Shining a spotlight on Toronto drag
Family drama is about a woman struggling with her dementia
For her final leading role, Cloris Leachman had seven decades of experience on her co-star Thomas Duplessie. “Jump, Darling” was Duplessie’s first film; it was Leachman’s 71st.
In the film, premiering on video-on-demand services on March 9, Leachman plays Margaret, a woman with early-stage dementia struggling to manage daily life while living alone in Ontario’s Prince Edward County. Duplessie, who is from Miramichi, N.B., and has lived in Toronto for about 12 years, plays her grandson, Russell, an actor who moonlights as the drag queen Fishy Falters. He finds himself staying with his grandma after breaking up with his boyfriend.
Though Leachman was a seasoned veteran, what Duplessie recalls from the weeks shooting with the sharp-witted grand dame in summer 2019 was her playfulness.
“She didn’t take herself too seriously, but she took the work seriously,” he recalls. “She would throw something new at you every take. It gave you permission to try whatever and she would go along with it.”
The Oscar and Emmy-winning star of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” died Jan. 27 at the age of 94 after suffering a stroke, with complications from COVID-19. Toronto director and screenwriter Phil Connell found out while in a meeting with the film’s distributor.
“I was initially in shock,” he recalls. “We continued on the agenda for a minute and then realized we couldn’t, because it changes everything.”
Connell had been pleasantly surprised by the energy and fearlessness Leachman brought to her role.
“A lot of things she wouldn’t have the energy to do as a 93year-old in real life, she would happily do in a take,” he says. “She saved all of her energy for the work and you could tell that she loved it. She lived to act.”
Though she grumbled about her character’s wardrobe of bathrobes and nighties, she didn’t blink at some of the challenges
the role demanded, including a scene in which her grandson helps her take a shower.
“In the back of my head I thought I would have to rewrite that scene,” Connell says. “Why would an actor of this calibre take this sort of personal and professional risk on a debut feature filmmaker? But it didn’t even come up. She would horse around a lot and test the waters but when it came down to it she was game to do what was required.”
Duplessie faced challenges of his own inhabiting the heels of a drag queen. Though he’d been to “hundreds” of drag shows on Church Street he’d never dressed in drag himself. He needn’t have worried. “Drag queens always say once you get into drag your confidence goes through the roof,” he says. “Once I got that wig on and those heels and that makeup, something else takes over.”
To get into character, he worked with Tynomi Banks, a Toronto drag performer who competed on “Canada’s Drag Race” and has a cameo in the film as drag queen Jacqueline O’Nasty. Banks, who also plays Medusa in an ad for Wealthsimple that premiered during the Super Bowl, taught Duplessie some moves for the film, but her instruction was more about an attitude than specific steps.
Banks was part of a group of Toronto drag queens Connell interviewed to capture the working drag queen experience. What Connell learned from drag performer Fay Slift, for example, ultimately shaped a fiery monologue she delivers in a climactic cameo about the presumptions people make about their local queen.
Leachman herself was a fan of the drag world. In an introduction she filmed for its preview screening at the Inside Out LGBT Film Festival in October, she said she’d watched “Canada’s Drag Race” and that Banks, who was eliminated fourth, was “robbed.”
Though the popularity of the “Drag Race” franchise proves that drag is having a moment, the reality is that a gay indie film is still a hard sell. Though “Jump, Darling” will be part of a digital edition of the queer British film festival BFI Flare later this month, the festival circuit so crucial to building word of mouth for smaller films has been dramatically scaled back amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Banks applauds Leachman for using her star power to help new audiences discover the film. “It’s such an important thing that this was the last movie that she was in,” she says. “Because it’s a gay film about owning yourself.”
Queen of queens
The artists behind “Jump, Darling” crown their personal drag superstars.
Tynomi Banks: “Symone is so unapologetic. For a person of her age to exude that confidence and just love being Black, she’s just so inspirational. I love seeing her on (the current season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”) Her glowing force comes through.”
Thomas Duplessie: “What Sasha Velour does just seems so authentic to her. No movement, no costume piece feels arbitrary. She doesn’t move a finger without asking why she is doing it.”
Phil Connell: “Alyss a Edwards sticks with me. I just find her incredibly entertaining and hilarious and her looks are off the charts. You cannot look away when Alyssa Edwards is around.” “Jump, Darling” will be available Tuesday on Apple, Google Play, and
other video-on-demand services.