Alison Wandzura virtually never smiles as Nicole, the pipe-wielding badass she plays on Van Helsing. Off-screen, however, the Vancouver actress smiles freely and frequently, with good reason.
First, there’s the fact that Van Helsing – Syfy’s locally shot series about a resurrected vampire hunter (portrayed by True Blood’s Kelly Overton) in a post-apocalyptic near-future where vampires have taken control – is a runaway hit. The series premiered in September to rave reviews and insta-love from fans around the globe, and has already been renewed for a second season.
Then there’s the fact that as Nicole, one of Van Helsing’s human survivors on the run from the menacing bloodsuckers, Wandzura is seen kicking ass in a strong, archetypal role. Wandzura grins as she describes how fans on Twitter have likened Nicole to Linda Hamilton’s iconic character in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. “It’s a tough world, and [Nicole]’s just doing what she needs to do to survive,” says Wandzura in a recent interview. “It’s so intense. There aren’t many smiles happening. Not even a half-smile.”
Wandzura’s all smiles as she recounts the trajectory of her own career: from an academics-focused upbringing in a Slavic family in corporate Calgary, to a marketing job in the swimwear industry, to the moment she embraced acting as her true calling, and now, to her life as a working actor in Vancouver’s thriving film and television industry.
In the beginning, Wandzura pursued marketing over performing because she thought it was the only way she could be self-sufficient. “I remember thinking, ‘I’m always going to be a person that won’t have to be dependant on anyone else, and I’m going to make a lot of money,’ so that’s why I went into business, but then somewhere along the way, I realized it was more important to tell stories,” she says.
Wandzura’s filmography includes The X-Files, You Me Her, Rogue, Supernatural, Once Upon a Time, The Runner, and her personal favourite: Cari Green’s Citizen Jane, a short film about the persecution faced by LGBT soldiers in the Canadian Armed Forces. She’s also produced a couple of shorts of her own (including Singer Sisters, in which Wandzura plays an actress whose manager-sister begs her to get plastic surgery), and is equally passionate about theatre work, teasing an unnamed project with Continuum actress Luvia Petersen for early 2017.
When Wandzura stepped onto the local screen scene at 26-years-old, she called upon the skills she’d learned in the marketing world to promote herself as an actress. “If I booked a role, I would immediately set to work on creating a campaign to advertise the fact that I had booked this role to the casting directors,” she chuckles. These campaigns often took the form of humorous postcards. “Casting directors were probably like, ‘what the hell is this, and that is so cute that she would be trying so hard,’” says Wandzura. “I’m sure it stood out. No one in the film industry does this.”
Wandzura notes that she soon hit a wall for that very reason: the film business doesn’t operate like other industries. “In business, generally, there’s a formula: You put in X effort, and X strategy, and you get Y amount of reward or output, but there’s no similar formula in film and television, so that was a real head- trip,” says Wandzura. Over the last seven years, she says she’s had to settle into a new way of looking at success and fulfillment – and even now, in the midst of a textbook “successful” year, her definition of successful is shifting.
“My version of success has shifted from how much work can I get to what am I actually putting out there into the world,” says Wandzura. “I’ve come to a point now where I need to be a storyteller. That’s the whole purpose of me doing this. If I don’t get to tell stories, I might as well be working back in swimwear.”
Van Helsing is chock-full of delicious storytelling for all of its story-loving cast and crew. Wandzura credits much of Van Helsing’s appeal to showrunner Neil LaBute. “He’s taken away all of the cutesiness and the glitz that can sometimes be associated with the vampire genre,” says Wandzura. “There’s not a speck of glitter on that show, we’re proud to say.”
If you missed last week’s nail-biting episode, we’ll spare you the gory details regarding Nicole’s current state. But we will share what Wandzura says about working closely on Van Helsing with one of her heroes: Christopher Heyerdahl, the prolific actor who also played The Swede on AMC’s Hell on Wheels.
“[Heyerdahl]’s just so interesting. You would be hard-pressed to find another actor whose character work is that nuanced and that skilled and that compelling,” says Wandzura. “Every moment [in which he’s acting] means something, and there’s always so much going on. On this show, he plays a deaf man. Some people might be, ‘Oh, he doesn’t have lines…?’ He brings so much to that character. I’ve learned so much about the art from watching him.”
Van Helsing airs Fridays on Syfy. Follow Wandzura on Twitter @alisonwandzura.
