When you see the kids of Jersey Shore or its forthcoming Toronto-set spiritual spinoff Lake Shore valorized for their smug, empty-headed charms, it’s easy to get depressed about the current state of celebrity.
Sure, we’ve never expected our stars to be Rhodes Scholars, but could it be possible that they’re actually dumbening? Wait, is “dumbening” even a word?
Well,despair not.There’s another, brainier strand emerging in our current celebrity culture, and Caterina Scorsone, the Toronto native whose star is rising thanks to her regular role on Private Practice and a crossover role on its sister show Grey’s Anatomy, is at the head of the pack.
Born in Toronto in 1981, Scorsone spent her youth in the Annex, living just a short walk away from St. George subway station, before moving to the Queen West area as she was entering high school.
Currently based in Los Angeles, Scorsone fondly remembers her childhood spent in downtown Toronto. “It was great walking to school every day and seeing the seasons change,” she recalls.
“It’s really a change from Los Angeles. If you’re an East Coaster, every time it’s fall you know for sure that you’re older. Here you just get a memo from your agent.”
Scorsone attended Holy Rosary Elementary School before transferring to Cardinal Carter Academy for the Arts in North Toronto for middle school.
As a child actor who had been working steadily since the age of eight (when she appeared on beloved CBC kids show Mr. Dressup), balancing a busy work schedule with school was always tricky. So for high school, Scorsone attended Subway Academy II, an alternative school formerly located above Future Bakery at Bloor and Brunswick.
“It was an alternative school that accommodated kids that had unique situations,” she says.
“I was doing a show called Power Play for CTV, and my schedule pulled me out of school a lot, and they could accommodate for that. It was almost a one-on-one thing with the teachers there.”
After high school, she faced a tough decision. Would she attend university or dive headfirst into the often unforgiving world of professional acting?
“I’d been in the industry since I was a kid, and I really wanted to step back and decide if acting was really something I felt passionate about or if it was just this inherited profession I had defaulted into.”
At the end of the day,she enrolled at the University of Toronto. And it made sense, especially coming from a family with a very strong academic background.
“Academic curiosity was always a priority in my family,” she explains. “Both my parents are academics. They met in grad school at the University of Toronto and got their PhDs there. One of my sisters is an Egyptologist who works at the ROM, and another one studied theology and is now a chaplain with the armed forces.”
While at U of T, Scorsone pursued minors in comparative religions and philosophy, but her major was an esoteric program called literary studies. “It’s not English lit,” she clarifies.“It was basically a greatbooks program that started with the epics and went through colonial literature and the avant-garde, then in the last year became a kind of postmodern theory program. It was sort of a literary philosophy program. It was an interesting program. It was very small for U of T, and I met some interesting people.”
Studying the theory of literature and storytelling allowed her to come to her own realization of why exactly she wanted to perform professionally.
“I’d always been involved in storytelling. It’s what I do professionally. But I needed to go at it from a literary perspective and also a philosophical perspective. I needed to come to an adult understanding of why I came to storytelling for a living.”In acquiring this nuanced understanding of her craft, Scorsone also netted herself a degree from Canada’s finest university (depending on who you ask).
Exercising her intellect also couldn’t have hurt her chances of landing her role on Private Practice where she plays neurosurgeon Dr. Amelia Shepherd, sister to Grey’s Anatomy heartthrob Patrick Dempsey’s Dr. Derek “McDreamy” Shepherd. (That she does bear a striking resembling to Dempsey, making their brother-sister rapport that much more believable, probably helped, too.) As a fan of the show, she really sunk into the role. “I had watched Grey’s Anatomy from season one, so I was very connected to the characters just as a fan.
Going on the show was pretty fun. And especially working with Sandra Oh, who’s Canadian — and Patrick Dempsey. It was kind of nice to enter that world that I’d been a part of as a fan.”
And while playing a neurosurgeon requires an ability to pronounce a whole slew of tricky words, Scorsone’s degree in literary theory probably did her some favours there, too. After all, if you can manage to pronounce Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s name correctly, there’s not much that can trip you up.
For her part, though, Scorsone is quick to mention she only plays a doctor on TV, and making it convincing required both her considerable talents and some help from the staff on Private Practice and Grey’s.“They really help us out,” she says. “At the beginning of every episode, we’re given a breakdown of all the medical terminology.It tells us what precisely it is that we’re doing and what part of the body is involved and a phonetic chart for the pronunciation of all these polysyllabic words.”
Her recent promotion to series regular on Private Practice keeps Scorsone pretty firmly entrenched in Los Angeles where she has lived for the past four years. Long enough that it’s become a blur.
Or as she puts it, “long enough that I can drive with confidence but not long enough that I don’t still consider Toronto home.”
She does relish the moments when she can sneak away back to her old Hogtown stomping grounds and was back in town for the Gemini Awards last month where she was nominated for best performance by an actress in a leading role in a dramatic program or miniseries for her starring role in Alice, a 2009 reimagining of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland stories. It was another great turn in a very cerebral series and more proof that Caterina Scorsone is getting more and more popular, without having to dumben herself, attracting audiences and earning critical acclaim in the process.
Cast of Lake Shore, eat your stupid hearts out.