'True Detective,' 'North of North' Inuk star Anna Lambe on taking risks and telling Indigenous stories with humour

Yahoo

5 days ago

In recent years, Anna Lambe's acting career has skyrocketed. The Inuk actor from Iqaluit got her start at 15 years old on the film The Grizzlies, then went on to star alongside Alfred Molina in the Prime Video series Three Pines, and worked with Jodie Foster in True Detective: Night Country.
Most recently, Lambe starred as Siaja in the CBC and Netflix series North of North, with the first released to rave reviews. Next up for Lambe? She will star alongside Brad Pitt in David Ayer's movie Heart of the Beast.
"It's pretty surreal. It's really, really cool," Lambe told Yahoo Canada about being cast in Heart of the Beast. "Every new project just feels so exciting. But I mean, the caliber and the size of Heart of the Beast is just, I feel very honoured to have the trust of the team to hop in and do my thing."
Lambe's acting career started at her Nunavut high school, where there were posters put up to attract students to join a workshop for The Grizzlies, and Lambe's drama teacher recommended that she participate.
In an interesting turn of events, Lambe almost "backed out" of the workshop, feeling too shy and anxious to participate, but her dad was already on his way to pick her up, so she went.
And the rest is history.
"Every time I get a new job, it's something that my dad always makes sure to remind me of is, 'Can you imagine if you never went and did that audition?'" Lambe said. "It's really humbling and it just makes me think about it in the big picture."
"I am grateful that I just took the chance. I mean, it was a low risk chance, but it has kind of led to so many bigger things. I've had to take risks over and over again along the way, that's just how this industry rolls. And everything's a bit of a roll of the dice, but I've embraced that a little bit more, and I'm really curious to see what what comes next."
Lambe would go on to work with the team behind The Grizzlies again on North of North.
"They took a chance on me when I was 15 and then they took a chance on me again when I was 23, and I am so grateful for the way that they always lead with the community at the forefront of their minds," Lambe said. "And that it's always about how they can give back and how they can tell stories with nuance and complexity, and appropriately and authentically."
The Grizzlies is a film about a group of teens in Kugluktuk, Nunavut, the town with the highest suicide rate in all of North America, who connect by playing lacrosse. Lambe plays the only female player on the team, Spring, and was tasked with taking on particularly difficult topics, like domestic violence.
"In playing Spring and taking up space, she really goes through this arc where she finds her strength after such significant loss and trauma, and how she, as a young woman, was like, 'I'm not going to be scared out of things that I want to do,'" Lambe said. "We're so often encouraged to make ourselves smaller for other people, and recognizing that your story and your strength and your resilience is valid, and is important, and is, I think, something that we all deserve to hear, to see."
When Lambe was filming The Grizzlies, she didn't fully grasp what being in a movie meant. She was just excited to make friends and tell an important story, and that desire to have fun and attraction to storytelling is still what drives her.
"I just get to move through this industry with a smile on my face, because I'm just having the time of my life," Lambe said.
Once Lambe got to Three Pines, the story of the show was particularly emotional, and difficult for the actor to both work on and watch.
Adapted from Louise Penny's best-selling book, the show is centred around investigations into murders in a Quebec town, including the disappearance of an Indigenous girl, Blue Two-Rivers, played by Lambe. While Blue's family is adamant she wouldn't mysteriously leave, and certainly wouldn't leave her daughter behind, the Quebec police are quick to dismiss her case.
"Three Pines was a heavy project and I think there was a lot happening at the time that made it that much harder. And it's a deeply personal thing to me, and something that I was struggling with at the time and trying to kind of deal with all of these different feelings that I was having," Lambe said. "But the very real issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women is something that, I think, we can never stop talking about, and something that I think deserves that space and that platform."
"It was very much a difficult one, and one that I really also struggled to watch. Violence against Indigenous women is a very real threat and also something that many of us have experienced, or have loved ones who have experienced. Three Pines was so different from anything else that I had done up until that point, and continues to be different from anything else I've done since. ... Because of how difficult it was for me, I don't know if I would choose to do that kind of thing again. But those kinds of stories are so important in continuing to highlight that crisis that very much is still happening within our communities."
While Lambe shared the screen with great talents like Alfred Molina, Rossif Sutherland, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Tantoo Cardinal in Three Pines, the celebrity of her collaborators certainly grew in True Detective: Night Country.
"Stepping into True Detective was such a dream," Lambe said. "The cast on that show was so incredible. I mean Jodie Foster, of course, but Kali Reis, Finn Bennett, John Hawkes, Chris Eccleston, Isabella LaBlanc, what an incredible cast and lovely people. Really such a great group of people to work with."
"[Showrunner] Issa López, I adore her with my whole heart. And she put so much attention to detail into everything that she did, everything she wrote, everything she directed. She was such a powerhouse. And I admire her work so dearly. And as well as the Alaskan producers, Cathy Tagnak Rexford and Princess Johnson."
In True Detective: Night Country, set in Alaska, Lambe plays Kayla Prior, whose husband Peter (Finn Bennett) is a rookie detective working under Foster's character Liz Danvers. Lambe has said the relationship reminded her of her own parents.
"[True Detective: Night Country] gave me a taste of what could be and something to chase for the rest of my career," Lambe said. "It allowed me the time and the space, with the acting coaches and the dialect coaches and everything, to try and do my best, to level myself up."
"That shoot was just such a privilege and getting to meet everyone on it was such a privilege. And the story that we told was one that was deeply important, again about missing and murdered Indigenous women, but also about empowerment and reclamation, and taking back and justice, whatever that may look like, or whatever that might mean. And whether you agree with that or not is always something that can be debated. It was just really exciting and empowering, and it's a point of my career that I often look on and I'm like, 'I can't believe that happened. That's so cool.'"
Lambe moved into comedy in a big way for North of North, a show that's outrageously funny and balances its emotional moments with perfection. Lambe plays Siaja, a young Inuk woman who goes through a very public separation from her husband in their small town, having to reevaluate her life under the close eye of her community, while also providing for her daughter.
"The amount of people that have loved it has been just really humbling, overwhelming, heartwarming," Lambe said. "I'm so grateful that so many people have been open and receptive to seeing the story in a place they might not have seen before, and allowed themselves to kind of fall in love with these characters and the show that we created."
But it was the light-hearted nature of the story that really appealed to Lambe, versus having to work through a lot of trauma-based storyline in her previous work.
"It was going to be hard and it was going to be really long days, and we were going to be battling the cold, and that definitely posed challenges throughout filming, but in terms of content it was like, this is going to be fun," Lambe said.
"And there were so many times where, in approaching episodes and scenes that we were filming, amongst the cast and amongst the crew, we'd be chatting with each other like, 'I can't wait to do this part. Oh my gosh, I can't wait to do Inuk Bridgerton. That's going to be so beautiful. I can't wait to do the underwater sequences. That's going to be really cool.' So just getting to kind of exist and play in so many different forms and moods and and tempos was really nice. Because we can go from like really high comedy, clown-esque comedy, and we kind of break your heart a little bit. ... I think to have that full swing is really fun and a huge privilege as an actor."
Another highlight from North of North is how the show really uses costumes as a tool to tell this story, particularly if you look at how Siaja dresses, versus her mother Neevee (Maika Harper), and Siaja's daughter Bun (Keira Cooper).
"The costumes played such a huge part into how I understood Siaja. Her love of colour and fun cuts and fun patterns, and fun prints," Lambe said.
"And even more so, I think what I loved was how Bun was dressed. She had such bold parkas, and she wore whatever she wanted, and these kind of cool, little funky outfits. I think there was something really interesting about going from Neevee's colour palette to Siaja to Bun's, because there is a kind of gradual shift into into bright and bold colours and expression, and fun. And that, to me, really exemplified the intergenerational healing that happened amongst those those three generations, and that with each generation people get to express themselves a little bit more. That we create safer spaces for our children to grow and be who they are. And I think the costume department did such an incredible job of representing that."
But when the show does have to lean into its more emotional moments, including a scene where Neevee tells Siaja that before she was born, she had another child who was taken by her white father, it's handled with so much care and adds such a richness of the storytelling in North of North.
"I think at the core of the show, what was most important for us was the authenticity of it, and the experience of living in the North, and the complexities of our communities and our family dynamics," Lambe said. "And something that's very real is how our community really struggles with the trauma from colonialism and how we navigate that."
"But for the most part, we do it through humour. ... From really dry humour to really silly like fart joke humour, the coping exists within all of that. And those moments where you do just break open, those are real too. And I think defining the show as one thing or the other, as just a comedy or just a drama, doesn't do it the service of, it's just a human experience, and just a human story. So it was nice to feel like we weren't needing to exist in one or the other, and that we can have both at different moments, and they both serve the story equally importantly."