AT FIRST BLUSH, Globe and Mail columnist Leah McLaren’s latest project, Abroad, a CBC TV movie about a North American newspaper columnist who goes to work and find true love in London, England, seems entirely autobiographical.
McLaren worked as the Globe’s London correspondent from 2002 to 2004.
But McLaren plays coy about which of the characters or details were inspired by real life. “The movie is autobiographical only in the broadest and most narrow terms,” she says. “This much is true: I moved to London in my 20s and, while there, worked as a journalist. I dated a bunch of British guys who alternately infatuated and horrified me.”
The TV movie, which is a pilot for a series in production, stars Toronto’s Liane Balaban (Last Chance Harvey) as fledgling writer Amy Pearce. Supporting cast members include comedian Seán Cullen, as her eccentric boss, and Maury Chaykin as a lordly newspaper baron. Choosing Balaban to play the character inspired by herself was an easy choice for McLaren.
“Liane is gorgeous, way more gorgeous than me. And much thinner. And younger. And nicer. She drinks less and eats less junk. She flosses and does charity work, too, and well basically, she’s better than me in every way, so you might say it was a canny PR move. I’m not sure it’s working. But the truth is, she totally rocked the audition,” McLaren says.
The seed of the movie was sown in a 2002 story McLaren wrote for the Spectator, a popular weekly magazine in the U.K., about the romantic shortcomings of the modern English male.The resultant buzz got McLaren thinking about a TV adaptation.
If McLaren’s style column is any guide, the movie will be full of signature McLaren cheek and irreverence.
To that end, McLaren looks back on her time as a wild-child student at Earl Haig fondly. She recalls “eating cafeteria bagels and sneaking cigarettes in the north stairwell with my best friend, Zoe Greenberg, as we waited for the punk loser she had a crush on to get out of auto shop.”
It was during those early days at Earl Haig that her English teacher introduced McLaren to the beauty of the written word, courtesy of Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women.
“I was in the Claude Watson arts program, and the teachers were extraordinary.We ran a bit wild, but most of us ended up OK,” she says. Abroad airs March 14 on CBC.
