Mia Kirshner bounds into the Hazelton Hotel suite for another interview, settling into a plush leather couch to chat about her latest project — a sci-fi series for Showcase called Defiance. For Kirshner, a stunning and accomplished actress with a wealth of challenging roles to her credit, the gig hits a lot closer to home than you might expect from a show that takes place in the year 2046.
A few years back, Kirshner, best known for her work on the groundbreaking TV series The L Word, travelled the globe listening to the stories of the world’s displaced peoples for an amazing book entitled I Live Here. In so doing, she spent a great deal of time in brothels. It wasn’t pretty.
For her new TV project, Defiance, airing Monday nights on Showcase, Kirshner plays Kenya, the proprietor of a sex and gambling bar called the Need/Want. How’s that for irony?
“The idea of playing someone that owned a brothel was a little difficult to get my head around,” says Kirshner. “I felt like it couldn’t be called a brothel, which is a place that is extremely dangerous for women, and they are really horror shows of exploitation.”
For Kirshner, there is a very important distinction between the Need/Want and the type of brothel she encountered during her travels.
“The Need/Want is a sex club. Kenya has created this utopia for herself to express herself through sexuality, and she finds a group of like-minded people who want the same thing,” she says. “And as a byproduct, she’s made some money from that. The women are there because they want to be there. It is a business for them and a safe place. It’s super-important to make that distinction.”
Not that the visually stunning new science fiction series is all about a futuristic sex club.
The series, also starring Grant Bowler, Julie Benz and Canadian icon Graham Greene, is set in the town of Defiance.
Long story short, an alien race ends up at war with humans and Earth is devastated as a result. Defiance springs up from the ashes after a truce is struck. Here, the various species — human, votan, castithan and many others — try to live together in peace and rebuild society from the ground up. Grant Bowler plays the new “law-keeper” in town charged with trying to keep the peace while also thwarting outside forces intent on demolishing the town.
The characters are what makes the show work. There are layers that will be peeled away as the show progresses, and plenty of depth and nuance.
Everyone, it seems, has a back story that will play out in due course, including Kenya, who is also the sister of the mayor (played by Benz) and a (financial at least) love interest of the law-keeper, setting up a potentially potent love triangle. But Kirshner is pretty tight-lipped about the whole sordid affair.
“I guess so, I mean, I don’t know.… Funny, I know what’s going to happen, but you don’t,” says Kirshner, refusing to give away any plot details. “Definitely, what’s great is the way in which Kenya handles her relationships, which is very much the way complicated women handle relationships. She is able to articulate that on screen.”
Another point of pride for Kirshner is the Canadian crew that worked their magic on a back lot in Scarborough.
“They were so fantastic; it was so nice,” says Kirshner. “There was so much Canadian talent that worked on this show. It was almost like being a kid and watching these fantastic people on the crew who were given complete creative licence. I’m very proud of that.”
The show is also unique in its combination of television and massively multiplayer online gaming. (Ask your kids. They’ll explain it to you.)
An added bonus, for Kirshner, the taping of the show represented the longest time she’s been able to spend in Toronto since she was just a teenager growing up in the shadow of Casa Loma.
Kirshner still loves walking her dog, Rainbow, along the ravine in Sir Winston Churchill Park in the neighbourhood and counts the grass under the old crabapple trees at Spadina House as one of her favourite places in the city.
“My dad and I like to lie under those trees in the summer and just talk about life,” she says.
Kirshner attended Forest Hill Collegiate Institute and Jarvis Collegiate before heading to McGill University in Montreal. She made her acting debut in the 1993 Denys Arcand film Love & Human Remains, a film in which she played a dominatrix.
Not one to shy away from controversial sexually charged roles, even back in the ’90s as a teenager, she played an exotic dancer in her next film, Atom Egoyan’s Exotica. She starred as Jenny Schecter on The L Word for all six seasons, from 2004 to 2009.
But Kirshner has also had a passion for writing — her dad worked at the Canadian Jewish News, and her sister Lauren is also an author. After 9/11, Kirshner decided to go ahead with her I Live Here project — more than seven years in the making — despite some serious second thoughts before her first trip to Ingushetia beside Chechnya.
I Live Here was published in 2008 with proceeds going to Amnesty International and the I Live Here Foundation. But the story didn’t end there.
“When we were in Malawi, we visited a juvenile prison, and I decided, actually very quickly, that we needed to build a school,” Kirshner explains. “Little did I know how difficult it was to build a school. But we did it. We actually built a school structure — it is actually a full-time school — and it has actually come to be mandatory to attend school.”
“I feel like it was my way, my small way,” she continues. “So many people gave so much to me, gave their stories. It was important for me to pay it forward.”
She’s an interesting person, this Mia Kirshner. She has layers, and much depth, not unlike her Defiance character Kenya. And Torontonians should probably make it a point of pride to remind people that she’s one of ours. And one of the good ones.