Camille Sullivan doesn’t audition for a lot of comedies.
“People generally come to me for heavy drama,” the Vancouver actress observes matter-of-factly over tea in Kitsilano.
“Heavy drama” might actually be a bit of an understatement. Sullivan’s two-decade-spanning filmography is populated by altogether gritty, meaty and gut-punching roles: a volatile drug addict on CBC’s underrated crime drama Intelligence; a grieving woman who might or might not be murdered by her dead sister’s roommates in Ally Was Screaming; a dying social worker desperate to reunite with the biological mom who gave her up at birth in The Birdwatcher; a troubled cop fighting all kinds of demons on the Downtown Eastside in Victory Square; a frantic mom whose daughter goes missing in Geoff Redknapp’s stellar disappearing-man thriller, The Unseen.
She’s scooped up multiple acting awards for her efforts: UBCP/ACTRA Awards for The Birdwatcher and Ally Was Screaming; Leo Awards for Victory Square and Normal; and, on the national level, Gemini nominations for Intelligence and Shattered.
Next month, Sullivan will once again be seen flexing her dramatic muscles in a thoroughly unfunny role: as a mother whose child goes missing in The Disappearance, a six-part limited series from CTV and NBC Universal International that reunites Sullivan with her The Unseen co-star Aden Young (Rectify).
“I like to keep my life pretty plain and I like to keep my dramatic life really dramatic,” notes the Vancouver actress.
The seeds for heavy drama were planted back in childhood, when Sullivan would devour films like Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves and David Lynch’s The Elephant Man via well-worn VHS tapes.
She attended a Toronto arts high school as a painting major, but found something resonant in theatre classes, and ultimately studied acting at the University of B.C. Painting and acting are surprisingly similar, according to Sullivan.
“When I paint, I primarily do portraits and that’s probably the same thing [as acting],” she says. “You’re looking at someone’s face. You’re looking into their eyes. You find their story.”
For Sullivan, the best characters are those that “have something that’s off about them. I can’t come at something from a 100-per-cent place of confidence – I don’t think I’ll ever get there – but I can play a confident character if that character is secretly not confident at all,” says Sullivan, who admits to bouts of imposter syndrome and stage fright. “If that’s in there somewhere or there’s room to put that in there, then I can do that.”
Francine on Intelligence fits this definition to a T. Intelligence – which ran for two seasons on CBC and starred Ian Tracey as a Vancouver crime boss and Klea Scott as the director of a local organized crime unit – recently joined the ranks of Netflix. Francine (the ex-wife of Tracey’s character) remains high on the list of Sullivan’s favourite roles for numerous reasons, not the least of which is that it gifted her with the opportunity to work with famed showrunner Chris Haddock (whose other credits include the Da Vinci shows and The Romeo Section).
“On my first day shooting the series, there was a big scene with Ian [Tracey] where I’m shouting and I’m freaking out, and I turn to Chris [Haddock] and say, ‘How crazy do you want me to go?’ He’s like, ‘You can’t go crazy enough,’” she recalls.
On Intelligence, Sullivan learned to “just go for it. It’s scary to just go 100 per cent because some of the time you’re going to go too far, you’re going to look ridiculous. But that character gave me the ability to go far because half the time she was faking,” says Sullivan. “It gave me permission to do, for example, a big cry, and put it all out on the table, and if it doesn’t seem all-out true – well, don’t worry, because it’s not.”
As for the upcoming Montreal-shot The Disappearance, Sullivan doesn’t mince words: “It’s the heaviest I’ve ever done.”
Sullivan plays Helen Murphy Sullivan, a mother whose child goes missing; Young plays the child’s father – a story point that is familiar to viewers who watched Young and Sullivan together in The Unseen.
“Our child goes missing again,” she marvels, before calling Young a “wonderful, generous actor and so fun. He plays really dark stuff but on set, in between, we’re laughing. It’s not heavy times on set. And he’s such a brilliant actor. He’s coming to the scenes from every direction.”
In The Disappearance, “family secrets unfold. It’s a thriller. It’s exciting. It’s heavy, but a lot happens over those six episodes,” says Sullivan. “It has a drive forward.”
• The Disappearance airs in September on CTV.
