Pickle Barrel
YOU KNOW HOW it is: you sit down with
someone to discuss her breakout role
in the latest installment of a venerable,
gore-splattered zombie franchise and
you wind up discussing her career as a
teacher at an inner-city high school in
Auckland, New Zealand.
“I like to flitter about,” says Amy Lalonde, and she’s not kidding. The 32- year-old long-time Yonge and St. Clair resident has taken a circuitous route toward stardom.
It all makes her current success — a memorable turn as an admirably undistressed damsel in creep-show auteur George Romero’s Diary of the Dead and a scene-stealing role in the hit CBC series Sophie — all the sweeter.
Lalonde, who grew up on a farm in Fenwick, Ont., relates her back story as if it’s no big deal, but the details are anything but ordinary.
“When I was 18,” says Lalonde, “I had to decide whether to go to York University for the fine arts program with a scholarship or to Queen’s in Kingston for concurrence in education. I had always been interested in teaching, and as a smalltown girl, York was a bit overwhelming. So I think I made the right choice.”
From there, she was hired as a teacher in Welland, Ont. — at her old high school, no less. “It was so weird,” she recalls. “I was working beside my old teachers.”
Compounding the strangeness was the fact that, at the age of 24, she could have easily passed for a student.
“I’d go in for parent-teacher interviews,” she says laughing, “and the parents would just look at me for a while and ask, ‘So … is the teacher coming in soon?’” All awkwardness aside, Lalonde insists that it was a great job and not one she was looking to leave — until fate intervened (as it so often does) via the Internet.
“I don’t know how it happened,” she says. “There was this online job posting for a teaching position in New Zealand. The next thing I knew, I was flying off to New Zealand.”
Lalonde spent the next year Down Under, teaching drama and dance to an ethnically diverse array of students, and was even offered a position as a department head.
“It was an amazing offer, but it was just too far away. My family is here, and for things like weddings and babies being born, it would have been too hard to get back.”
So Lalonde returned to Toronto to put her knowledge of the actor’s craft into practice to break into the biz — not an easy process considering that she had zero credits on her resumé.
She did get a break early on, though it wasn’t of the acting variety. It was as a model.
“It was suggested to me that I “check it out,” so I tentatively went in for their “Open Call Wednesday,” she says. “I did a test shoot, and the rest is history.”
Lalonde ended up signing with B&M Model Management. She found steady work and eventually met her future Sophie co-star Natalie Brown, another B&M model.
“We knew of each other," Lalonde says. “Now, that we’re on the same show, we see each other a lot. We always book our hotel rooms on the same floor and across from each other. That way we can work on scripts the night before shooting or for the girly necessities, like, ‘Can I borrow your curling iron?’”
Choosing the right modelling agency was a coup, as was settling in the Yonge and St. Clair area.
“It’s a great area to start in, especially if you’re from a small town because I was very close to downtown where a lot of my auditions and modelling bookings were scheduled,” she says. “I was always amazing at how relaxed I felt the minute I drove up Mount Pleasant, dipped down into the ravine coming up to St. Clair. I would feel at home.”
Lalonde also wrangled a part-time supply teaching job at Bishop Strachan in Forest Hill.
“Supply teaching there was great. I was able to work there when my schedule was booked up with modelling and acting gigs,” she says.
Eventually, she got her chance, though it was, by her own admission, something of an inauspicious debut. “I was channel flipping the other day, and I caught the episode of Mutant X, where I had my first role,” she says sheepishly. “I was a nanobot Stepford wife clone.”
Not exactly a part to show off a full range of dramatic skills, but Lalonde was thrilled. “It was my first time onset, and I’ll never forget how ecstatic I was,” she says. “All the veteran actors around me were telling me, ‘Never lose that.’” A couple of years and many, many gigs later, Lalonde says she understands where they were coming from. “I will admit that there’s been a bit of a shift,” she continues. “I’ve accepted that it’s work. There are some days when I’m exhausted, when I never want to get on a plane ever again, when I realize that I’ve been living in hotels and at the airport for weeks on end. Then I stop and remind myself of the times before, when I was pounding the pavement to get a role as the nanobot clone with three lines.”
Suffice it to say that Diary of the Dead gives an audience a better sense of her chops. The film, which borrows the old Blair Witch conceit of being filmed by its principal characters, is an ensemble piece, but Lalonde’s work stands out. She plays a flirty, southernaccented actress who starts off being menaced by an unconvincingly undead colleague in a shoestring student film and winds up, one clever life-imitatesart twist later, being pursued by an honest-to-goodness zombie.
In addition to satirizing horror flick conventions, Diary of the Dead also functions nostalgically as a throwback to writer-director George Romero’s low-budget origins — a gesture upon which Lalonde has a typically unique perspective.
“When I was teaching [in Welland], she says, “I did a film course. My colleague and I created a unit on horror films, and we showed Romero’s original 1968 Night of the Living Dead. So I was up there, talking to the class about how Night of the Living Dead invented the [zombie] genre. So there was the blond ingenue on screen, running through the cemetery and losing her shoe. When I was doing Diary of the Dead, I was that same blond ingenue, running around and losing my shoe. It’s just surreal.”
Given Romero’s rabid fan base, Diary of the Dead will likely live on as a cult item, but it’s Sophie (which features precisely zero decapitation scenes) that would seem to present Lalonde with her best shot at mainstream success. The series, which opened to good reviews and even better ratings, has been picked up in the United States by ABC Family, and Lalonde, who plays the eponymous talent agent’s ethically challenged client and (owing to some fairly bad behaviour) former best friend, has her fingers crossed that the show will stick around for a second season.
In the meantime, Lalonde’s weighing other options, including a possible move southwestward. “I’ve always dabbled with the thought of going to L.A.,” she says. “It’s a question Canadian actors wrestle with. We feel a pull to go down there. I was supposed to go to L.A. for pilot season, but, of course, with the writers’ strike, there was no pilot season. Now, with Sophie doing well, I might put that off for a while. It’s up in the air.”
And, as it turns out, some downtime suits her just fine. After spending seven months in Montreal shooting Sophie, Lalonde is happy to be back in Toronto and doing things that don’t involve standing in front of a camera.
She and Brown have enrolled together in an Italian course, and she’s relishing the opportunity to frequent her favourite local haunts and restaurants. She’s also looking forward to the chance to get back to the family farm in Fenwick.
“My dad likes to say it grounds me,” says Lalonde of the country life. “It’s nice to put on the rubber boots and go fishing in the pond or to not see or hear your neighbours when you get up in the morning. I feel sometimes like I need that.”
As it turns out, there might be an
opportunity for Lalonde to work and
get back to her roots at the same time.
“I did a pilot for the CBC called
Cowgirl, which is a dream come true,”
says the former equestrian (it turns
out that horse riding was her first
passion, before acting or teaching). “It
films on a beautiful ranch in Calgary.
So if that gets picked up, I’ll get to go
west and do some acting and riding
out in the country. And that would be
amazing.” 
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