HOMETOWN GLORY
Canadian actress Christine Horne goes against all odds. By GORDON BOWNESS
CHRISTINE HORNE IS HAVING DOUBTS OVER HER
red carpet appearance for the gala screening of Hyena Road, Paul Gross’s unsettling war drama set within Canada’s combat mission in Afghanistan. The film, which opens across the country this month, had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. “The idea of borrowing a dress or having someone else style me,” says Horne, “it all feels….” Her voice trails off in exasperation. “How am I presenting myself ? Who is choosing how I am represented? I can get into an existential crisis about it. I just get uncomfortable in those situations.”
A darling of the Toronto stage, Horne, 33, rarely secondguesses herself when she’s performing. It’s when playing herself that she has misgivings.
“I have to find a way to embrace the fun side of it,” she concedes. “I know a lot of people who do it a lot more than I do, so I think I’ll have a lot of help.” Horne is set to make a big splash with her performance as Capt. Jennifer Bowman, who runs a command post at a forward operating base at Sperwan Ghar, in the heart of the treacherous Panjwai district. Under her command is an elite group of snipers headed by Ryan Sanders (played by Rossif Sutherland), with whom she’s having a clandestine affair. The two become entangled in the machinations of intelligence officer Pete Mitchell (Gross) and a legendary Mujahideen leader (Niamatullah Arghandabi) .
“I approached the role of Bowman just as a person doing a job,” says Horne. “Because that’s what the military people we talked with do: their job, under extreme circumstances.”
Bowman is the latest in a string of indomitable women played by Horne. Since graduating from York University’s theatre program, she has delivered a series of blistering stage performances, including a love-mad princess in Andromache, a neurotic governess in The Turn of the Screw (for which she won a Dora Award in 2010) and a despairing seductress in Miss Julie. Her first film role was as the young Hagar Shipley, opposite Ellen Burstyn’s mature portrayal, in the 2007 adaptation of The Stone Angel. “I haven’t done a lot of ingenue parts, those girl-next-door roles. It’s all been [characters with] big emotions and big language. I like that outlet.”
That’s by design. When Horne graduated, the Aurora, Ont., native had long blonde hair down to her waist, a leftover from her hippie days at Aurora High School. Later, a professor suggested her tresses would make a great selling point. “I kind of recoiled at the thought. I didn’t want to get jobs because of my hair. I wanted to be a legitimate actor,” she says, snickering at the word “legitimate.” So she cut off all her hair and sported a close-cropped pixie cut for the next decade.
“I think it was about keeping that power, not giving into something I felt the industry was wanting me to do. I didn’t want to be living my life to serve this business,” she says. “I think I got more interesting parts because of it.”
Horne embraces with gusto the intellectual rigour and emotional honesty required by the likes of playwrights Jean Racine, Henry James and August Strindberg. Her decisions and approach have kept her busy this year, as she appears in a drama called Unless alongside Catherine Keener. This is in addition to her role in a comedy called How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town, a film about a writer from the city who helps plan a sex party with her friends who live in a small town called Beaver Ridge (she plays the writer’s editor).
“I like having my ass kicked. I like the challenge of hard roles. I tend to do things that have fairly high emotional demands. I like getting wrecked by it,” she says. “Isn’t that the point—to get to do the things we can’t do in life?”