Tilly enjoying her TV role
Bomb Girls star glad she has reconnected with the screen
Meg Tilly did something few actresses ever attempt — she took a 17-year break from screen acting.
The star of Agnes of God and The Big Chill was busy, during that time, raising three children, doing theatre and writing books, including one entitled Singing Songs, which was a series of vignettes about a young girl whose stepfather molests her and her sisters.
She wasn’t really looking to jump back into acting for the screen fulltime after being away for so long when her new agent suggested she meet with the producers of Bomb Girls, a dramatic series for television about women in a Second World War-era Canadian munitions factory. She really only agreed to the meeting as a favour to the agent. Surprise, she got the part and the six-part series became a pretty big hit last year on the Global network, averaging 1.3 million viewers per episode.
And, at the Canadian Screen Awards earlier this month, Tilly won the Best Actress Award for her role in Bomb Girls. She plays Lorna Corbett, a plant manager who struggles with a disabled husband and goes on to have an affair with a coworker.
“I really didn’t want to do TV or film because I was loving doing plays,” said Tilly, 53, in town recently to promote season two of the series which begins Monday on Global at 9 p.m. In the episode titled Party Line, news of the raid on Dieppe electrifies the nation, but as the truth comes in, the women at the munitions factory begin to deal with the unfolding tragedy of Operation Jubilee in some personal and unexpected ways.
Tilly said she met with series cocreator Adrienne Mitchell and they talked at length about the character and what she’d bring to the role. Tilly was eventually sold on the character and the dramatic series and told her husband, writer Don Calame, that she wanted to take the part.
“I’m so happy they offered it to me. We were living in Oak Bay on Vancouver Island, just a very peaceful life,” said Tilly, who has been married three times, including a fiveyear relationship to the British actor Colin Firth. Out of that union, the couple had a son, Will, born in 1990. Her other children, Emily, born in 1984, and David, born in 1986, were from her marriage to film producer Tim Zinnemann.
“I didn’t realize how much I missed acting. I would never want my children to feel that I gave anything up for them, (but) I gained so much with the privilege of being able to raise them. But I didn’t realize how much acting was a part of me and how much fun it is to create with other people.
“I’m not career-building (now), I could care less. I’ve been offered a bunch of things since I started the show, but I’m not doing them because I just want to enjoy what I’m doing now.”
This season the series has expanded to 12 episodes and will feature a big-name guest star in Rosie O’Donnell. Tilley said the producers could have easily pitched it to U.S. networks and given it more of an American slant but they decided against it.
“They were determined to keep it Canadian and I’m so proud,” said Tilly, born Margaret Elizabeth Chan in Long Beach, Calif. Her mother was a Canadian school teacher and her father a Chinese-American businessman.
Tilly is known for playing complex and tragic characters onscreen, notably her role as a troubled young nun who gives birth in Agnes of God, for which she received an Oscar nomination and won a Golden Globe.
But in Bomb Girls she’s a toughtalking supervisor of the women who work at the plant while their husbands or boyfriends are in battle overseas.
“(At first), I didn’t see all that she (Lorna) could be. It was only after meeting with Adrienne Mitchell that I saw Lorna, the humanness of her and the complexities that were just hinted at. After I dove into her skin, I relaxed and said I loved this character and have to play her.”
Tilly said all of the characters in the series are going through some type of personal issues and they all have a strong focus and purpose. During the Second World War, about 260,000 women worked in Canada’s factories building bombs and ammunition.
“In the show, women are women, they are not just props to men. They are presented as full people with the light side and the dark side, like we all are. These women were soldiers on the home front,” said Tilly, who says she was unaware of the extent of the Canadian home front during the war before starting work on the show.
These days she is living in Toronto with her husband and she’s happy to do more work if the right role comes along. But she’s also excited about becoming a grandmother and spending time with the new addition to the family.
“Acting is a big priority but it’s not my only priority. I want balance in my life, I don’t want to race around like a chicken with my head cut off and just gorging on everything that comes my way because I missed it. I don’t want to do too much because then maybe it won’t feel like a blessing of going to work every day,” she said.