‘Quarry’ star carving out TV career
Cape Town-born Jodi Balfour chats to Debashine Thangevelo about bagging a role in the TV series Quarry and what’s in store for her future
WHILE many South Africans are besotted with the gritty new international TV series,
Quarry, few are aware of the fact that Jodi Balfour, who plays Joni Conway, is a proud local export.
The Cape Town born film and television actress is an alumnus of the University of Cape Town.
She moved overseas fresh out of graduation.
In a telephonic chat with the actress, who was in London at the time, she explains how it all started.
“I moved sort of reluctantly at first, I certainly didn’t expect to go and stay in Vancouver, where my parents emigrated to a couple of years prior. I went and went and tested the waters in film and TV there,” she shares.
Interestingly, she also bagged a BBC mini-series a few months before her graduation, which gave her her first taste of working on a really high-quality international project.
She shares: “It was a wartime saga. I was really intimidated. It was a sort of baptism of fire. Not to say anything in SA doesn’t measure up, it was just a very different experience.
“I ended up doing a British accent. Playing a role so different to me really gave me the bug. And since I had Canadian residency because of my parents, I went and explored Vancouver. Things started going well and I got an agent there. I began working on TV shows as a guest star. Within a year, I was booked as the lead in a Canadian drama that was shot in Toronto. Then I just ended up staying…” By the way, that drama was called
Bomb Girls, and she played a character called Gladys Witham.
She says: “It was a surreal thing to be entrenched in such a powerful Canadian story with an entirely Canadian cast. I loved it so, so much. It taught me an enormous amount. I felt so passionately about the story we were telling and particularly of this character, Gladys, who was this feminist trailblazer in the ’40s, pushing back against her father and family’s expectations.
“And it was largely a female cast, which was the best thing ever. I won the Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Drama Programme or Mini-series at the Canadian Screen Awards. That was for the TV film version.”
Back to Quarry, she says: “It’s still so fresh in my mind. I wanted it so badly. It was kind of the regular way you go about doing things. I got an audition for it. They had already shot the pilot. They wanted to shake things up a little bit and I got in sort of through the back door and I got an audition for the role of Joni. I sent an audition tape to New York, which is where the casting director, Alexis Fogel, was. And that was that.”
She adds: “I remember reading the script for the first time in preparation for the audition and just, like you say, falling in love with the writing. I hadn’t read something that made me feel things and really had an impact on me the way
Quarry did.” She was über excited when they got in touch before she headed back to South Africa to spend Christmas with her family.
Reshuffling her schedule a little, she made her way to Los Angeles for a chemistry test with Logan MarshallGreen, who plays the lead character, Mac Conway. Suffice to say, she nailed it – an hour before heading to the airport, she learned that she had got the role.
She admits: “So I got to go home with the best Christmas present ever.”
As for getting to work alongside, Marshall Green, she shares: “He is an actor’s actor. He was there to be of service to the scene and our performance. We had a great time.”
Meanwhile, she’s got a few other shows in the bag. One is a show for Netflix called The Crown, where she is cast opposite Michael C Hall (Dexter) and the other is a BBC and HBO co-production called Rellik.
Another talent doing South Africa proud, we wish Balfour all the best! Quarry airs on M-Net Edge (DStv channel 102) at 9pm on Tuesdays.