A slayer with layers

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This article was published 04/02/2022 (1012 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In the very first scene in the new CTV Sci-Fi Channel series Astrid & Lilly Save the World, Winnipeg-born actor Jana Morrison can be seen slicing into the body of a demonic monster and plunging her hands into its gooey guts to retrieve a mysterious alien organ.

Jana’s mom is very proud.

And Rebecca Torres Morrison has every reason to be. As high school girl Astrid — who, with her best bud Lilly (Samantha Aucoin), takes on a monster-hunting mission to avert Armageddon — her daughter Jana not only scored a plum role in the series. She also offers up a rare representation of Filipinos on television.

That’s a point of pride for Jana Morrison, in addition to the way she gives representation to another oft-overlooked demographic, which she mentions in describing the series’ premise.

“Astrid is a plus-size, feisty girl who is really into science,” the actor says in a morning phone interview from Victoria, B.C., where she studied at the Canadian College of Performing Arts, and now calls home.

“She loves her best friend Lilly and they are kind of (each other’s) only friends,” Morrison adds.

“They like to spy on the other kids at school just to know what the cool kids are doing and to see what they can do to make themselves a little bit more cool,” she explains. “They are bullied for their weight, and they’re bullied for the things they like to do.”

After Astrid and Lilly are dubbed the “pudge patrol” by a schoolmate at a party, they engage in an impromptu ritual that inadvertently allows monsters entry into our world.

Going by the first episodes, the tone of the show is comically outlandish, if occasionally gruesome, yet it does reflect a certain bitter reality when it comes to teen cruelty regarding weight.

On that score, Morrison says she could access a few painful memories of attending Sisler High School about a decade ago.

“I wasn’t necessarily bullied like crazy. But I did have a bullied time, so I did pull from those memories,” she says.

“But I was really in the theatre crowd, and you know how the theatre crowd is,” she adds. “We’re kind of weird. We’re kind of loud. We’re not necessarily the coolest, but we’ve got each other‘s backs. We get each other.”

Morrison attributes her early love affair with arts to her mother, who enrolled Jana in dance classes at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, singing classes with beloved Winnipeg vocal coach Joy Lazo, and acting classes with Onalee Ames. (While still in high school, Morrison worked as a background performer on the series Todd and the Book of Pure Evil, a show very much cut from the same horror-comedy cloth as Astrid & Lilly.)

“My mom just wanted me to gain some confidence,” Jana says.

That evidently worked beyond anyone’s expectations.

“Jana really embodies Astrid in many ways,” says the show’s producing director, Danishka Esterhazy, another Winnipeg expat. “She has her fierceness and her confidence and her sense of humour and her warmth.

“Jana is a really wonderful person,” says Esterhazy. “She’s very much a friendly Manitoban. She is very kind and very warm and it’s great to have her as one of the leads on the show because, on a TV show, the lead actors really sets the tone of the entire set.

“Everybody follows their behaviour. And so Jana and Sam, being such great people — so hard-working and so kind and supportive of the other cast members and of the crew — that made the shooting environment really nice.”

For her part, Morrison stood in awe of at least one of her castmates, yet another former Winnipegger, Broadway vet Ma-Anne Dionisio, who plays Astrid’s mother. When she met her, Morrison acknowledges, “I geeked out …

“As a musical-theatre Filipino girl, she was someone that I had been dying to work with. Joy Lazo and (Winnipeg playwright) Joseph Sevillo had been talking about her and singing her praises. And she was a dream to work with.”

The role was not written for Filipino characters, Morrison says.

“In the breakdown of the role when I first got the audition, the character was not Filipino at all,” Morrison says. “They were just looking for a plus-size girl who could fill this role.

“And when they cast me, they were like: Great, let’s cast a Filipino mom for her.

“And I really respect that choice,” she says. “There are thousands and maybe millions of Filipinos in Canada and all of them obviously watch TV. Unfortunately, it is not normal to have Filipino representation on TV and I think this is going to help show that there can be more representation.

“We’re not weirdly different from any other race,” Morrison says. “We’re going through the same issues.”

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Esterhazy acknowledges the show owes a debt to the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

“I know the creators (Betsy Van Stone and Noelle Stehman) are huge fans of Buffy and I am a huge fan of Buffy and we talked about Buffy a lot,” Esterhazy says, acknowledging that Buffy fandom has been somewhat soured by allegations of misogyny and abuse against the show’s creator, Joss Whedon.

“But this is a very feminist show with female leads, female creators, female directors and non-binary directors.

“It’s quite a change,” Esterhazy says. “The industry has changed and I think our show reflects that.”

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Morrison occasionally returns to her hometown and hopes to employ her musical chops in the planned Rainbow Stage production of Ma-Buhay, an original musical about a Filipino talent competition by Joseph Sevillo and Josh Caldo.

“We’re just workshopping that. Work has been bringing me back to Winnipeg more and more,” Morrison says. “I’m sure hoping it happens.”

Astrid & Lilly Save the World airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on CTV Sci-Fi Channel.

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