Swan keeps it real as TV coroner
Star of new CBC drama portrays character as a seeker of truth rather than a supermodel
Serinda Swan felt there was more to her new TV character coroner Jenny Cooper than the study of bodily fluids, skin tissue and blood spray patterns.
Swan felt Cooper, the lead character in the new CBC drama Coroner, had an internal life that was also ripe for dissection.
“I really want to keep her as human as possible. I don’t want her to be a coroner that happens to be a person. I wanted her to be a person who happens to be a coroner,” Swan told Coroner showrunner Adrienne Mitchell and creator Morwyn Brebner when they were discussing the role.
“I wanted to be able to lead with her humanity. I wanted to lead with everything she feels.”
In the new eight-part series, we meet Swan just as her husband has dropped dead.
Once an emergency room doctor, Swan’s mounting anxiety has forced her to make big changes and navigate new often emotional waters. To help start anew, she packs up her teenage son, moves to Toronto and takes a job as a coroner.
“First and foremost it’s watching a woman’s experience in this new life,” said Swan, who grew up in West Vancouver but has called Los Angeles home since 2009.
“Jenny is an amazing experience for me because she is definitely a weird one, and I love her for that. I love going to work and getting to explore,” said Swan about her character, who is based on the protagonist in the series of books by author M.R. Hall.
Cooper is as complex and screwed up as they get, but at the same time, she’s a focused truth-seeker who isn’t stymied by either red tape or old ways. She is thorough, thoughtful and unwavering in her desire to crack a case.
She works closely with a detective played by Vancouver’s Roger Cross.
This new role marks a strong addition to Swan’s resume, which over the last decade has included many TV roles, most notably in Inhumans, Ballers, Chicago Fire and Breakout Kings.
The daughter of a theatre director (Scott Swan) and an actress turned spiritual healer (Alandra Napali Kai), Swan’s first gig was alongside her mother on the Ted Danson and Isabella Rossellini 1989 film Cousins when she was just three years old. She remembers there was candy.
In her teens she began to model, but that life wasn’t for Swan. She didn’t like the scene, the process, and what it represented and how it made her feel. She says it was a life she was happy to walk away from.
“We can all be duped into thinking our value is the sexual energy we can get from another person, or the sexual attention we can get,” said Swan, adding that she never saw herself as a model turned actor.
“That has nothing to do with me. That’s my mother. That’s my father. That’s my genetics,” said Swan of her model-friendly looks. “If I solely rely on my genetics for my life’s creativity, then I’m a bit of a jackass.”
Her new TV character is a long way from glossy magazine pictorials. Sure she has great eyebrows, but Jenny isn’t running around crime scenes in four-inch stilettos and perfectly tailored, designer suits.
“I put on eight pounds for the character and I made sure when I cut my hair that my bangs were a little off. I wanted it to look utilitarian. I wanted it to look like she did it in her sink,” said Swan.
“I didn’t want this to be a pretty shiny character.”
A pair of Hunter gumboots used for outdoor crime scene investigations is as fancy as Cooper gets.
Swan is looking for substance over sex appeal, plain and simple.
“The people who have longevity in this industry are the people who have made themselves, and they have made themselves into many different characters,” said Swan, who played Anne Bancroft opposite Jessica Lange’s Joan Crawford in TV mogul Ryan Murphy’s miniseries Feud.
"As a woman we are told our value decreases as we get older,” said Swan.
“I’m like: ‘My value actually increases. On the outside I may not be valued as much by society, but the conversations I can have and my ability to contribute to society, the wisdom that increases my value.’”
There is no word yet if Swan will get to play Cooper again; that will be determined after the series goes to air.
Either way, she says she’s really proud of the show and loved the fact she got to shoot it in Toronto — and Toronto got to remain Toronto.
“I think through specificity it creates universality. You look at shows like Shetland or Happy Valley — these BBC shows that are so specific to their little towns, and we love them. We love them because we feel like we’re part of the community. We know the local pub. We learn about different areas. We get to see the landscapes. It’s so specific and you become so invested.
“Part of the reason why I took this project was because it’s so specific. It’s a Canadian woman in Toronto. We’re shooting it in downtown Toronto. We’re talking about Dundas Street, we shoot in the TIFF building. Our language is very specific to Toronto.”
It also has a language very specific to the job.
Coroner is a procedural drama, and these types of shows take some extra work and some outside guidance to pull off. Medical specialists are signed on as consultants to help the actors with everything from the holding of a scalpel, to the angle of an incision, to what to wear to work.
Swan also had an extra expert on set if she needed to talk about being a coroner. In fact, she had access to the OG Canadian TV coroner Nicholas Campbell, a.k.a. Dominic Da Vinci, from Da Vinci’s Inquest.
Campbell shows up in this new series as Cooper’s father.
“He’s a legend,” said Swan, when asked about the award-winning Campbell. “It was a total fluke. It was hilarious.
“On the last day of shooting, he said this was one of his favourite projects that he’s ever worked on,” said Swan. “It brought tears to my eyes.”
So after eight episodes and plenty of bodies, does Swan have a good story or fascinating fact she can pull out at a dinner party?
“Oh yeah, I do,” said Swan, who then explained what happens in a regular autopsy after they take out organs and dissect and test them.
“At the end of it, everything, including your brain, goes into a yellow plastic bag and gets sewn into your stomach, your chest cavity,” said Swan. “So any time there’s ever an open casket, everything is just in there, in the stomach, in a bag.”
Right now Swan is back at home in Los Angeles and working on the education technology company that she co-founded two years ago.
Deedly (as in good deeds) is a free education app to which kids in Grades 6-12 can sign up with their teachers.
“I wanted to be able to lead with her humanity. I wanted to lead with everything she feels.” Coroner star Serinda Swan
In the app is a curriculum that’s based around world issues like mental health, education, poverty and environmental conservation. Through the app, kids have access to charities that work with those issues.
To date, Deedly has piloted in 500 schools and it will be available in Canada in fall 2019.
This project is an extension of Swan’s other interest of working with Together1Heart and the U.N. to combat human trafficking.
“I had this moment in 2011 when I realized that my voice can’t just be telling my story. It needs to be an educated voice, and it needs to tell the story of many,” said Swan.