In an annual feature, we pick out the TIFF 2022 emerging actor, whom we predict will be the screen stars of tomorrow: from Grace Dove to Paul Mescal.
Read all of our TIFF 2022 coverage here.
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Since 2012, TIFF Industry has been anointing an annual class of “Rising Stars” at the festival, with a larger and larger list each year. These are usually young actors on the cusp of — though more likely several years before — a breakout. They are often major talents, though they may go on to be character actors more so than movie stars. Past Canadian class members have included Connor Jessup in 2012 for Blackbird (his big breakout was in 2015’s Closet Monster), Karelle Tremblay in 2015 for Our Loved Ones (whose breakout arguably came with The Fireflies Are Gone in 2018) and Théodore Pellerin in 2017 for Never Steady, Never Still (his breakout came in 2018 with Genèse). Internationally, TIFF has also picked now Oscar-nominee Jessie Buckley in 2017 for Beast. If we’d made a list that year, we would have picked her, too (she was on our Sundance 2018 breakout performance list for the same film), but she didn’t have her big breakout until the last couple of years. Another favourite from TIFF’s selections was Mamoudou Athie in 2017 for Unicorn Store (we’re still waiting for his meteoric rise).
At Seventh Row, we’ve long been on the lookout for rising acting talent. In 2021, we published a list of fifty screen stars of tomorrow. We also regularly publish in our “Bright Young Things” series of career interviews or essays on actors about to break out. This has included a number of both TIFF’s rising stars and Seventh Row’s picks for the best emerging actors at the festival that year. For example, we have published career profiles of Devery Jacobs (TIFF 2018 Rising Star; our 2019 pick) and Mamoudou Athie (TIFF 2017 Rising Star; our 2018 pick).
In response to TIFF’s “Rising stars” program, Seventh Row has, since 2018, been anointing our own list of Emerging Actors at TIFF. We want to shine a light on talent TIFF might have missed and that we feel have the potential for career longevity. Sometimes, there’s overlap between our selections and TIFF’s. Often, we pick major talent that TIFF hasn’t selected. We’ve also picked people TIFF has selected for its program, either in the same year or later years. For example, in 2018, we picked Karelle Tremblay, Mamoudou Athie, and Jessie Buckley — all partly based on the work they did in 2015 or 2016 when TIFF had anointed them.
We picked Michaela Kurimsky (2020), Deragh Campbell (2019), Grace Glowicki (this year), a few years after TIFF did (dates are for our picks not TIFF’s year). That’s partly because we wouldn’t have seen the films they were selected for before the festival that year. Partly, it’s because we often want to see an actor in at least two great parts before declaring their longevity. And partly, it’s because we’ve been fans for years and we’re still waiting for them to find even bigger audiences and more great character parts. In some cases, it’s because we just didn’t do this list before 2018!
Over the years, we’ve deviated from TIFF with our selections of actors like Jack Lowden and others from Benediction (2021), James McArdle (Ammonite, 2020), Niamh Algar (Calm With Horses, 2019), Forrest Goodluck (Blood Quantum, 2019), Denise Gough (The Other Lamb, 2019), Thomasin Mackenzie (Jojo Rabbit, 2019), Josh O’Connor (The Hope Gap, 2019), Geraldine Viswanathan (Hala, 2019), Vanessa Kirby (2020), and more. Note that we run our emerging actors list as a festival curtain raiser (i.e., before the festival starts). Thus, we often won’t have seen the actors’ latest films at the festival. Our picks have often been based on past film work or even theatre work (like Denise Gough and James McArdle).
We also will keep picking people who haven’t yet broken out broadly even though they’ve technically had a breakout role in the industry. Devery Jacobs, for example, was on our 2019 list for Blood Quantum, though Rhymes for Young Ghouls was her industry breakout (and our #6 film of the 2010s). Yet TIFF didn’t pick her as a Rising Star until 2018. We considered Jacobs for our list this year because she’s still not a household name and we think she should be. But since she’s starring in the hit US TV series Reservation Dogs, and the Gotham Awards considered her a breakout last year, we’ve found other ways to talk about her great work this year (stay tuned!).
This year, we’ve only picked actors whose TIFF 2022 work we’ve seen at the time of publishing, which means we’ve yet to discover many great talents. None of TIFF’s Official Rising Stars are on our list, but we also haven’t seen many of their films (in some cases, we also disagree). It also means some of our picks are from short films (as has been true in past years), but partly based on the work we’ve seen these actors do in past features. There’s also a heavy focus on Canadian actors and Indigenous actors. That’s partly to do with what we’ve been able to see pre-fest and who was doing the best work. There is just a lot of Canadian and Indigenous talent! Below, you’ll find our list of 12 actors in alphabetical order by last name.
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Émilie Bierre, n’x̌ax̌aitkʷ: Sacred Spirit of the Lake
I first saw eighteen-year-old Québécois actress Emilie Bierre in Philipe Lesage’s Genèse back in 2018. She shows up in the film’s final act as Béatrice, the crush of Lesage’s avatar, Félix (the star of Les démons), at summer camp. Her quiet, uncertain, but warm Béatrice was a sweet depiction of a girl on the cusp of adolescence tentatively navigating a crush in a gender segregated camp environment. Since then, she has appeared in and elevated troubled projects, and I’ve been waiting for her to get to work on good material. In A Colony, she plays a curious and kind Québécois teenager who befriends a local Indigenous boy — though, as a québécois film by a white settler, it’s filled with every horrifying and racist cliche about Indigenous people. In Les nôtres, she plays a teenager who is being sexually assaulted by her neighbour, and confused about where the power lies in that relationship — another film with a troubled script that Bierre elevates with her performance of a confused girl not quite aware of the bad situation she’s in.
Working with Asia Youngman in the short film n’x̌ax̌aitkʷ, she gets to kind of meld these two characters into one in a more thoughtful script: the cool girl teenager who peer pressures her new Indigenous friend, with all the privileges and biases that come with being a settler. She’s utterly compelling as the girl you want to be your friend, but you’re not quite sure you can trust.
Kiawentiio, n’x̌ax̌aitkʷ: Sacred Spirit of the Lake
Sixteen-year-old Kiawentiio made her big screen debut in 2020 ast the titular character in Beans, a Mohawk teenager figuring out her identity in the midst of the Oka Crisis. Throughout the film, Beans navigates peer pressure, systemic and overt racism, figuring out her identity, and self-harm, and Kiawentiio brought all of this vividly to life. Since then, she’s appeared on a couple of episodes of Rutherford Falls and has completed shooting for Avatar: The Last Airbender. And she’s back at TIFF this year in Asia Youngman’s short film N’xaxaitkw, as an Indigenous teenager dealing with the loss of her best friend, a move to a new town, and the racist peer pressure of her white settler peers. The film relies on Kiawentiio’s gestures and body language to communicate everything she can’t say to her settler peers: the way she shrinks into herself when she thinks they may be a threat and tries her best to fake a smile because she’s not yet sure if they are friends or enemies.
Mélanie Bray, ROSIE
After playing a hilariously inept soldier in Québexit, co-written by Gail Maurice, Mélanie Bray gets the starring role in Maurice’s feature debut, ROSIE. Though a white settler, Bray’s Fred feels every bit like a Gail Maurice character — feisty, independent, and socially aware. The film gets its name from the Indigenous girl — Fred’s niece from her adoptive sister — whom she ends up caring for when her sister dies. But this is very much Bray’s film. As Fred, she’s a woman full of life, dealing with her own traumas, and trying to find a way to care for the young girl unexpectedly in her charge when she can’t even afford her own rent. Bray’s chutzpah and sensitivity as Fred makes us root for her to figure it out. It’s a performance that announces the arrival of a new star.
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Shantae Barnes-Cowan, Sweet As
Though she’s only had a handful of credits in the last couple of years, Indigenous actress Shante Barnes-Cowan is on the verge of a breakout internationally, and may have already broken out in Australia. Thus far, she’s worked on the Australian miniseries Operation Buffalo opposite Seventh Row favourite Ewen Leslie. She is currently starring in the AMC+ series Firebite co-created co-directed by Australian Aboriginal filmmaker/cinematographer Warwick Thornton (Sweet Country).
At TIFF this year, Barnes-Cowan anchors Sweet As, a light-hearted YA film set in remote Pilbara country of Western Australia. It’s the first feature from Indigenous writer-director Jub Clerc, also of Australia. Barnes-Cowan stars as Murra, a sixteen-year-old Indigenous girl who has been regularly abandoned by her drug addict mother since childhood. One particularly scary event leads her to call her uncle, a cop, who arranges to send her on a “Photo Safari” for “at risk” teens.
It’s a tough role to play: Murra is fiercely independent and strong-minded but naive about a lot of things, including her own romantic desires. She feels out of place among the group of teenage misfits — which include a girl with a pedophile boyfriend and a suicidal white boy — because she thinks she doesn’t actually have any problems. Yet Barnes-Cowan reveals Murra’s internal conflict, including her journey to accept herself, through subtle shifts in body language and facial expressions. Although the film features gorgeous landscapes of Pilbara country, Barnes Cowan keeps your focus. She feels real in a film that feels like a first feature (especially in the dialogue), but still wins your heart — and that’s largely thanks to her performance.
Jessica Dinnage, Unruly
Jessica Dinnage steals the show in Malou Reymann’s heart-wrenching film about the young women deemed “vagrants” and “morally deficient” who were sent to Sprøgo island in the 1920s as part of Denmark’s growing eugenics policies. The film technically centres around Maren (Emilie Kroyer Koppel), who is the newest inmate/resident at Sprøgo where she shares a room with Dinnage’s Sørine, who is among the longest residents there. While Maren is feisty and rebellious, Sørine has learned to lose herself and perform docile femininity, with the vain hope of buying her freedom through her behaviour. Maren’s “fight the patriarchy” attitude is certainly the easiest route into the story for audiences. But Sørine’s story is the more complex one because she has a past: she’s the cautionary tale for what could happen to Maren six years down the line. Though roommates, they are at loggerheads at first, so it’s slyly that Dinnage steals your heart.
At the beginning, Dinnage has to convince us both that Sørine has bought into the role she’s learned to play and that maybe she’s hiding something. Maren’s rebellious spirit rubs off on Sørine, so we get to watch her grow and navigate tricky territory — keeping a modicum of her identity without being destroyed by the system — which she was too afraid to tread before, and which Maren never really bothers to. It’s a gradual process, in which Dinnage reveals a young woman who only appears docile, obedient, and is treated like she’s intellectually disabled. But it’s a front, and one that Sørine herself must unpack.
As Maren’s story starts to mimic Sørine’s more and more, Dinnage has to convince us how and why Sørine becomes more active and less passive. Because Sørine is set up early on as the tattle-tale — the enforcer of patriarchal eugenics from within the ranks of the oppressed — it means Dinnage has to work overtime to ensure that, while we kind of hate Sørine at the beginning, there’s something more behind her actions. As Sørine goes through more and more emotional stress, Dinnage navigates this with aplomb. Sørine is not a showy role, but it’s the most substantial one in the film, and it marks Dinnage as a major talent to watch.
Grace Dove, Bones of Crows
Like many Indigenous actors, Grave Dove’s first part in a major film was in The Revenant (2015). But she first came onto our radar with her starring role in Loretta Todd’s Monkey Beach. In that film, she plays a young woman who returns home to her reserve from Vancouver after years away, to cope with past trauma and the grief of losing her grandmother. Much of the film is an internal story about Dove’s character, and Dove makes you want to get to know her better, taking you on her turbulent emotional journey.
With Bones of Crows, Grace Dove gives another star-making performance, and perhaps an even showier one. Dove plays Aline Spears, a Cree woman who is recovering from the trauma of “residential school” and cultural genocide, from age sixteen to well into her forties or fifties. Director Marie Clements, much like Loretta Todd, is a fantastic visual storyteller, and so much of the film is about memory, the land, and nonlinear connections through time. This means that once again, Dove has to communicate a ton of emotion physically and through a few looks because dialogue is not the main focus. No actor fully survives old age makeup, but Dove is excellent here, as we feel her pain echoing through the decades, and her determination to make things better.
Hamza Haq, Viking
Although Hamza Haq is already the star of a major Canadian television series, Transplant, he’s still had limited work in the movies or in projects with writing that lives up to his talents. Watching a few episodes of Transplant, Haq exudes star power as a brilliant immigrant surgeon struggling in Toronto, where every system is set up to work against him. I made it as far as I did in the show — the brilliance of This is Going to Hurt has ruined all medical TV shows for me, and Transplant is particularly badly written — because of his compelling performance. No matter what silly lines he has to deliver, you want to watch him.
In 2020, Haq played a small supporting role in Philippe Falardeau’s My Salinger Year, as the protagonist’s ex who gets caught up in a musical dance sequence. In our masterclass with Falardeau, he shared stories that Haq shared with him about how hard it’s been to find good work as a person of colour in the Canadian film and television industry.
At TIFF this year, Haq gets to flex his comedic and dramatic skills in a crucial supporting role in Stéphane Lafleur’s Platform title Viking. Haq plays a member of the B Team on earth, chosen for their personalities that match the astronauts on a mission to mars, who are there to help troubleshoot the astronauts’ interpersonal relationships. He plays a quintessential bro: well-meaning if a bit daft and not exactly the hardest worker. His character is probably more under-written than the others, and yet he regularly steals every scene he’s in. I did not know that clicking a pen required such comic timing, or that watching him hurl himself over a table in pursuit of something exciting could be so entertaining. It’s only the greats that are equally adept at playing brilliant (as he does in Transplant) and very basic (as he does in Viking). I hope this is the beginning of more worthy roles to come for this excellent rising Canadian star.
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Romina D’Ugo, I Like Movies
As the video store manager in Chandler Levack’s early ‘00s nostalgia flick, I Like Movies, Canadian actress Romina D’Ugo’s Alana is the only character who feels like a human — and someone whose story might have been a more interesting centrepiece. A twentysomething woman working a dead end job, Alana is someone obviously carrying around a lot of disappointments. Long before she lets it out, we know she’s hiding a lot, and trying hard to seem like she’s put together.
Though given the thankless role of spewing autobiography to force the film’s protagonist to start to learn empathy, Romina D’Ugo does so with such realistic anxiety and insecurities that you barely notice she’s speechifying. Levack lets the reveal of this story play out in a wide shot so that we can see D’Ugo’s full body language. Pacing back and forth with nervous energy, we watch her not knowing what to do with her hands, where to look, how to talk about something she’s rarely ever talked about. The words are forced and wholly unrealistic, but D’Ugo is completely believable.
Grace Glowicki, Until Branches Bend
Grace Glowicki’s supporting role in Strawberry Mansion landed her on our list of the Best Emerging Actors at Sundance 2021. After directing, writing, and starring in her first feature, Tito (2019), and starring in Raf (2019) a few years ago, she returns to TIFF again with a leading role in Until Branches Bend. I’m not sure how long we can keep calling her an emerging actress, because I think her work as a character actress is what we love about her: we just hope she gets better projects to work on.
Though the script for Until Branches Bend doesn’t quite work, Glowicki’s enthralling performance propels it, as a woman with an unwanted pregnancy who may be either losing her mind or being gaslit by her community. She works as a grader sorting peaches in a peach farming community, and when she stumbles upon a bug that’s dug all the way into the peach, she can’t let it go. She knows she’s probably right, and we do, too, but between the pregnancy and the gaslighting, she keeps doubting herself. Her behaviour becomes increasingly unhinged and Glowicki is marvellous as a sane woman who isn’t quite sure what to believe anymore. Glowicki is in almost every frame of the film, and her performance keeps us invested in the character, even when the plot doesn’t do her justice.
Brittany LeBorgne, This Place
Having gotten her start in the landmark TV series Mohawk Girls, Indigenous actress Brittany LeBorgne has recently been making small but memorable supporting appearances in Indigenous films. In Rustic Oracle, she’s the sensitive sister to the protagonist who is searching for her lost teenage daughter. She also appeared in Beans as a Mohawk activist in the Oka Crisis who inspires her cousin, the film’s protagonist, to fight for her people and her beliefs.
In This Place, LeBorgne plays Wari, the mother of protagonist Kawenniióhstha (Devery Jacobs). Wari is a woman who fell in love with an Iranian man at university, had his child, and was divided forever from him when she went home from university to stand in solidarity with her community during the Oka Crisis. In flashbacks, we see her love story start and finish. In the present, we see the effects of her divided identity— a mixed woman fighting for her Mohawk identity, terrified that her Mohawk-Iranian daughter could be even further divided from her own Mohawk identity.
Paul Mescal, Aftersun
Though already headlining multiple films at TIFF (Aftersun and Carmen) and Cannes (Aftersun and God’s Creatures) this year, Irish actor Paul Mescal still seems like a relatively untested actor, even if he’s already become a bankable one. After a career-making breakout performance in Normal People of particular sensitivity and vulnerability, and a small part in The Lost Daughter last year, we still haven’t seen Mescal stretch much. It’s like Timothée Chalamet post-Call My by Your Name: we know he can do realist drama with a touch of comedy, but is that it? Already the talk of Dublin theatre before he became a screen star, I have hope that the technical precision of Mescal’s performances will bear more fruit in his future work than we’ve seen in Chalamet’s.
I’m not sure that Mescal is doing something particularly new in Aftersun, but he does it very well. His single dad, Calum, mostly only sees his twelve-year-old daughter on holidays, like the one around which the movie is set. Unlike his Normal People character Connell, Calum is self-aware and trying very hard to hide his pain from his daughter, but drowning nonetheless. The script by director Charlotte Wells is a bit underbaked when it comes to Calum’s psychology, but Wells is wise enough to linger on Mescal in quiet moments to let him elevate it.
There are unforgettable bits of performance, like when Calum sits on a rug he’s bought but can’t afford, willing himself to live or maybe just about giving up. There are small moments when the weight of Calum’s lost dreams overtake Mescal’s face and body — before he has to tuck it away so his daughter doesn’t notice. Mescal reveals the ways in which Calum never grew up because he became a teen dad — his inappropriate excessive drinking, his sometimes too brotherly approach to parenting. He also shows us how Calum is mature beyond his years, trying to hide his own turmoil from his daughter because he’s the adult. Mescal makes both sides of Calum make sense.
Sara Montpetit, Falcon Lake
With only two feature films to her name in the last two years, Québécois actress Sara Montepetit has already distinguished herself as a talent to watch with considerable range. In both films, she leaps off the screen as someone you want to know more, gripped every time she reveals her innermost thoughts. Last year, she starred as the title character in Sébastian Pilote’s Maria Chapdelaine, a teenage girl in 1800s rural Quebec who is deciding between potential suitors and what life she would lead with each of them. Her Maria Chapdelaine was demure but strong-minded, careful with how she makes the one choice afforded to girls in that time. Ironically, one of the problems with Maria Chapdelaine is that Montpetit was so captivating that the script’s underbaked interiority for her was immediately frustrating; the book on which it’s based is more about Maria’s suitors than Maria herself.
In Charlotte Lebon’s Falcon Lake, I almost didn’t recognize her as Chloé: gone are the period costumes in place of swimsuits, oversize t-shirts, and a girl still unsure about how she feels about her sexuality. Though technically the object of affection of the film’s perspective character, Falcon Lake is every bit Montpetit’s film — which is partly about navigating being treated like an object, especially when your sexuality is emerging but you still feel a bit like a child. Her Chloé is spontaneous and fun, but vulnerable and uncertain. She seems like the life of the party, but isn’t sure that’s who she is or wants to be. She’s in the process of figuring out who she is, and yet Montpetit plays her with a self-assurance that means she’s not a vague character, just someone not yet certain of the choices she wants to make.
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