'Smallville' star Laura Vandervoort on combatting typecasting, voicing her opinion on set: 'Being put in a box, it can be very frustrating'
Born and raised in Toronto, Laura Vandervoort is a force whenever she's on screen. Beginning her acting career at age 12, from classic Canadian projects like Goosebumps and Are You Afraid of the Dark?, to shows with huge fandoms like Smallville and The Handmaid's Tale, Vandervoort does it all with an infectious presence, which she's also bringing behind the camera as a director.
As Vandervoort described, she was "introverted" as a child, a "tomboy" and "super nerdy," a kid who spent most of her time playing sports. But when she saw the 1991 movie My Girl, starring Anna Chlumsky, that sparked a new interest for her.
"I'd never seen someone my age emote those kind of feelings before, and it kind of stirred something in me," Vandervoort told Yahoo Canada. "And I was like, 'I want to do whatever that is.' And my parents were like, 'Absolutely no. Child actors, bad thing.' But eventually they were like, 'You know what? This is probably good for her. She's pretty shy.'"
That led to the talented actor starting her career with background work on projects like Road to Avonlea and Harriet the Spy, and then moving into commercials, eventually getting an agent and working on beloved Disney Channel Original Movies (DCOMs), including Mom's Got a Date with a Vampire, with Caroline Rhea and Charles Shaughnessy.
From Canadian productions, Vandervoort made the move to the U.S., really growing in her career at a time when it was important to go to Los Angeles, participate in pilot season, and just be across the border for meetings and to audition in-person. Ultimately, the actor knew the L.A. life wasn't for her.
"I did move and didn't love it," she said. "Wasn't my thing. Still pretty introverted. Didn't go out. Didn't party. Didn't do the whole L.A. thing, which is probably how I never got into trouble as a kid actor."
"But it's not necessary anymore. Especially since COVID, actors can audition anywhere by self-tape. There's pros and cons to that. ... I did find though, the minute I moved to L.A., all of my jobs were in Canada. So it was almost like Canada was like, 'Oh, she left. We want her more.' And I think that's kind of how it was back then, but that's definitely changed."
In terms of the roles that really excite Vandervoort, she likes playing characters who are far from who she is in real life.
"With typecasting and being put in a box, it can be very frustrating," she said. "So if I'm given an opportunity to ... just completely change who I am, not just visually, but mentally, ... I find that so juicy and exciting."
"It's hard to find roles like that right now. So you find you're either creating them, or you're trying to collaborate with other artists to create a project that doesn't exist for all of you to do. You want to always change people's opinions about who you are and what you're capable of, and challenge yourself."For Canadian teens and tweens in the 2000s, Instant Star was the perfect TV obsession. A young teen, Jude Harrison (Alexz Johnson), wins a singing competition that launches her music career.
Vandervoort played Jude's sister, Sadie, who becomes quite jealous of all the attention her younger sister starts receiving. Admittedly, Sadie may have not been a favourite character for many, given a pretty one-dimensional arc to play with, but Vandervoort is not closing the door to bringing Sadie back, with a storyline she deserves.
"Instant Star was great for me to get my feet wet, to play a character that I could not relate to in any way," Vandervoort said. "I actually hated Sadie. I found her so annoying, but it was great."
"The cast is great. Everyone's doing wonderful now. Tim Rozon is busy, he and I were just talking about doing a movie together, because I haven't worked with him in so long. And I think Alexz started something online about having a reunion, which we're all in for. I just was like, please give Sadie a storyline, because she never really had one. She was an annoying brat."
Interestingly, while Vandervoort was on Instant Star she booked Smallville, and at one point was doing both shows at the same time, travelling between Vancouver and Toronto as Instant Star approached its end. But the actor almost wasn't able to move on to Smallville.
"[Instant Star] was a good place for me to kind of learn the ropes, and then getting on to Smallville, which was a huge U.S. show, moving out of the city for the first time as a teenager, driving myself around Vancouver, 18-hour work days, stunts. ... I'm grateful for it," Vandervoort said.
"I think if I recall, Epitome Pictures, who did Instant Star, would block shoot my scenes, which is essentially, we'll shoot all your scenes in a day. But they weren't going to let me do Smallville when I got cast. Contractually, they weren't going to let it happen. And thankfully they did, because it made a huge difference for my career."
For an entire generation, Vandervoort is Supergirl (Kara), starring alongside Tom Welling as Clark Kent in Smallville, making her first appearance on the show in Season 7.
"I've always been drawn to stronger, independent, tough women, and growing up doing martial arts, I just felt like I could relate to trying to portray a strong female character, which you'd then later see in my career," Vandervoort highlighted. "But I auditioned for it and didn't think anything of it. I just put myself on tape in Canada and sent it off, and it took months, and then we got a call."
"We were actually at our cottage and they were like, 'You need to be in L.A. tomorrow.' So we drove home, I got on a plane and I screen tested, with three other girls. And it was an awkward situation, because they had all of us in one room and no one was talking. And me, as a Canadian, I'm like, 'Hi. How are you guys? Nice to meet you!' ... We did the screen test, and then the producer came back out and said everyone could go home, but me. And I thought I was in trouble, but it turns out I got the job."
Vandervoort stressed that joining Smallville was one of the best things that could have happened to her as a young actor, because it was an "iconic" show that allowed her to play a female superhero, specifically a character that was particularly underserved in other projects.
"Meeting young fans at conventions, young girls who looked up to me, was really cool," she said. "Having come from a character like Sadie to someone who's a little more confident in her own shoes, and who little girls looked up to, was very cool for me."
As Smallville fans will know, Kristin Kreuk, who played Lana Lang, has publicly reflected on her time on the show and has said that she didn't love how some episodes portrayed her character, and objectified Lana. But also, as a young actor, Kreuk didn't feel that she had the space to speak up.
Vandervoort shared a similar sentiment about the ability to express opinions as a young woman on set.
"As a kid, I didn't voice any opinions. Of course I had them, but I didn't think it was my place. I was hired to do a job and I will do, to the best of my ability, whatever they need me to do," Vandervoort said. "And I was working with adults, so I wanted to be an adult. I wanted to be professional and just make everyone happy. I'm sure my therapist would tell you, later in life that's not great."
"But since then, as a grown-up, I have found my voice, and I have used it, and the world didn't end. And people are collaborative and understanding and want to hear your side of it. But I think that comes ... once you have some respect in this industry. It took a long time for people to listen to me. Maybe I was trying to voice it, but I wasn't heard until I had done enough in my career for people to stop and listen. And I would say, as a kid, I didn't enjoy the process, and now I do, because I realize the world doesn't end if you forget a line. You're meant to enjoy this process as an actor. ... If I would have been able to talk to her as a young actor, I would have said, 'Just enjoy it. This is a cool job and it's not the end of the world. Just enjoy the process.'"
Vandervoort's exit on the show became a big topic of conversation for Smallville fans, leaving after one season, only coming back for small appearances after Season 7. But without social media at the time, it's something the actor has to respond to now, at places like conventions, more than she even did at the time. Vandervoort also shared that there were things she would have changed about her character, if she was able to at the time.
"I definitely would have changed a few things about Kara, my character, and her story arc, and her personality and her wardrobe," Vandervoort said. "But I know that people liked what they did with her at the time the show was existing in the world."
But one of the great TV disappointments is the cancellation of V after just two seasons. The sci-fi drama, based on the 1980s miniseries, about a extraterrestrial species arriving on earth. In addition to Vandervoort, the cast includes Elizabeth Mitchell, Morris Chestnut, Joel Gretsch, Morena Baccarin, Scott Wolf and Rekha Sharma.
"I was upset. That was an incredible show, ABC, great ratings, incredible cast who have all gone on to do huge things, and we were just getting into the flow of it," Vandervoort said. "We never found out why it was cancelled. I think within a day we got three different answers as, oh it's going to be a miniseries now, we're going to do one more episode, and then suddenly we were just done."
"I was having a great time, especially towards the end. I would have been playing two characters, my evil twin and myself. It was a wild show. I got to do some crazy stuff. I remember the most challenging part of shooting it was that my character couldn't share emotions. So you'd think that would be the easiest job in the world, but it was so hard for me, because you want to express through your eyes. And I grew up expressing, and that was an interesting, surprising challenge for me."
But in 2016 Vandervoort had to pass on the "Supergirl" baton, in some ways, when the series Supergirl, starring Melissa Benoist as the title character, was released.
"That came about because I met one of the producers at an award show in Los Angeles, and he was like, 'Hey, we have this new show. We'd love for you to kind of give the nod of approval and come on,'" Vandervoort explained. "I always wanted to see that character have her own show and I said, 'Can I be a villain and just look nothing like myself?' So they came up with Indigo."
"It was the first season for [Melissa], so I made sure to just be respectful, and I'm just here for this job, but it's always fun to be a villain. It's more fun than being a superhero, because ... you're not set into a box. I was with Kara, because there were certain expectations for that character, but with Indigo, which was a made-up character, I could just be very sneaky."
A project Vandervoort described as "one of the best experiences" in her life was a small budget short film called Age of Dysphoria, written by Vandervoort and Zoe Robyn, directed by Jessica Petelle. The main reason it's so important to Vandervoort is because she got to work with the late Gordon Pinsent.
"He also was a relative of mine and he was my mentor since I was a kid," Vandervoort shared. "He came to my first real set on Goosebumps. Came into my trailer, gave me the spiel about how to behave, how to be respectful."
"[I] was in awe the whole time we were filming that, just watching him. And it was surreal, because ... we'd never been on camera together, and it meant so much to me. ... I had trouble keeping the tears from falling just doing scenes with him. And the full circle part of it is Age of Dysphoria was his last project, and he was on my first project. So for whatever reason, it felt very serendipitous."
What Vandervoort's resume proves is that even when her time on a project is limited, she makes an impact. That includes her role in The Handmaid's Tale Season 4, in which she plays Daisy, who worked at the original Jezebels, surviving after Winslow's death.
"It was a short lived experience, but one of the highlights for me," Vandervoort said. "Being on a show that dealt with those topics, that I was already a fan of, politically I loved what they were doing, and Elisabeth Moss is just an idol for me."
"I was petrified to do my scenes with her, and just kept quiet and watched her, and watched how she handled the set. ... She was just a boss. And I was so impressed and it really inspired me to want to get more behind the camera. We did our scenes together and I was like, 'Oh my God, I got through it.' ... She was lovely and sent me a DM [saying] how it was nice to work with me. ... You don't have to do that, so that made it a very special moment for me. I kept that message, screenshotted it, and then I look at it sometimes just to be like, after all these years, you're getting to work with people that you really admire."
Taking the lead behind the camera is exactly what Vandervoort did with the short thriller film she wrote, directed and produced, My Soul to Take. It's about a young woman, played by Jenny Raven, as a software update on her phone unlocks a dream world.
"I wrote My Soul to Take during COVID, I was working more than ever, which is odd, flying and shooting Christmas movies or whatever it was, and so I was quarantining when it was what you had to do, for 14 days in between each show," she explained. "So I was alone a lot and I had trouble sleeping, and so I downloaded a sleep app that sort of just walks you through a story and helps you fall asleep."
"I just thought how disturbing it was, for whatever reason. I've always been into kind of darker M Night. Shyamalan, Hitchcock and Tim Burton. ... So instead of sleeping, like a crazy person I got up and wrote for three days, and wrote the first script I've finished. ... I sent it off to a producer friend and I was like, 'Do we have something here?' And she said yes. And we got the team together. I did an Indiegogo platform to raise all the funds for it, and sold all of my Smallville merchandise to fund it, and cast some incredible friends in the show. And then somehow got Colm Feore to say yes. We shot it in three days and it was terrifying."
In terms of actually being able to get the funds to make the film, Vandervoort said it was "scary," but she was "determined" to make it work.
"The fans showed up. They made it happen," she said.
"I didn't think I could direct, and once I had the team together and I had my [director of photography], Kim Derko, ... she helped me through it the whole time. ... I maybe couldn't tell her the lens that I wanted, but I could tell her visually what I saw in my head. ... She was the technical side of it."
What's compelling about My Soul to Take is the way that Vandervoort leaned into the idea of curating yourself for an audience, linked to particularly poignant messaging of being addicted to being constantly online, our dependence on technology, but ultimately feeling isolated.
"Social media is a double-edged sword," Vandervoort said. "I use it. I'm guilty of it. I play the game. But at that time and even now, I really didn't love what it was doing to my self-esteem and to the thoughts I had about myself, and my career."
"You'd see other actors posting their announcements, they've been cast in this, and like anyone you want to take a break from feeling like a failure or comparing yourself to someone else. And so I think, at that time, I was 14 days in an apartment, I couldn't leave, I was on social media and it was just making me miserable. So I think it stemmed from that. I'd also met an actor who made a living from social media and I found that frustrating, and it's just this whole other world. And that's where the 'Alice in Wonderland' aspect of My Soul to Take came in with this fake world, where it seems like everyone's doing well and happy, when in reality people just aren't posting when they're in the fetal position crying in the shower. Life isn't cultivated, it's lived, and why are we watching people live a fake version of it, or a highlight reel? So there was a lot going on in my head at the time, for sure."
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