Sarah Gadon, Unleashed
The brilliant Canadian actor talks artistry, obsession and why she hates the word “muse”
Sarah Gadon is having trouble sleeping.
“I wake up often in the middle of the night,” the Canadian actor said on a recent chilly Friday. “The way that I work is a little obsessive, so it’s really hard for me to turn that off.”
The current object of Gadon’s attention is Yerma, a play by Spanish literary giant Federico García Lorca that tells the story of a woman living in rural Spain whose grief at being unable to have a child of her own mutates into an obsession with horrifying consequences.
Gadon—who built an international reputation for her ability to inhabit intensely felt, emotionally harrowing roles in titles like Alias Grace, Cosmopolis and All My Puny Sorrows—plays the lead character in a new production at Toronto’s Coal Mine Theatre.
“I’ve been reading a lot about dysfunction in families, trauma and addiction, IVF and infertility,” Gadon explains of her newfound insomnia during a chat on her rehearsal lunch break. “The journey in the play, the way she has this slow erosion and unravelling…there are things about it that stay with you.” It’s not unusual for Gadon to wake up the next morning saying her lines from the day before.
“I’m not the kind of actor who thinks that all the roles you create are separate from who you are,” she says. “There have to be touchstones where the person you’re playing and the person you are come together and have moments of meaning.”
For Gadon, these intersections are in what she calls “deeply personal” places. “That’s what I love about growing older and having more life experience,” says Gadon. “If I’d played the part five years ago, my interpretation of this char- acter would have been completely different. There are layers I would have understood in a different way.”
At its most straightforward, Yerma is a play about fertility, a subject that hits different with age. “I’m 35 now, and the journey that I’ve been on with fertility is, of course, different than what it was when I was 30 or 25,” says Gadon, dancing as close as she feels comfortable to such a profoundly private topic. “If I was looking at this character five years ago, I wouldn’t have had the experience of being in my mid-30s without a child, and I wouldn’t have had what that meant to me.”
Gadon has been performing since she was a child, but the play, which Gadon first saw in New York years ago, will be her first professional theatre gig. Not that she’s a stranger to Toronto’s stages: As a child, Gadon trained at Canada’s National Ballet School, performing in the company’s productions—including that rite of passage The Nutcracker—before developing an “obsession” with auteur cinema at university.
“The 20 years that I was a dancer are coming up in a great way,” she says. “I feel really connected to my body, being able to experience this freedom as a full, moving being.” It’s a contrast, she says, to film, where “it’s very much about what’s happening above your waist.”
Beyond a genre leap, Yerma feels as though it also marks a post-pandemic artistic evolution for Gadon. While she says she was grateful for the work she did during the pandemic, many of the creative choices she made were driven by a scarcity of work or a need to work.
“As an artist, I was searching for that job that was going to be really challenging but also that relationship with a director that was going to be really stimulating,” Gadon says of the creative partnership she’s now found with Yerma’s director, Diana Bentley, who she describes as a “very powerful leader.”
Gadon says she’s always had a clear vision for the kind of career she wants, and she’s been proactive about carving it out on her own terms. At the same time, she spent much of her 20s being referred to as Canadian director David Cronenberg’s “muse,” starring in several of his films in the early 2010s.
“I think of it as a derogatory term to reduce a female actor and their intelligence and their capabilities as an artist,” she says in reaction to the term. “It suggests a man needs this inspiration in order to do his work, and her only value is derived from that man’s work.”
When she was younger, Gadon says she found it “laughable,” because the directors she was working with were so intelligent, and she felt so autonomous. With a bit of distance, however, she wonders whether it may have affected her a bit more than she’d thought.
“It gives that woman an expiration date, which maybe I felt a bit when I was exiting my 20s and entering my 30s as an actor. It was like, ‘Who am I now? What do I do now?’ Do I elicit that same curiosity among filmmakers?’”
Yerma is an example of Gadon seeking out the opportunities that will shape her future. It’s one that looks very bright. She is currently in the writer’s residency at TIFF, working on the second draft of her adaptation of Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals. Either this year or next, the project will also mark her directorial debut.
“It’s been very humbling,” she says. “I’m so established as an actor, and when you branch out into something else like screenwriting, you’re a beginner.” After sitting on the book for four years, it then took her a year to conquer the imposter syndrome that was keeping her from writing the adaptation.
“I was so scared,” Gadon says of the fear that the script would be bad, or that no one would take her seriously as a writer. “It’s been a huge learning process, but it’s also been rewarding because it’s been so challenging.”
From the sublime to the sartorial, Gadon’s evolution includes a fresh approach to her personal style.
“I’ve really been excited by my own autonomy in that space, which I feel like could get me in a little trouble,” she says. “We currently exist in a space where if an actor doesn’t have a stylist, it’s almost like she hasn’t achieved a certain level of success.” For Gadon, however, the kind of world where stylists would appear on the cover of the industry bible the Hollywood Reporter is a “disillusionment” of sorts.
“We’re in such an economy of stylists and fashion houses and contracts that I find it an extension of the bureaucracy and politics of being an actor,” says Gadon. “I feel very rebellious against it. I look around at my peers, especially anyone over the age of 25, and I think, ‘I want to know what you would wear.’”
When she served on the 2021 Venice Film Festival jury, Gadon styled all 12 of her red carpet looks herself. “It was crazy to do that without a stylist, but it was also really freeing,” she says. “I got to wear what I wanted, including Canadian designers, and I didn’t feel the pressure of doing it with a stylist.”
All in all, it’s a time of immense growth for Gadon, emerging from the survival mode of the pandemic, where life was about simply staying afloat, and the idea of stretching and changing felt frivolous.
“I was planting those seeds during that time, and now it feels like all these little seeds I’ve planted over the past couple of years are starting to grow,” says Gadon of pushing herself to places she hadn’t been before. “And now, so am I.”
