The YVR Screen Scene Podcast

Simone Bailly is a screen actress, stage actress, painter, singer, deejay, talk show host, producer, model, sci-fi fan, and fan favourite. Simone’s lengthy filmography includes Battlestar Galactica , NCIS: Los Angeles , The L Word , a series regular role on Da Vinci’s City Hall , Smallville , a popular appearance in the Need for Speed: Most Wanted video game, and the fan favourite role of Ka’lel,...

The documentary Emergence: Out of the Shadows confronts the alienation and discrimination faced by queer people dealing with sexuality, gender, and coming-out issues in traditional South Asian communities.  The film follows Kayden, Jag, and Alex as they awaken to and express their sexuality within conservative South Asian families in Canada and in India. Heart-wrenching and healing, their ind...

Over the last several years, Steven Roberts has delivered three fearless performances in a trio of searing feature films: in 2019’s In God I Trust , 2020’s Beyond The Woods , and 2021’s River Road. In the first, he’s Tyler, a white supremacist with a hair-trigger temper and major issues with his law enforcement officer dad; in the second, he’s Andrew Bennett, a suspect in the murder of his wife an...

Carmen Pollard is a documentary filmmaker, editor, producer, and story consultant whose filmography includes For Dear Life , a feature-length documentary in which she sensitively followed her cousin, Vancouver theatre producer James Pollard, in the three and a half years after his terminal cancer diagnosis, and Dancehalls, Deejays & Distortion , an upbeat 10-part series that amplifies little-k...

In recent years, actress Rukiya Bernard has spoken publicly and frequently about the blatant racism and racist micro-aggressions she’s experienced as a Black woman in the film and television industry. She’s sat on numerous diversity and inclusion panels. She’s written about it, including in a creative essay titled Dear Becky that we published on the YVR Screen Scene site. She’s spoken about it in...

Content warning : This episode contains frank and graphic talk about mental health, mental illness, and suicide. If you’re thinking about suicide or are worried about a friend or a loved one, the Canada Suicide Prevention Service is available 24/7/365 at 1.833.456.4566. You can also find links to international suicide prevention and mental health support services in the footnotes for this episode....

Untold history is still history, and it deserves to be heard – and the new Knowledge Network documentary series British Columbia: An Untold History aims to tell largely untold stories from and about the land that is known today as British Columbia. Over the course of four riveting episodes, we see that the region’s history is a confluence of cultures, races, genders, conflicts, and narratives. Thr...

Crystal Balint has taken us to some fascinating places, eras, and moments in time and space on both screen and stage. On screen, she took us to 1950s San Francisco as the lead in BritBox’s The Bletchley Circle: San Francisco , and into the heart and life of Iris Bearden, a former cryptographer turned brilliant sleuth. As Grace on Disney XD’s Mech X4 , she made us laugh and feel big feelings as she...

Today’s episode is all about Family Law , the highly anticipated Global Original series in which one dysfunctional family helps other dysfunctional families in crisis. With its all-star, all-Canadian cast including Jewel Staite, Victor Garber, Zach Smadu, and Genelle Williams, the 10-episode, one-hour legal drama premieres Friday, September 17 on Global. We enter Family Law by way of Abigail “Abby...

Ellie Harvie is a veteran actress and stand-up comedian with a filmography a mile long and dozens of award nominations to her name, including two Gemini nominations, a Canadian Comedy Award nomination, and eight Leo nominations. In 2000, she won a Leo Award for Best Performance or Host in a Music, Comedy or Variety Program or Series for her delicious work portraying Morticia Addams on The New Adda...

It’s only been a few years since Thomas Nicholson arrived in Canada (from Denmark, by way of England) in search of a new career and purpose, and it’s clear he found both in acting. From Project Blue Book to Supernatural , from Luvia Petersen’s Dog Bite to Netflix mega-hits Virgin River and The Haunting of Bly Manor , Thomas is stealing scenes and making himself known in our Vancouver screen scene...

Sex/Life has basically lived in the Netflix Top 10 since it first hit the streaming service in June 2021. The eight-part dramatic series tells the story of Billie (Sarah Shahi), a married mom living a sweet life in Connecticut who begins to fantasize about her hot ex-boyfriend after the birth of her second child. She writes all of her sexy memories down in a journal, and one day, the line between...

Grace Dove is a change-maker, and this abiding passion for change is evident in everything she’s done so far in the film and television industry: as an actor, a filmmaker, and an advocate for Indigenous representation and reclamation. Grace is a member of the Shuswap First Nation who divides her time between Vancouver and LA. Her acting filmography includes The Revenant , How It Ends , and Monkey...

Actress Fiona Vroom’s eclectic filmography includes Hell on Wheels , Tim Burton’s Big Eyes , a 1950s housewife with superpowers on the way-ahead-of-its-time web series The True Heroines (which she also produced), Kindergarten Cop 2 , Bates Motel , the eternally youthful sitcom star Barbara Beaumont in a cult favourite episode of The X-Files , and schoolteacher Miss Gillies on TNT’s post-apocalypti...

Alfred Hitchcock was a game-changer. Heck, he made his own game: one through which the goal was to unsettle, to stir, to haunt, to move, and to horrify his audience while remaining wholly committed to pure cinema. But who was Alfred Hitchcock, really? What did he want from his art? What did the industry think of him? What did he really think of his actors (many of whom allege he was a bully)? And...

Today’s bonus episode features audio from YVR Screen Scene For India, a star-studded fundraiser for Indian COVID relief that was broadcast live on May 8, 2021. The event – which was akin to Inside the Actors Studio but with a South Asian Canadian twist – featured Sabrina Rani Furminger in conversation with some of Vancouver’s finest South Asian Canadian actors, including Agam Darshi, Dhirendra, Pr...

Actress Sharon Taylor (JANN ) returns to the YVR Screen Scene Podcast to turn the tables on our host Sabrina Rani Furminger. This funny and at times emotional conversation between good friends covers geekdom, the B.C. star system, long-term relationships, living with mental illness, and that time Sharon got Sabrina to go on a hike. Programming note: The YVR Screen Scene Podcast is currently on sum...

Levi: Becoming Himself explores the journey of Vancouver’s Levi Nahirney as he navigates his gender identity and transition with the support of his family. The CBC Original Documentary launches on CBC Gem on July 16 and premieres on CBC Television in B.C. & Alberta on July 17. Levi is an identical twin from a small fishing village in Vietnam who was adopted by a white family and grew up in Nor...

Seventeen years ago, Brent Butt was a 30-something stand-up comedian with an idea for a TV show about the zany residents of a prairie town named Dog River located 40 km from nowhere. Brent was admittedly surprised when his show idea – ultimately titled Corner Gas – was picked up by CTV, and downright shocked when it became a hit. Corner Gas is one of Canada’s highest-rated comedy brands of all-tim...

Aliza Vellani portrays Rani in Sweet Tooth , the critically acclaimed eight-part post-apocalyptic fantasy series that hit Netflix in early June. Sweet Tooth draws its inspiration from Jeff Lemire’s comic book series about a boy who’s half-human and half deer navigating a world that has been devastated by a virus that has killed a lot of people and led to the mysterious emergence of human-animal hy...

Joella Cabalu is a documentary filmmaker and producer based in Vancouver. Since making her directorial debut in 2016 with It Runs In The Family (a deeply personal documentary feature film that highlighted queer stories from the Philippines and the diaspora, including that of her own brother), Joella has helped bring the stories of a staggering array of remarkable people to the screen, including th...

In the realm of fictional true crime podcasts – that delicious genre where the worlds of true crime and narrative fiction collide – Ghost Town Killer is a top-tier specimen. The six-part series follows supernatural podcaster Lilith Black as she investigates the murder of her sister in their isolated hometown where she wrestles with family secrets, millionaires and lowlifes, the ghost of a serial k...

Actor Aleks Paunovic – AKA the “Big Guy” of the Vancouver film and television industry – returns to the YVR Screen Scene Podcast to discuss the searing indie hit Chained , saying goodbye to Van Helsing after five triumphant seasons, the enduring appeal of post-apocalyptic film and television, and his 20-year friendship with actor Tahmoh Penikett. Episode sponsor: UBCP/ACTRA

Tahmoh Penikett has gained an international fan following for wildly different roles in an array of studio, network, and indie projects, including Battlestar Galactica (where he appeared as Karl “Helo” Agathon), Strange Empire , Dollhouse , Supernatural , Riftworld Chronicles , Bomb Girls , and The Sinners . The son of a politician and a residential school survivor, Tahmoh is passionate about Indi...

Tahmoh Penikett has gained an international fan following for wildly different roles in an array of studio, network, and indie projects, including Battlestar Galactica (where he appeared as Karl “Helo” Agathon), Strange Empire , Dollhouse , Supernatural , Riftworld Chronicles , Bomb Girls , and The Sinners . The son of a politician and a residential school survivor, Tahmoh is passionate about Indi...