The YVR Screen Scene Podcast

Roughly 6.2 million Canadians – or 25% of the population – live with some form of disability, but that high number hasn’t led to an accessible society. In the film and television industry, countless barriers exist for people with disabilities that simply don’t exist for people without them. In the first of our new series of episodes about disability and accessibility in #BCFilm, actor and advocate...

Over the last several years, Kai Bradbury has made a name for himself playing characters who dabble in deception. On Motherland: Fort Salem , he played the bird-wielding male witch Gerit who shows up in Fort Salem to participate in Beltane and lies to Tally about his relationship status. As rogue scientist Nate on The Imperfects , he lured monsters Abbi, Tilda, and Juan into a potentially devastat...

For three seasons, Catherine Lough Haggquist portrayed General Petra Bellweather on Freeform’s Motherland: Fort Salem . The dramatic series imagined a world where the witches of Salem entered into a pact with non-magical humans that made them a celebrated and powerful military force – and General Bellweather rose through the ranks (and the series) to become the highest ranking witch in the militar...

Morgan Holmstrom plays a nurse who takes no guff and gives everything she has to the people she loves on CBC and Paramount Plus’ action-packed dramatic series SkyMed . In the APTN limited series Shadow of the Rougarou , she lights up the screen as a Metis-Cree fur trapper who must face the curse that ripped her life apart as a child – a role for which she was nominated for a 2022 Leo Award. And in...

Anthony Shim ( Daughter ) directed, wrote, edited, produced, and acted in Riceboy Sleeps , the staggering coming of age film that screens at the 2022 Vancouver International Film Festival. The dramatic feature tells the story of a South Korean immigrant and single mom, So-young, who is raising her son Dong-hyun in the Vancouver suburbs in the 1990s. So-young desperately wants to instill a sense of...

back home premieres this month at the 2022 Vancouver International Film Festival. The film follows filmmaker Nisha Platzer’s journey to get to know her older brother Josh 20 years after he took his own life. Over the span of five years, Nisha connects with the friends who knew Josh best as a teenager; it isn’t long before his chosen family becomes hers, too. back home is a haunting and nuanced fil...

You would be hard-pressed to find a bigger fan of the Vancouver Grizzlies than Kat Jayme. Not only did Kat grow up a fan of the ill-fated NBA franchise, but she’s parlayed that childhood passion into a number of films, including We The West , 2018’s festival hit Finding Big Country (in which she successfully tracked down NBA enigma Bryant “Big Country Reeves), and The Grizzlie Truth , in which she...

Showrunner Dennis Heaton returns to the YVR Screen Scene Podcast to talk about The Imperfects , his latest fantastical series that premiered on Netflix earlier this month. The Imperfects are Tilda, Abbi, and Juan, three 20-somethings who band together to hunt down the scientist responsible for turning them into monsters via experimental gene therapy and forcing him to make them human again. Tilda...

Kandyse McClure’s filmography is populated by a staggering range of characters. On the critically acclaimed and beloved Battlestar Galactica , Kandyse portrayed Anastasia “Dee” Dualla, a passionate woman who fought, loved, dreamt, and, ultimately, succumbed to despair. As Nicte Batan in the third and final season of Motherland: Fort Salem , she wrestled with her character’s past as a terrorist whi...

Fakes  is the story of two best friends – played by Emilija Baranac and Jennifer Tong – who accidentally build one of the largest fake ID empires in North America. Friend-of-the-podcast Richard Harmon is Tryst, who might or might not be something of a dirtbag. There’s a lot to love about this comedy-drama, the 10 episodes of which hit CBC Gem (in Canada) and Netflix (outside of Canada) e...

Thomas Elms stars in SkyMed , the action-packed CBC dramatic series about the up-and-coming pilots and nurses who work at an air ambulance service; the show premiered in July on CBC Television, CBC Gem, and Paramount Plus, and immediately got people buzzing on all the socials. Thomas is Captain Milosz Nowak, a calm, collected, and fiercely loyal pilot who broke with his immigrant parents to m...

Actor Praneet Akilla ( Nancy Drew , Motherland: Fort Salem ) returns to the YVR Screen Scene Podcast to talk about his leading role in CBC's SkyMed . The sexy, action-packed dramatic television series was inspired by the real-life experiences of SkyMed showrunner Julie Puckrin’s sister and brother-in-law who met flying air ambulances in the North. In this contemplative and at times raucous in...

Jesse Inocalla is a wildly talented voice actor best known for his stunning work voicing Soren on Netflix’s The Dragon Prince . Soren can be cocky and brash but also charming, charismatic, a little dim, and kind, and Jesse’s inspired performance hits all of those beats. Jesse’s lengthy and growing filmography also includes Spider-Ham in Marvel Battleworld: Mystery of the Thanostones , Reptil in Ma...

Brian Drummond is a versatile voice artist with more than 325 credits to his name. He’s wielded this versatility in beloved projects like Death Note , Ninjago , Corner Gas Animated , The Last Kids on Earth , The Hollow , My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic , Super Dinosaur , Slugterra , Wolverine Versus Sabretooth , and Ultimate Wolverine Versus Hulk , as well as a fan favourite turn as Vegeta in...

Keilani Rose is a scene-stealer in Shoresy , a spin-off of Jared Keeso and Jacob Tierney’s beloved comedy series, Letterkenny . Shoresy follows the foul-mouthed, chirp-serving, mother-loving, fan favourite character from Letterkenny named Shoresy as he joins the Sudbury Bulldogs in a quest to never lose again. Shoresy is audacious, surreal, daring, and hilarious. It’s also intersectional...

Khrystyna Syvolap arrived in Canada with her 8-year-old daughter nearly three months ago, seeking refuge from Russia’s unjust assault on Ukraine. Khrystyna is a commercial director who has directed television, short films, and a feature film (2020’s Viddana ). She's a member of the Ukrainian Film Academy and was on Forbes Magazine's list of Ukraine's "30 Under 30" for 2021. And for the moment at l...

Aliyah O’Brien is a versatile actress, an advocate for self-love, and a happy wanderer who has ambled ’round the world. Aliyah is beloved for her work as one half of #Golly on Rookie Blue , for playing a brilliant detective on Take Two , and for fun roles in series like DC’s Legends of Tomorrow , Bates Motel , You Me Her, and Sanctuary. In this fun and fascinating conversation with Sabrina Rani Fu...

Aleks Paunovic ( Snowpiercer ) and Tahmoh Penikett ( Battlestar Galactica ) didn’t exactly hit it off when they first met in acting class more than 20 years ago, but the friendship they built in the intervening years is the stuff of legend. In the third of our #IndustryBFFs series, these best bros bring us into the inner workings of their epic friendship, and discuss the myriad of ways their frien...

This is the fifth episode in our ongoing #StopAsianHate series where we explore the intersection between anti-Asian hate and the film and television industry.  May is Asian Heritage Month, and to paraphrase Sandra Oh, it’s an honour to celebrate the depth and breadth of what it means to be Asian. Asian is a big word; Asia is comprised of nearly 50 countries, billions of people, thousands of c...

Actress Erin Karpluk is known around the world for her starring role in CBC’s Being Erica, which aired for four seasons in 180 countries and won Erin a Best Actress Gemini Award in 2009 and a Best Lead Actress Leo Award in 2010, and she’s beloved in the local industry for playing Kate, the restaurant manager who experiences an incredible trauma, in the Vancouver-shot Godiva’s. More recently, she l...

Bill Newton’s filmography is chock-full of voice performances that are exciting, adventurous, daring, and damn funny. Bill has voiced everyone’s favourite God of Mischief Loki in multiple marvel projects, including Lego Marvel Adventures and Marvel Battleworld: Treachery at Twilight . He was nominated for a 2021 UBCP/ACTRA Award for voicing the dude-bro ogre BrainFreeze in Monster Beach (a perform...

By the time William B. Davis debuted in the pilot episode of The X-Files as the Cigarette Smoking Man, he’d already built a storied career as a director, acting teacher, and actor on both sides of the Atlantic. William documented his journey to The X-File s in his 2013 book, Where There’s Smoke… Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man – a journey that began with CBC audio dramas when he was a child and...

What comes to your mind when you hear the words “Doug and the Slugs”? If you live in Canada and grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, you probably think of one of the hottest party bands of the era fronted by the unlikeliest of rockstars: the late, great Doug Bennett. And you probably smile, because songs like “Too Bad” and “Real Enough” and “Making It Work” and “Day By Day” and their accompanying music...

It’s been six years since the British Columbia government declared the opioid overdose crisis a public health emergency. More than 9,400 British Columbians have died from overdoses since January 2016. 174 people were lost in the month of February 2022 alone. Colin Askey’s film Love In The Time Of Fentanyl goes beyond the cold statistics and to the heart of what’s at stake: human beings in our prov...

Filmmaker Shakil Jessa is determined to make the kind of films he needed to see when he was a queer Muslim teenager. This determination is particularly evident in Imran and Alykhan , a short film about two boys who fall in love at a Muslim youth retreat but have to keep their relationship a secret from those around them; the film will premiere on May 7 at Crazy8s. Shakil recently wrapped his first...