Malena Cunningham Anderson was a fixture on Birmingham airwaves as a news anchor at NBC 13 for about a dozen years before leaving the anchor desk in 2004, staying in Alabama another decade as a media consultant and exercise franchise owner.

And though she left Birmingham for Pennsylvania (and now Atlanta) in 2014, she’s back on TV here in what she calls a “new season” of her life – as a professional actress.

Former Birmingham news anchor turned actress Malena Cunningham Anderson.

Anderson, who will participate in a panel Friday at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Birmingham, has her biggest role to date, appearing in Lifetime Movie Network’s “Beware the Night Nurse.” It airs Sunday night on the cable network, but it’s also available on demand.

“Up until this, my biggest role was one scene with three lines, but this is 15 scenes and whole lot of lines,” Anderson says from Atlanta, where she lives with her husband, Carl, an attorney. “It was exciting and scary at the same time.”

That about sums up the past few years for Anderson, who came to acting after a 23-year journalism career and more than a decade as a media consultant.

When COVID-19 hit, Anderson, living in Atlanta with her husband and her mother, decided it was time for a change.

“I wanted to do something else, because I had been a homemaker and caretaker, and I was sitting on my back porch and said, ‘Lord, find me something to do,’” she recalls. “The next week, I got a random email from a casting company looking for people to do background work, so I sent in my photo.”

That first gig – a scene with Michelle Pfeiffer as Betty Ford in the Showtime series “The First Lady” that was eventually cut – led to another on the set of the TV series “Cobra Kai” a day later, and a young actor suggested she call his agent.

Anderson’s background as a news anchor was one of the reasons the agent signed her.

“She said that everyone looking for a news anchor and a news reporter want people who have actually done it before,” Anderson says. Her age – she’s now 64 – was also a plus, as she could play mothers, grandmothers, doctors, lawyers, judges and others.

On the set of the movie “Honk for Jesus” are, from left, Regina Hall, Natashia Fuller and Malena Cunningham Anderson. (Photo courtesy of Malena Cunningham Anderson)

Anderson signed with her agent in May 2021 and quickly booked a movie opposite actress Regina Hall.

Though that scene was cut, too, Anderson was bitten by the acting bug and began taking classes.

Though her news anchoring background helped, it was all new for the former journalist.

“It’s two totally different skillsets,” she says. “When we’re anchoring, we’re reading the teleprompter. With acting, it helped that I wasn’t nervous with a camera and nervous with people moving around behind the scenes. I was comfortable on camera.”

Most of Anderson’s training has come on the job, appearing in commercials, twice on the Fox TV series “The Resident,” and, in larger roles, in the streaming series “Judge Me Not” and Lifetime’s “Beware the Night Nurse.”

“This was the first movie where I had a bunch of lines,” Anderson says of the Lifetime movie, which filmed in Boston. “It was like my first days in a newsroom, where you’re hired and you’ve got to prove yourself and show people that you know what you’re doing. I got a lot of compliments from the director. That’s when I knew maybe there is something here.”

Malena Cunningham Anderson on the set of “The Resident.” (Photo courtesy of Malena Cunningham Anderson)

Though things have slowed down a bit because of the actors’ and writers’ strikes that have stopped many productions, Anderson will appear in the upcoming “The Exorcist: Believer,” which opens in theaters Oct. 13, as a news anchor interviewing a character played by Jennifer Nettles.

And in the meantime, she is doing work behind the camera. She has written a short film and is working on a longer one.

“They say to write something based on what you know, and this is based on a news anchor,” she says. “So much content is needed now with all of these streaming services. I want to be able to act and write and produce.”

Malena Cunningham Anderson, center, on the set of “Beware the Night Nurse” in Boston. (Photo courtesy of Malena Cunningham Anderson)

She’s looking forward to coming back to Birmingham next week and participating in a panel, talking about her path from news anchor to actor.

“I’m coming back as a reinvented news anchor and a career that’s starting to take off in this industry,” Anderson says. “It’s all a surprise. Never in my life had I thought about acting. Never. Ever.”