STRIVING FOR INDEPENDENCE
Calgary teenager Imajyn Cardinal balked at acting with her mom in Montreal-shot film
For Imajyn Cardinal, it was a case of good news-bad news.
The good news? The talented 15-year-old Calgary actress landed her first lead role in the Montrealshot, coming-of-age film, The Saver, which will screen at the Calgary International Film Festival Sunday.
The bad news? Her mother landed a role in the film as well.
With typical teenage frankness, the soft-spoken Imajyn doesn’t pull any punches when asked how she felt about her mom, awardwinning actress and activist Michelle Thrush, being cast as, well, her mom.
“I didn’t like it,” she said flatly. “It’s weird. I don’t know how to explain it. You see your mom at home and you go to work and you see her again and you go home and you see your mom again.”
It should be noted that Imajyn says this as her mom, grinning widely, sits beside her at a downtown Calgary coffee shop. The two are here to discuss Montreal filmmaker Wiebke von Carolsfeld’s dramatic and occasionally bleak tale of a stubborn teen girl left on her own after her mother dies. Thrush, a Gemini-award winning actress currently starring in the Edmonton-shot series Blackstone, does not have much screen time in the film — “You might blink and miss me,” she says — and Imajyn wants to make one point crystal clear.
“I was cast and then they figured out who my mom was,” she says.
“She told me, ‘Mom, they better not cast you as my mom or I’m not doing it,’ ” Thrush says with a laugh. “When my agent called and said, ‘They want you to play the mom,’ I was, ‘Oh, how am I going to tell her?’ ”
“I don’t want it to seem like I’m getting work because my mom is helping me,” Imajyn adds. “I want to do it on my own.”
That said, this isn’t the first time the two have worked together. Imajyn has a recurring role in Blackstone, in which Thrush plays alcoholic Grace Stoney, and both were in the 2014 family film The Journey Home. Imajyn started acting at the age of seven, cast in an educational video about sexual abuse. She was literally still in the womb the first time she was on a set, back when her mother was filming the Albertashot drama North of 60.
Nevertheless, Thrush admits she was nervous for her daughter when it came to shooting The Saver. As Fern, a resolutely independent teen determined not to end up in the foster-care system that abused her mother, Imajyn is in every scene.