All posts by A.R. Wilson

A.R. Wilson has been interviewing actors, writers and musicians for over 20 years. In addition to TV-Eh, her work has appeared in Curve, ROCKRGRL, and Sound On Sight. A native of Detroit, she grew up watching Mr. Dressup and The Friendly Giant on CBC, which led to a lifelong love of Canadian television. Her perpetual New Year's resolution is to become fluent in French.
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This Life’s Louis Ferreira: “David has something to prove”

Louis Ferreira has been a near-constant presence on our TV and film screens for decades, appearing in everything from Stargate Universe to Breaking Bad to Saw IV , but he doesn’t talk to the press much.

“I usually don’t do a lot of these,” he admits.

That’s a shame, because from the moment the Portuguese-Canadian actor answers his cell phone on a busy Vancouver street—his warm, gravelly voice instantly familiar—he is open and charming, talking easily about spirituality and politics before we get to the crux of our chat: discussing his role as Natalie’s (Torri Higginson) ex-husband David on the CBC family drama, This Life.

David, a deadbeat dad who only resurfaced once he learned his ex-wife had terminal cancer, could have been a thankless role for any actor to take on. But Ferreira says he was eager to play the part.

“I think what David represents is something that I believe in strongly, which is fathers doing right by their children, ultimately,” he explains.

He also says This Life is a hallmark for what Canadian TV is capable of.

“I was actually impressed with what CBC and Canada have done,” he says. “It’s a very well-done show. I was really proud to be part of it, to be honest.”

In an exclusive interview, Ferreira, who also has a recurring role on Space’s Aftermath, tells us more about David’s motivations, his working relationship with Torri Higginson, and wrapping popular CTV series Motive earlier this year.

How did you first become involved with This Life?  
Louis Ferreira: I think we had someone on the first season of Motive that knew me and asked about me, I think, through Kristin Lehman and was like, ‘What’s he like?’ and she was like, ‘Nice.’ I think that’s kind of where it started, and then from there the part came to me. And there was just that last episode of the first season, where [the creators of This Life] were like, ‘If it goes, there’s going to be a journey with him.’ Based on what they were telling me about the character, the ex who comes back, I was like, ‘Oooh.’ There are certain things that speak to me personally, and David was one of those stories. I was immediately interested, I was all over it, to be honest.

What were your early impressions of David, who is a character who comes with a lot of baggage?
I never thought of it as a guy with baggage, which is something we all have in all degrees of weight, but there was the opportunity to redeem. I love redemption. I love evolution. I love the idea of people coming to epiphanies in their lives and then changing them. I love the u-turn, and that’s what I saw in David right from the get-go, that this man had had some version of an epiphany and was going to come back and do right by his children because he acknowledged that he’d done wrong by them.

When I spoke with Torri Higginson earlier in the season, she said she was upset when she learned David was coming back into Natalie’s life.
I think that’s why Torri and I work together well. We’ll have discussions on set before we roll. It’s kind of a he said, she said, and she’ll state her piece, ‘Well, he did this,’ and I’ll be like, ‘Yes, but she….’ and it becomes almost like a therapy session before we shoot the scene. And we’ve done it several times, and it’s been very helpful, I think, for both of us because we’re able to see and feel each other’s hearts on the situation, and I think it informs the scene sometimes.

So you have a very interactive approach to your scenes together?
Yeah, for sure. I think absolutely we do. And I think we’re both journeymen in the business, and I think there is immediately a respect for that aspect of it, and I think we both sort of immediately connected because she was so rooted in that feeling of what she had going in, that, ‘Why is he coming back?’ and I felt that right away. For me, it was like, not only am I going to come back, but I’m going to prove to you that evolved potential that you saw back in the day that I probably could have been, I now have, in fact, become . . . David’s got something to prove.

Do you think David would have eventually returned on his own if Romy hadn’t called him last season to tell him Natalie was sick?
Yes. I think that the timing with Natalie’s illness, I’d like to imagine that it wasn’t about that, but it was the coincidence of where David got to in his life and how the universe sometimes works in people’s lives, where timing sometimes lines up. Sometimes it’s neither good nor bad, it’s just what it is. I think in this particular case, it was the trigger. I think when he got the phone call from Romy, it was certainly the thing that made him go, ‘OK, that’s a sign and I need to listen to it,’ because he was at that point in his life. So that’s probably what kickstarted it, but certainly going back was something that was on his agenda for quite a while. It’s something that he had to do.

It’s interesting to think about [David’s] younger kids and the older kids in terms of that whole thing of when we’re kids and we fall and it’s like, ‘Oh, no big problem,’ and we get back up. But as we get older, it gets harder and harder. It’s almost the same thing that the youngest of his children is able to be more, perhaps, forgiving, be more open, which is a really beautiful quality. But then as life happens, and egos age and get more jaded, it’s more difficult to do those very things that we did when we were younger, which is to forgive easily and love easier.

I think David has a real soft spot for Romy, because I think he can see with her the hurt that’s inside there, and I don’t think that would make any man—who’s a real man—feel good about himself, and I think that also drives David.

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Last week, David’s second wife, Kate, tells him that she won’t move back to Montreal, which means he’ll have to try to be a father to two families in two locations. Is that something he is capable of now?
David, back in the day, was probably under the bad boy category, so I think now he’s probably some version of a reformed bad boy. But now I think he’s gone into a whole other level, as we do when we get older, and hopefully you get a little bit more into a context of spirituality or things that matter more to you. I like what they wrote in the car, I think he said to Kate, ‘The reality is that I’m always going to love the mother of my children. That doesn’t go away. She’s the mother of my children. How could I not?’ That’s a mature statement.

The other thing I liked about it, about [Natalie] being the mother of my children and me having another family, is that also becomes [Kate’s] responsibility, and it should have been from the get-go. When people with kids move into another relationship, it’s absolutely crucial that they understand that their children come first in a certain way, and they are part of it. It’s not just my moral responsibility, it’s the responsibility of the person who wants to share my life with me. It’s also on them, and that’s true partnership in terms of a healthy relationship. So David is now going, ‘OK, this is healthy, and this is not. And I will choose to be healthy or at least try.’

Just a couple of episodes ago, Natalie and David kind of had that one thing that happened, that one-off [where they sleep together], and you just sit there going, ‘Wait a minute, that’s not good.’ That probably shouldn’t have happened. And I loved that fact that it happened and was never mentioned again, and it’s our imperfections that make things interesting. But at the same time, I do believe that, in his heart, David is trying to do and wanting to do right by his children first and his families. And in this particular case, this is a man with two families.

Motive ended its four-year run in August. Were you happy with the way the series wrapped?
We just had the greatest group of people for four years. It was one big family, and we’re all still very, very close. It couldn’t have been a more enjoyable experience. Truly. From top to bottom, it was just one of those things where everything was right.

Do you keep in touch with the cast?
I just saw Kristin two days ago. We went out for coffee, and she’s just onto a new show now, a big show coming out next year, and she’s doing well, and Brendan [Penny]’s doing great, and I just talked to Lauren [Holly] yesterday, so we’re all tight. But beyond the cast, with that crew—it was just one of those things where everything was just easy and right and no egos and just working together. It was one of those rarities, and we’re all grateful for it.

This Life airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on CBC.

Images courtesy of CBC.

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This Life showrunner Joseph Kay takes us on a ‘Joyride’

Spoiler warning: Do not read this article until you have seen This Life Episode 207, “Joyride.”

As we approach the final three episodes of This Life‘s impressive second season, several storylines are coming to a head. In Sunday’s new episode, “Joyride,” written by showrunner Joseph Kay, David’s (Louis Ferreira) two lives are converging in uncomfortable ways, Oliver (Kristopher Turner) is battling mental health issues, Maggie (Lauren Lee Smith) is discovering her sham marriage may not be a sham, and Emma (Stephanie Janusauskas) is dealing with her unexpected feelings for Miranda (Devery Jacobs). And don’t forget about Natalie (Torri Higginson), who–after reeling from the news that she is in partial remission–is learning how to be someone other than a cancer patient or the wife someone left behind.

“We realized that it might be scary for her to have to live, to be able to beat cancer and to have to reevaluate the way her marriage ended,” Kay says of the decision to write some ambiguity into Natalie’s terminal diagnosis.

Taking a break from editing the sound on This Life‘s upcoming Season 2 finale, Kay discusses this week’s major plot points and tells us what to expect as the season winds down.

A couple of weeks ago, we found out Natalie’s cancer is in partial remission. What was your motivation for giving her a reprieve, however temporary it might be?
Joseph Kay: The more we thought about Natalie–you know, she has this sort of existential crisis, ‘I might die,’ and that comes with all these inherent stakes–but the more that we dug into the character of Natalie, and tried to find what makes her tick, and tried to find the complexity, we realized that a really interesting thing to ask Natalie is, ‘What if I live?’

Her sister calls her in the very first episode of the show and says, “You’ve wasted your life,” and that’s the same day that she gets her diagnosis, and we sort of realized that maybe she has [wasted her life] . . . And it’s all wrapped up in her past and the choices that she’s made, and we get to that point in Episode 206 where they tell her that she’s always hid behind everything, and we sort of came to that on our own in understanding this character. We realized that it might be scary for her to have to live, to be able to beat cancer and to have to reevaluate the way her marriage ended, to see it as less black and white, and that she really had spent her whole life only focusing on the kids. What would that mean for her if she survived?

In this week’s episode, we see David torn between his responsibilities to Natalie and Romy and his second family, Kate and Jesse. Is he sincere in his efforts to be a father to both families? 
We really wanted to let the audience see it from his perspective, and this ongoing attempt to humanize him and to try to deconstruct Natalie’s simpler version of how their marriage ended and the kind of person David was. I think he wants to try, but trying is hard. So I think, as a fan of David’s, that he’s not lying when he says he wants to try, but I think he’s also aware of his limitations as a human being. He knows that he has to let people down sometimes. I believe, or believed when we were writing it, that he wants to try, but the trying is not going to be easy. I hope that when we see it from his perspective people are seeing him as a complicated person and a complicated situation in which there is no easy way to please everybody. In fact, it’s impossible. We don’t know if he’s going to make the right decision, but I think we’ve seen him wanting to try.

After David misses Romy’s dinner, she sneaks into his house and leaves him some of her work. Why did she do that?
She wants him to notice her. She’s the one who brought him back here, and she’s the one of everybody who tried to give him a chance at the beginning of this season, and she’s smart enough to know that she can’t trust him, but she wants somebody to notice her. She’s really torn between wanting this secret life where she’s out there sort of proving herself based on her skills on her own, and also being this little kid who wants her dad to notice her and be impressed with what she’s able to do.

So we have the scene where her mentor of her job says to her, “Why are you doing this? Why do you care what anyone thinks when all that really matters is what you think, or maybe the one or two people who care about you?” And she wants him to be one of those people. I think she’s trying to drag him in a more profound way into her life. And, for whatever reason, she doesn’t feel that she can just come clean with her mom about this stuff.

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Emma has been struggling with her identity all season, and there are scenes in “Joyride” that suggest that struggle includes her sexuality. Is that an accurate interpretation?  
Yeah, I think we were interested in the idea of Emma not quite knowing who she is in every sense of the word. She takes a job and starts lying about who she is and manufacturing another home life for herself, partially because her home life is kind of grim in a way, but also because she doesn’t quite know who she is. So she is the kind of person we think who is a little bit malleable in terms of her own identity. She’s kind of like an open book, and she wants very much to be liked, and so we’re interested in the idea of Emma’s fluid approach to maybe her own sexuality being in line with her blank slate personality. Her sister even, in Season 1, is accusing her of not knowing [who she is]. There’s a void, she says, where her personality should be. In contrast to Romy, who so clearly knows who she is, Emma just doesn’t really know who she is. So, yeah, you’re right, the suggestiveness of that scene asks, ‘Does Emma like this girl?’

And we want to see Emma explore that, and I think it’s a surprise to her. It’s not something that she thought was going to happen. I think it’s in context with her ongoing struggle with who she is. And it was a surprise to us to. I think like with the Natalie thing that I mentioned, when we thought back on Emma’s Season 1 relationship with this boy, she didn’t seem comfortable with that either. She felt as though it was something that she was supposed to want, and she liked him in some sense, but, to us, she didn’t seem comfortable. She wasn’t comfortable in her own skin. So we just felt as it was evolving and, as it was really important to her to have Miranda’s affection or respect or whatever, that that in Emma went from being something as simple as, ‘Oh, this girl’s kind of cool, and I want her to like me,’ to ‘No, I really want her to like me,’ and that she’s surprised by it. We wanted to see where it went.

Oliver continued to spiral out of control, and we learned he might be bipolar. Why did you want to tackle that issue?
Actually, there’s a reference at the end of Season 1, in the episode in which Oliver goes home and sort deals with his boyfriend who died and he sees his therapist. And he’s ready to go back home, and all he’s taking is this one belonging, and his therapist actually says in that scene that she’s worried that he’s hypermanic again, and he says no. I just think, in digging into Oliver, he’s a guy who hovers in his life between depression and sort of the opposite and the choices he’s made to cut himself off from his family.

I also think that mental illness is generally underrepresented on television and, when we wrote that scene last year, it just made sense. It sort of filled in a blank with the character that maybe we didn’t know was happening. We knew he was depressive, but it just made sense for us, and we didn’t want to back away from it, which we could have done, because it was a really, really small reference, and most people didn’t even notice. But it just felt like who he was, and we wanted to find a way to access it. And then the whole issue of Oliver being a creative person who thinks he has to harness some of his mania to be a prolific creative person, I think is worth exploring.

During her immigration interview, Maggie seemed to realize she has feelings for Raza. Does this mean their sham marriage could end up being real? 
It means that Maggie has to face that she actually has feelings in a situation that she thought was purely transactional, and we asked her this season to maybe take a look at why she’s so generally dismissive of people feeling things for each other, and we really wanted to make a situation where that sort of attachment might sneak up on her and see how she deals with it. So, yeah, from Maggie’s side, it turns out that she likes him. And that’s a simple device, but with Maggie–who’s so unpredictable when it comes to relationships and affections–that was just really kind of exciting. We went into the season knowing that she seemed kind of like Teflon, emotionally, and we wanted to make her not.

I’ve really enjoyed Hamza Haq as Raza this season. 
He’s good! We also think he’s great. We looked everywhere for that character, because we wanted whoever played him to be authentic, and we auditioned in London, we auditioned all over, and we cast a guy who lived in Montreal. And he brought himself into the part in a big way, his own background, parts of his own family, and I think he did a really nice job.

What can you tease about the finale three episodes of the season? 
Just that we’re all really excited about them. There’s a momentum to the end of this season that I think begins in Episode 206 and generally carries through. I’m thinking 209 and 210 are some of the strongest episodes we’ve done. Big stuff happens, and we’re looking forward to seeing how everybody reacts to it.

This Life airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on CBC.

Images courtesy of CBC.

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This Life 207: David is torn between two families in “Joyride”

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This Life‘s writers have done an admirable job of making Natalie’s ex-husband, David, a complex and relatable character– even as he’s tried to push his way back into a family that long ago learned to live without him. In this week’s episode, “Joyride,” we meet David’s second wife, Kate, and see him struggle to find balance between his two families. As is typical with this show, the solutions aren’t easy.

Meanwhile, Maggie and Raza face intimidating immigration interviews to legitimize their marriage, and Emma struggles to face Miranda after having her lies exposed last week.

Here’s a preview of what’s to come.

David is strangely likable 

Disarmingly upfront about his flaws and, at times, maddeningly reasonable, deadbeat David has become one of my favourite characters on the show. This Life writers and Louis Ferreira for the win.

Maxim Roy guest stars as Kate

19-2 fans rejoice.

Maggie and Raza’s relationship continues to evolve

Are there real feelings bubbling beneath the surface of this sham marriage?

Emma struggles with her identity

A subtle storyline becomes a bit more obvious this week. It will be interesting to see where this goes.

Oliver becomes more reckless

But Matthew has a revelation about his brother.

This Life airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on CBC.

Images courtesy of CBC.

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This Life’s Stephanie Janusauskas on Emma’s “independence and strength”

Stephanie Janusauskas was certain she blew her final audition for the role of Emma Lawson on CBC’s This Life.

“We did the scene from Season 1 where we find out that Natalie has cancer, and I couldn’t conjure up any tears,” recalls the 17-year-old Montreal native. “I was so disappointed with myself, and I came home and was sure I’d messed it up.”

Janusauskas needn’t have worried. She landed the part of Natalie Lawson’s (Torri Higginson) middle child and has spent two seasons portraying the rarest of TV characters: a realistic, complicated teenage girl trying to form her own identity.

“She’s just trying to forge her own way, and she’s afraid that she’s going to lose her mother, so she feels this need to survive on her own almost,” she explains.

Janusauskas—who made her film debut in 2008’s Punisher: War Zone and just filmed Death Wish with Bruce Willis—joins us by phone to tell us more about Emma’s attempts to find herself in Season 2.

What were your first impressions of Emma when you got the part?
Stephanie Janusauskas: I related to her particularly because we’re both teenagers, and you go through the typical trials and tribulations of adolescence, and you end up finding yourself and forging relationships with guys and seeing that that’s not necessarily right for you—or maybe it is. And I think what I wanted to bring to her was a quality that she was a genuine person, and often times in television and films alike, you have this idea that teenagers are kind of empty-headed and their problems are kind of trivial and unimportant, and I didn’t want people to get that impression of Emma because I find that teenagers tend to be overlooked a lot, and there was importance in the difficulties that she overcame.

A lot of importance is put on Romy because she’s more outwardly troubled than Emma might be, and Emma is very independent and sometimes seen as selfish and bitchy, but it’s important to see that she’s just trying to forge her own way, and she’s afraid that she’s going to lose her mother, so she feels this need to survive on her own almost. I think it’s kind of important to realize that—what I was trying to bring to the character at least, I don’t know if I succeeded—was that quality of independence and strength.

Of Natalie’s three kids, Emma has seemed the most, to use your word, selfish in the face of her mom’s diagnosis. How do you think she is really handling it?
Romy is the one that’s often catered to. She’s the youngest, and with her anxiety and her more artistic tendencies, Natalie seems to relate to her a lot more, and Caleb is already so independent and has become our father figure almost. Much like the model of the middle child, Emma has been forgotten a bit. So as much as people say that she’s very outgoing and, like I said before, kind of selfish, I think she does keep to herself what her mother’s diagnosis means to her, mostly in the sense that she’s going to feel lost without her, but she’s trying to find her way in the world so that, when that happens, not everybody crumbles around her. It’s not a testimony to her heartlessness or anything, but rather to the fact that she loves her mom so much that she doesn’t want her spirit to leave behind all these broken shells of people she once knew.

Emma got her first job this season, but, instead of being herself, she invented stories about her background to Miranda. Why do you feel she needed to do that?
I think she just wanted to discover more facets of herself, and she was so used to being defined by a mother with cancer or as a sibling, a sister, a child with only a mother, abandoned by her father, and she’s trying to escape that. She does lie to her friend Miranda, but it’s so that she can escape her own life, and I don’t think it should be seen as an offense to anybody else. I think she suffers from low self-esteem like a lot of people, so she just wants to sculpt herself in a way that allows her more flexibility in who she might want to become. Obviously, we see that it doesn’t quite work out for her, but I think that she needed to experience that kind of degradation of values and morals about what her life was in order to realize that she’s happy with who she is. I think she needed that discovery process.

In this week’s episode, we find out more about Emma’s struggles with identity. What can you preview about that?
I think we’re going to see that her relationship with Miranda is kind of ambiguous, and viewers will read into it however they choose. But I think it’s important to see that all of this kind of speaks to Emma’s learning process to who she wants to become, to who she is becoming. She’s kind of learning about herself through lies, if you will, and I think that brings out her truest self to a certain degree.

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Emma’s dad, David, has said he wants custody of Emma and Romy should anything happen to Natalie. Do you think she has any interest in having a relationship with him?
Unlike Romy, I don’t think she has any interest in having a relationship with him, based on the fact that her mother raised her. Her father had nothing to do with who she is, who she’s become. She doesn’t need him, and I think that Romy does need him because she’s trying to find herself in a way that requires external validation, whereas Emma is comfortable not knowing him. She’s going to remain mad at him and that obviously kind of forces her to put too much emphasis on negative emotions, but at the same time–I mean, I’m kind of on Emma’s side, personally, because I really don’t like the father that David is—but she doesn’t need him and that’s the bottom line. He was absent during the time that she might have needed him most.

Emma and Romy seem to have gotten a bit closer this season. Is Emma trying to become a better big sister in Caleb’s absence?
I don’t know if it’s necessarily because of Caleb’s absence. I think that she’s not going to take on the parental figure that Romy doesn’t have. I think she’s going to be the supportive sister that Romy needs. Emma’s trying to fill that void and at the same time forge a connection that is unbreakable between them. Because, though they are so incredibly different in character, they’re bonded because of their mother’s illness, because obviously they’re sisters, but because they love each other and they love their family more than anything.

The cast of This Life seems pretty close. What’s your relationship like with your TV siblings, Julia Scarlett Dan and James Wotherspoon?
We act as siblings on set as well. We poke fun at each other, and we laugh, and we really do get along the way siblings would, and we’ve definitely connected in amazing ways. And the same can be said for the rest of the older actors as well. It makes acting so much easier and more honest when you’re working with not only such talented people but also with such lovely people.

Do you have a favourite episode or scene in Season 2?
The rest of the season holds some amazing moments, and I think there’s this symmetry between both Season 1 and 2 of kind of everybody diverging from each other and then coming together. Everybody’s going through their own problems, but the end of the season will be a pleasant surprise when we see everybody pull together. I think the final moments are some of my favourite little tidbits.

And what can viewers expect from Emma the rest of the season?
Kind of just this whole transformation that she’s embarked on, and you’re going to see her become more true to herself and to her family. More than that, she’s honest with herself for once, instead of trying to find herself in her boyfriend in the first season, and then the triathlon, and then this job, and Miranda, she’s finally going to come to terms with who she is. So I’m looking forward to the viewers seeing her progression.

This Life airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on CBC.

Images courtesy of CBC.

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This Life writer Alison Lea Bingeman on Oliver’s “Intervention”

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Spoiler warning: Do not read this article until you have seen This Life Episode 206, “Intervention.”

For most of This Life‘s second season, Oliver Lawson’s (Kristopher Turner) problems have been overshadowed by his sister Natalie’s (Torri Higginson) terminal cancer diagnosis. But last week, Natalie learned she is in partial remission, and in this week’s new episode, “Intervention,” written by Alison Lea Bingeman, Natalie, Maggie (Lauren Lee Smith), and Matthew (Rick Roberts) finally confront Oliver about his deplorable living conditions — with unexpected results.

Bingeman says the Lawsons have a “blindspot” about the cause of Oliver’s troubles, but “layer upon layer” will be exposed as Season 2 continues.

“I think with his compulsion to work and his rather obsessive personality, more will be revealed about that,” she says. “It’s a very watchable journey.”

Bingeman joins us by phone from L.A. to tell us more about Oliver’s intervention, Natalie’s deliberate choice to stop being a victim, and the special bond between Caleb (James Wotherspoon), Emma (Stephanie Janusauskas), and Romy (Julia Scarlett Dan).

The centerpiece of this episode is that wonderful, revealing intervention scene. Where did that idea come from?  
Alison Lea Bingeman: We came up with it in the story room, so it was a group effort. I can’t really claim authorship of it. But the idea being, it’s like when a family gets together and there’s this elephant in the room, which is a brother’s dysfunction, and they’re thinking that it’s drugs, that we have to address it, and how do we do it? It’s how the Lawsons do that in their own kind of dysfunctional way.

The family addresses the situation with Oliver because they believe he’s in denial about his drug problem, but, in fact, what’s interesting about this is that the issues go quite deeper than that, and it’s more about a family denial.

Matthew was having a tough time adjusting to his post-separation life in this episode. What’s going with him? 
What’s interesting about Matthew is that he has a hard time accepting the way that things are, and he’s having a hard time accepting the consequences of his own actions. What’s interesting to explore with that character is how we do these sort of run arounds, and how if we’re not getting what we want, how we try alternative means to get what we want. He wants someone to see him and to appreciate him, and really what Matthew needs is to appreciate himself.

I liked Matthew’s interactions with Beatrice (Victoria Sanchez), especially the scene where he rubs her shoulder, and she shoots him down with, “Really?” It was funny, but it also forced him to sit with his own discomfort. 
I know. [laughs] It’s like he’s not getting the affection from Nicole, so he’ll try it with Beatrice, and she’s like, “Are you kidding me?” And so he’s really left alone again with his own sense of longing.

Maggie and Raza (Hamza Haq) seem to be developing a real trust. Is Maggie conquering some of her intimacy fears? 
I think that Maggie is trying to negotiate a new life and a new kind of intimacy for herself, and she’s kind of stumbling through it.

Natalie found out she’s in partial remission last week, which threw her for a loop. How would you describe what’s going on in her head?
If you look at the entire series up until now, it’s about her working toward acceptance that there’s no hope, and for the first time in this entire series, there’s a glimmer of hope. And here’s she’s been preparing herself, girding her loins for the opposite, so what happens when there’s that reversal? You think you’re going to be overjoyed and jumping up and down, but it kind of throws everything into question again. And I think that’s a very real response, and now that there’s a chance to not deal with those life and death issues, what’s the day-to-day look like? And sometimes that’s hard to look at because she’s been in kind of this crisis management mode for all this time, and now she’s got to pull it back to the day-to-day living. Sometimes that’s a challenge.

Which you demonstrated through the seemingly simple decision of whether or not to buy a new car.
Yeah, that’s the metaphor. Because what happens if your car breaks down? Two weeks ago, who cares? Because you may not need a car in a month or two. But now you have to look at things a little more long-term. And what does a new car mean? Do I have car payments? Do I pay for it with cash, or do I save that for the kids? We didn’t really get into the details of that decision, but that’s what implied by getting a new car.

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During the invention, Natalie’s siblings told her she’s been playing the victim for a long time. She then meets up with David (Louis Ferreira) about his custody plans and ends up sleeping with him. Why did she choose to do that? 
I think that what is going on in her story is that she is rattled by what her siblings tell her, and that she has identified with being a victim for many years. In this episode, she steps outside of that and she takes things on, not because she has the right solution, but because it’s her impulse in the moment. And her impulse in the moment is to sleep with her ex-husband, and she does it. We wrote that, specifically, that it’s something that she brought on. It was her decision. So there’s no victim there, and it’s a step out of that role. And it wasn’t a big seduction either. It’s like it just was what it was. It just happened, just like that.

We got a bigger glimpse of David’s life with his second family in this episode. Where is that headed? 
Here’s a man who left his family, and he started another family. And now his first family, he wants them back in his life. It’s like those two families converge in this season, and his responsibilities to each one are going to be in conflict.

It was interesting that the adult siblings melted down in the invention scene, but, in contrast, Caleb, Emma, and Romy bonded in their scene together. Why was that important to show? 
I think it’s that the siblings are there for each other. And I think what’s underlying that is that, whatever is happening with these adults, these kids are going to be okay because they have each other and that there’s a strength in that. That really is, I think, very foundational to the series, that love and support they have for each other. They’re siblings and they always have their conflicts, but I think with these kids–and I think it’s very true with kids who have lived through trauma–that they tend to rely on each other. There’s a closeness there that you wouldn’t necessarily see otherwise.

Because, first of all, their father left them, and Caleb took on the role as the primary man in the family, and we see the consequences of that and what that does to him. But you also see how he’s there for his two sisters and how the two sisters are there for each other as well. And it was very important to see Romy get over her panic attack. Remember how we saw that she was almost undone in the previous season? Here, she’s able–on her mother’s urging–to do the exercises, and she’s actually able to pull herself through it.

And what about Emma?
It’s very interesting to watch a teenage girl try to reinvent herself, and then she really doesn’t like her reinvention. She thinks that’s what she wants, but when she does it, she looks at herself and thinks, ‘This isn’t who I want to be.’ That’s what Emma’s going through. She’s trying to find out, ‘Who am I?’ and ‘How do I want to appear in the world?’

What can you tell viewers about upcoming episodes? 
I think, as usual with This Life, expect the unexpected. That’s what makes this series so interesting and fun, and I think what sets it apart from other series is that we really strive to go to unexpected places with our characters.

This Life airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on CBC.

Images courtesy of CBC.

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