The first time actress Sarah Allen saw a real-life medical procedure she nearly fainted. It was while prepping for a role in the short-lived medical drama Jozi-H that she watched a doctor perform the routine procedure on a cancer patient. Not a squeamish person, she’d expected to witness the procedure without incident, but when it started, Allen just about passed out.
“It was the most bizarre thing,” says the 34-year-old actress, “it challenges your perception of our bodies when you actually see the knife splitting the skin.”
Seven years later, Allen’s back in the medical drama game, and this time, she’s hoping to challenge a few of the audience’s perceptions of the genre.
Allen, a graduate of the Bayview-based Canadian Film Centre, is currently starring in Global’s well-received Monday night series Remedy.
The first season is about halfway through its run and has won praise for deftly combining surgical blood and guts with an engaging family drama and a Downton Abbey–like exploration of relationships between those who work above and below stairs at a hospital.
The show centres on the Conners, a clan for whom medicine is the family business. They are variously doctors, nurses or, in the case of the family’s black sheep, a med school dropout who has become an orderly.
In defiance of good sense and, presumably, some ethics guidelines, somehow they’ve all wound up working together in the fictional Bethune General Hospital in Toronto.
As ICU nurse and eldest sibling Sandy Conner, Allen is at the centre of much of the family drama and is often called upon to inject a dose of compassion into the coldly pragmatic maneuverings of the doctors in the family.
It’s a role that seems perfect for Allen, who, in person, is friendly and unpretentious. When we meet at a café on Queen West that’s not far from her Roncesvalles home, she’s wearing a casual grey T-shirt and has her hair tied back ready for the yoga class she’s heading to after our interview. Sitting at an enormous wooden table that takes up most of the café’s upstairs, the native of Nelson, B.C., basks in the sunshine streaming through the double-height window.
“It’s worth going through Toronto’s winter just for the spring,” she says.
Allen has called Toronto home for more than a decade, having moved here after graduating from the National Theatre School in Montreal, and has spent much of her career working in TV and film. Her resumé is packed with innovative shows, including Being Human and Little Mosque on the Prairie, but in some ways Remedy is the most ambitious yet, setting out as it does to find a new take on a crowded genre.
Allen admits that the first time she read the scripts before her auditions, she had a hard time pinning down the show in her head and says she didn’t see it’s hidden depths. Even the auditions themselves had unexpected layers, turning into an arduous process involving four callbacks and eight-hour reading sessions that she jokingly likens to a task from a Greek heroic epic.
“I think they really wanted to know that they had the right people and the right family dynamic. The cast were all scattered across Canada and the United States, so they had to keep bringing us together with their choices and mixing and matching us.”
The show’s producer, Greg Spottiswood, had Allen read for both the role of Sandy and that of her onscreen sister, Dr. Melissa Conner. In the end, he elected to put her in the nurse’s blue scrubs rather than a white coat, and it’s a decision Allen is just fine with. When it comes to her co-workers, Allen has nothing but praise, particularly for a fellow Torontonian thespian Enrico Colantoni, who plays Dr. Allen Conner, who heads Bethune General Hospital.
Says Allen, “I don’t know if Enrico is an incredibly thorough character actor, but he is the father on the show and he is like that in life. He has this paternal warmth to him that’s so lovely to be around, especially doing what we do, but he is just easy to be with and he makes everyone feel very comfortable.”
But work for this actress is never without its challenges. Having played a surgical resident on Jozi-H, she shudders as she recalls the hours of repetition it takes an actor to master the strings of polysyllabic medical terms that are the hallmark of a TV doctor’s dialogue. “I’ll be honest, sometimes I would look at the scripts of Sarah Canning, who plays Melissa, and I’d quietly thank the heavens that I was not cast as her. Sandy doesn’t have to do quite as much of that.”
Her role in Remedy is the most recent part in a busy few years in Allen’s career. In 2010, she was among the inaugural class at the Canadian Film Centre’s actors’ conservatory, a six-month course to nurture onscreen talent where Allen had the opportunity to grill such figures as Kiefer Sutherland on how to make it in the industry.
“We did spend a lot of time acting, but it was more a lesson in the Canadian industry and being able to explore the relationships between actors, writers and directors,” recalls Allen, adding that previously she had been scared of approaching directors for fear she would say the wrong thing.
Her time at the CFC seems to have been well spent as she emerged from it to be named one of TIFF 2011’s “rising stars.” Contacts she made there were also instrumental in getting her an audition for a movie role in The Husband, a black comedy in which she plays a wife doing jail time for sleeping with her 14-year-old student. The film premiered at TIFF last year and began playing in select theatres around Canada in March. She was also recently seen in Bravo’s police drama 19-2.
With filming on her projects wrapped, Allen is now getting to enjoy audience reactions to her work.
When we talk, she is preparing to fly to B.C. for the opening of The Husband there. She plays it down as an elaborate scheme to see her family, but she mentions that her high school drama teacher will be doing the introduction ahead of the movie, and she’s clearly touched by the gesture of hometown support. “It’s going to be hilarious and wonderful, and I’m going to be so proud,” she says.
And if Allen and the cast of Remedy succeed in their task of reinventing the medical drama, it’ll sure give them another thing to talk about back in Nelson.
