Anna Daniels
Tori Scott was only in ten episodes of Saved By The Bell, but left a stronger impact than most guest actors. The leather jacket-wearing biker girl who transitioned from Zack Morris’ enemy to friend to girlfriend came out of nowhere and vanished into thin air later. Leanna Creel, the actress who played Tori, also vanished from screens — but that’s because these days, she works behind the camera instead of in front of it.
Creel and her two sisters — identical triplets — got started in acting as teens. Creel was studying history at UCLA when she got the call to attend Bayside High for a ten-week shoot. She was a little older and her priorities were different, but got value out of her time on the show. After all, it’s where she found her true calling: producing.
During her time on the show, she realized the person she most wanted to be wasn’t Zack or Lisa or even Tori — it was Peter Engel, the show’s producer, because he was always doing something during and between takes. The restless Creel mostly left acting behind when Tori outright vanished from Bayside. Tori was — per Saved By The Bell tradition — never mentioned again, but Creel went back to UCLA and got an MFA in film production.
In 1998, she co-founded Ignite Entertainment, the film production company behind But I’m a Cheerleader and other late ’90s teen movies. The company was later sold to Lionsgate, and Creel has worked on various web series and smaller projects since. She now runs a full-service production company, Creel Studio, with her wife, Rinat Greenberg. On the company’s About Us page, she notes that she “finally traded in the Harley for a Vespa.”
Written by: Looper
