that minute to breathe. And then I watched a lot of people have breakdowns later on because they didn’t take that time. It was part of my journey, and it was the healthiest thing I could do at the time.”
Ford continues to work in interior design in Los Angeles to this day and recently celebrated her tenth wedding anniversary in April 2015.
