HEY, BAYVIEW TEENS: someone’s watching you. No, don’t worry, she’s not out to steal your iPhone: Sarah Gadon’s more interested in lifting your slang and mannerisms.
“I love watching the neighbourhood high school kids walk to school,”says the 23-year-old actor, who lives just on the edge of Bayview. “You get to see their body language and how they talk to their friends and all the goofing off that happens.”
Though Gadon is a few years removed from high school herself, the petite blonde actor is still most often cast as a teenager. “I find it really beneficial as an actor to live around here,” she says, “especially playing a teenager.You can lift so much from the current youth culture.”
Gadon grew up in the neighbourhood — in fact, she still lives in her parents’house while she attends the University of Toronto part-time and travels frequently for work.
Her list of alma maters is typical of someone who began a film career at a young age: Gadon attended Claude Watson School for the Arts until Grade 8 and then spent a year at the area’s Cardinal Carter. “I loved going to arts schools,” says Gadon. “It’s such a positive environment. But you really have to be there and be rooted in the community in order to get the most out of it.”
By Grade 9, Gadon was already taking a lot of time out of school to work on film and television sets, so after a year at Cardinal Carter, she decided to switch to Vaughan Road Academy’s INTERACT program, a flexible program for professional kids.
Gadon has always seized the opportunities that come with being an actor in Toronto. “If you look at my resumé, it’s half Canadian television shows mixed with a few Canadian indie films and then really recognizable U.S. projects, and it’s a great blend working here, because you get both.”
Gadon has been working in film since she was 11, and her resumé runs the gamut from typical Toronto child-actor fare, like Are You Afraid of the Dark?, to appearances on made-for-TV-movies like Mom’s on Strike and features films including 2007’s Charlie Bartlett. She’s also voiced characters on cartoon series such as Ruby Gloom and Total Drama Island. More recently, Gadon has had recurring roles on Toronto-centric shows Being Erica and The Border.
Gadon also recently worked with Daniel Craig on Jim Sheridan’s forthcoming thriller Dream House, which should come out sometime next year. “It was really intimidating working with [Sheridan] at first, because he had this method where he pushed you to alienate yourself from the material and then speak it in your own words, and he was very intense,” she says. “But what was great was seeing him do that to me, and then seeing him do that to Daniel Craig.I was like, yes!”
Though Gadon may look like your conventional blonde starlet, it’s the independent and cult projects that really ignite her passion. Right now, she can be seen on both the big and small screens in projects that have become instant cult favourites.
On the big screen, Gadon appears in Leslie, My Name is Evil,a campy,raucous, and thoroughly bizarre romantic comedy inspired by the trial of “Manson Girl” Leslie van Houten. The film, which is directed by Monkey Warfare director Reginald Harkema, premiered at TIFF last fall,but is only now starting to play in theatres. (Torontonians can catch it downtown at the Yonge and Dundas AMC.)
On the small screen, Happy Town marks Gadon’s first gig as a series regular, and it’s been “a real trip,” she says. She’s the only native Torontonian in the cast,so she loved being able to show her out-oftowner co-stars around town.
“It’s really great to rediscover the city with people who aren’t from it,”she says.
The show, an American crime drama series that premiered at the end of April on A-Channel in Canada, was shot in and around Toronto, the bucolic vistas of Oakville and Port Hope standing in for small-town Minnesota. Unfortunately, the show had a bit of a rough premiere, though it has developed a cult following of David Lynch fans who see comparisons to the surreal filmmaker’s iconic series Twin Peaks.
Both examine the dark underbelly of a seemingly idyllic small town, and both have a supernatural edge to them as well.The series has been temporarily suspended,but ABC has said it will air the remaining episodes this month.
Happy Town marks Gadon’s first gig as a series regular, and it’s been “a real trip,” she says. “It has a very cult-series vibe,” says Gadon, who plays Georgia Bravin, a neglected teenage girl from the wrong side of the tracks who babysits for the series’ central family. “When I watch the show,it doesn’t feel mainstream at all,and there are a lot of obscure cinematic and pop culture references.”
The obscure cinematic references are something she especially appreciates, as she is majoring in cinema studies at U of T. “It’s great because it’s a very analytical program,” she says. “Not very practical, but I get a lot of the practical side of things working on sets, so it’s a nice balance.”
Not one to pass up any opportunity that comes her way, Gadon even asked the producers of Happy Town if they’d mind if she shadowed them during preproduction.
“I wanted to be more emotionally invested in the project,” she says. “As television actors, you often just arrive at a point in the process, and it’s harder to be aware of the bigger picture.”
They said yes,and she got herself a free crash course in producing a television series. “I learned a lot about budgets and crew and unions and everything that needs to happen on a film set,” she says. “It’s almost like you need an MBA to be a producer,there’s so much technical stuff to learn!”
She’s just as enthusiastic speaking about the “less practical” side. Gadon’s eyes light up when asked about her favourite filmmakers, and she launches into an enthusiastic rave about Agnès Varda and French New Wave Cinema.
Now that Happy Town’s wrapped, Gadon is off to Germany to shoot A Dangerous Method, a David Cronenberg film about Carl Jung,Sigmund Freud and the birth of psychoanalysis.
“It’s been a really exciting process leading up to that,”she says,“because I’ve been going to London for costume fittings,and all our costume fittings are at Cosprop, which is like this mecca of period drama costumes for pretty much all film and theatre in Europe. It’s just amazing in there.”
But as exciting as the prospect of travelling is, Gadon is always happy to return home to Toronto. “Living here feels like a really great retreat,” she says. “You have everything that’s great about Toronto at your fingertips, but there’s something that’s way more relaxed about living here. And there’s a lot of nature around here, too.”
Gadon still doesn’t know where her career might take her, but she knows that Toronto will always be home. “Everyone needs a home base,” she says. “This is mine.”
