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Agam Darshi goes undercover

If there's one thing Agam Darshi loves to do with her time, it's play and in her new series Played , she gets to do it while cameras are rolling.
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If there's one thing Agam Darshi loves to do with her time, it's play and in her new series Played, she gets to do it while cameras are rolling.

In Darshi's case, "play" translates to revelling in a craft that she loves, and if you examine how she's spent the last several years, the versatile actress — who splits her time between Vancouver and Los Angeles — has clocked some premium playtime.

There was her stint playing street smart Kate Freelander on Sanctuary, the Vancouver-shot steampunk-esque sci-fi series for which Darshi garnered a legion of fans around the globe. Then there were guest gigs and recurring roles on shows like Dan for Mayor and Arrow, and a Leo Award-winning turn as the shrewd wife of the titular character in Crimes of Mike Recket.

And somewhere in the midst of all of this on-camera play, the British-born actress made her directorial debut with Fade Out (a bravoFACT-funded project about aging and celebrity that Darshi also wrote). Darshi and co. filmed Fade Out at the Stanley Theatre over a couple of days this past January — mere months before Darshi temporarily relocated to Toronto to film the first season of Played, a crime procedural about undercover cops that premiered on CTV last week.

On Played, Darshi is Khali Bhatt, a tech genius who does whatever she's got to do to support the play (ie. infiltrating the criminal world). "There's nothing better than getting a character that's so interesting and flawed and trying to figure out why they do what they do," said Darshi during a phone interview from the LA home she shares with her husband, fellow Leo Award-winner Juan Riedinger. "For me, that's a huge reason that I'm an actor."

Somewhere between the guns, money, fast cars, drugs, suspense, and danger, the series also explores the multitude of differences between undercover cops and uniformed officers. "There's so much about their lives that [undercover cops] have to keep secret and they can't really share, so it's the people that they work with that they become close with," said Darshi.

Played also stars Vincent Walsh, Chandra West, Lisa Marcos, Dwain Murphy and Adam Butcher.

Fans of Sanctuary's sassy Kate — many of whom Darshi has met at sci-fi conventions ("It's beautiful that people can get so much out of your show and they respond to you and your character in a certain way and you give them strength") — might recognize a similar fire in Khali's eyes. "Khali has that playfulness that Kate had, and she has her own little badass-ness, too, but obviously she doesn't shoot Abnormals," Darshi said, referring to Sanctuary's fantastical non-human characters.

As for writing and directing, Darshi has no intention of slowing down. She's currently collaborating on scripts with her Vancouver-based writing partner, actress Leena Manro.

But despite her off-camera pursuits, there is something about the process of acting something mystifying that compels her to keep diving deep into characters like Khali.

"I love acting and I'll always love acting, and I think the reason that I love it is also because I find it the most difficult," she said. "I think acting is still something that I'm so passionate about because I don't understand it. I don't know why certain performances are great, and certain performances are not so great, when I'm doing it. That just drives me crazy trying to understand how that works. Acting is just something that I'm still just so amazed at and its kind of magical to me."

Played airs Thursdays at 10:00pm on CTV.