| Snaps Crackles And Pops · By Ken Eisner In Private She's A Shy Zen Housewife. But On-Screen, Local Actor Emily Perkins Has Fans Of The Ginger Snaps Film Series Crying Wolf "It's like an infection," said Emily Perkins's character in Ginger Snaps. "It works from the inside out." In the 2000 movie, her character was complaining about lycanthropy, or the tendency to turn into a werewolf. But she could have been talking about acting. It has been said that all thespians attempt to lose themselves in their roles and, further, that they do it mostly to find themselves in real life. But compared to Perkins, few performers, especially at such a nascent career stage, have devoted such a large proportion of their work to literally transforming before the audience's eyes. And then there's all the blood, but that's a whole other discussion. (The film's tag line was "They don't call it the curse for nothing.") Having acted since the age of 11, the Vancouver-born Perkins has been in TV commercials, done voice-overs in kids' cartoons, played otherworldly apparitions in The X-Files and the miniseries Stephen King's IT, and been a tough street hooker on multiple episodes of Da Vinci's Inquest, as well as a gentle Tennessee hillbilly in the period TV drama Christy, Choices of the Heart and its sequel. Perhaps fittingly, for the kids' series Mentors, she also played Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein. Notably, in the past three years, she has shot the same number of movies bearing the Ginger Snaps stamp. Dismissed by some as mere genre fodder, others recognized the first movie as a campy spin on real-life rites of passage. By now there must have been many university papers written about its dystopic vision of adolescent angst, female rage, and hormonal vertigo. In the series starter, directed by John Fawcett, Perkins played Brigitte Fitzgerald, the younger, mousier sister of the film's more glamorous antihero, embodied by fellow Vancouverite Katharine Isabelle. (It was an almost subliminal joke that Perkins is actually five years older than Isabelle.) In a horror-movie riff on It's a Wonderful Life, the tale took place in blandly anonymous Bailey Downs, a suburb where it takes a monster or two to wake people from their doldrums. To put this in other cinematic terms, if the cynically wisecracking girls played by Thora Birch and Scarlett Johansson in Ghost World had started killing the people they criticized, not to mention eating their entrails, the Terry Zwigoff movie would have looked a lot more like Ginger Snaps. Or, if the main creature in the Alien movies did a lot of eye-rolling when her mother tried to explain menstruation at the dinner table--well, you get the idea The next installment of what's up at Bailey Downs, Ginger Snaps II: Unleashed, opens here next Friday (January 30), and it's an even darker affair. This one finds Brigitte haunted by the ghostly visage of Ginger, to whom she finally gave the silver-bullet treatment--okay, it was a knife--but not before "sharing" her sis's affliction. (As the title implies, Isabelle is still on the prowl in the follow-up.) Outside of the Snaps series, however, Perkins is still finding her niche. "Well, honestly, I just haven't worked that much," she says during a recent hometown visit with the Georgia Straight shortly before heading to Toronto to promote Unleashed. "I only went to five auditions last year, which isn't a lot for an actor." Perhaps not, but she did shoot two movies: Unleashed and Ginger Snaps Back, a prequel set almost a century before the first two films. (The first film's writer, Karen Walton, wasn't interested in seeing the series continue.) The movies were shot back-to-back in the Edmonton area over roughly 60 days. "Yes," Perkins says with a giggle, "it was exactly like Lord of the Rings. Same budget, too." But it wasn't entirely the lack of other options that made the trilogy attractive. She liked the tonal contrasts offered by the scripts, as well as the opportunity to develop one character in wildly different periods and settings. In the second helping, directed by Brett Sullivan, who edited the first movie, Brigitte leaves the burbs to mark time in a mental hospital populated by youngsters who are, if anything, even weirder. Still, she seems to be the only kid who really grows hair on her palms when masturbating. Oh, and ears and a tail and other gruesome bodily developments. Sure, Charlize Theron gained weight for Monster, but the grotesquery here is maybe closer to The Lord of the Rings' Gollum, with a hint of Marilyn Manson thrown in. Her movie version may be slack-jawed, with bloodshot eyes (and that's on her better days), but in real life Perkins comes across as pretty, petite, and wholesome. At 26, the camera still reads her as a precocious, if troubled, adolescent, and the dissonance has become part of her basic material. "For me, this process was quite cathartic, kind of a cleansing experience, really. I was a pretty dark teenager. I didn't respond to the changes of adolescence very well or happily. Teen culture is such a manufactured thing, and maybe it's not good to fit into it too easily. Mine was such an internal darkness, though; I can't say I really showed it to other people. I had my group of friends, and I was the star of the school play and all that, so others didn't necessarily see me as this broody creature." In a previous Straight interview, Perkins described herself as a former "people pleaser" whose good grades and verbal talents masked a lot of formless anger. Since leaving her parents' nest, out in Delta, she has taken the somewhat surprising route of adopting two foster children--a boy, 10, and a girl, 13--who are, through circumstances too complicated to get into here, her own cousins. She has already been their primary caregiver for about three years, so that may explain why Perkins is so casual about the state of her acting career. "Being a parent is a kind of performance for a very particular audience," she says. Even so, the gig doesn't quite compare to the other kind. "I think a certain amount of catharsis simply comes from acting itself, which somehow gives a bit of validity to your experience, to the sense that you're not alone with your feelings." Perkins says that although she started in school plays and got her training through the Carousel Theatre and the Vancouver Youth Theatre Company, her innate shyness makes it harder to work in theatre than within the collaborative process of the closed film set. But how shy can someone be when they've chosen to act out their emotions in public? "There is an exhibitionist aspect to it, no matter what the form is. I am amplifying this hidden part of myself. But the audience thinks it's looking at someone else, so in a way, it's safe. I'm sorry everything I'm saying is so obvious. I've become a vacuous housewife; my thoughts are so Zen when I'm doing dishes, but when I go to talk to someone about it..." Perkins trails off, neither embarrassed nor impressed by her thinking process. "I have my own world, with my books and my family." She's willing, however, to leave that world to promote Unleashed. If it does at all well, before the year is over she'll do the same for Ginger Snaps Back, which was directed by Grant Harvey, previously best known for the quirky indie flick American Beer. Playing on doppelgänger elements, the prequel hurtles the hirsute siblings back to 1910 and their first red-toothed encounter. "The movie doesn't really explain it, but they could be earlier incarnations of Brigitte and Ginger. And Brigitte actually looks kind of nice, with makeup and everything. There's definitely a lesbian subtext--I think so, anyway--but there are also a lot more men in it. It's shot like a fairy tale, and the whole look is quite beautiful." Like Mary Shelley, Perkins has fashioned a character that is always on the verge of getting away from her. And, in her own way, she's quietly proud of the infection she has sent out into the uncaring world. Main Page Interviews Image Gallery |