Canadian actress lands major role in Street Legal
Canadian actress goes from wanting to be a lawyer to playing one on TV
Yvonne Chapman’s shifting career aspirations must have been a bit of a roller-coaster ride for her parents.
She is an actress about to enjoy her highest profile role yet in the CBC reboot of the long-running 1980s-90s drama Street Legal, playing a crusading lawyer named Mina Lee who takes on Big Pharma over the opioid crisis.
It turns out Chapman wanted to be a lawyer while growing up in Calgary as a second-generation Canadian, a career goal that sat nicely with parents who Chapman says “valued the traditional path.” “I think I realized I’m good at arguing,” Chapman says in a phone interview from her home in Vancouver. “I was like, ‘Maybe I could be a lawyer!’ That was kind of my first inclination. But, oh man, I went all over the place. At first, I thought I was going to be a lawyer and then when I actually got to school I did two years of bio-sci, thinking I was going to be a doctor and realized I hated it. Then I went into finance.”
So, to review, her career ambitions went from lawyer to doctor to corporate finance to ... struggling actress?
“I tried the professional route, Mom and Dad!” says Chapman with a laugh. “I tried every single one! It didn’t work.” Granted, the acting thing didn’t come out of nowhere. Chapman spent a lot of time focused on academics and sports when attending high school, where she was enrolled in the International Baccalaureate program while playing volleyball, basketball, rugby and badminton. But she also loved to act. At the age of 10, she even asked her parents if she could get an agent. Through elementary, junior high and high school she participated in school plays. It was a creative outlet, but not the sort of thing you were supposed to be doing for a living. So, after high school, she buck- led down after that false start in bio-sci and completed her bachelor of commerce. That led to a job in mergers and acquisitions as a corporate development analyst, where she spent her days building financial models, evaluating assets her company was looking to acquire and working out recommendations for how much they should be acquired for.
She has no regrets about her time in that world, nor does she harbour any resentment toward her parents for encouraging her to stay on a straight-and-narrow career path. But five years ago, that itch to act became overwhelming. Chapman had been taking acting classes at night but it wasn’t enough. So she eventually decided to throw caution to the wind, take a leave of absence from corporate Calgary and head to Vancouver.
“I didn’t pursue it right away because it just wasn’t the practical path,” she says. “Acting is a really difficult profession as I quickly found out in my first few years. You are constantly auditioning and you’re working every day but not for a paycheque, you’re just working for a chance. For me, though, it was like I had to do it or I would regret it.”
Chapman landed small roles in TV shows such as The Crossing, The 100 and Second Chance. But Street Legal is her first major role in a series and just might offer some solace to her parents. After all, to borrow a showbiz cliché, she isn’t a lawyer but she plays one on TV. And her character Mina Lee is an exceptional lawyer: meticulous, principled, empathetic and completely devoted to clients that have had their lives ruined by Big Pharma’s deceptive marketing of widely prescribed and highly addictive opioids. Her boutique startup on Queen Street, which she shares with equally committed partners Lilly Rue (Cara Ricketts) and Adam Darling (Steve Lund), has launched a class-action lawsuit.
This does not sit well with Olivia Novak (Cynthia Dale), a partner in a large Bay Street law firm that is also behind a class-action lawsuit. She is initially dismissive of these young lawyers, attempting to strong-arm them into more of a background role as she takes the lead.
Fans of the original series will remember Novak as the aggressive young lawyer who joined the firm of Barr, Robinovitch and Tchobanian in the original Street Legal three decades ago. But when her career suffers a bit of a meltdown, Novak realizes she needs this new generation of lawyers more than she originally thought. Actor Eric Peterson, who played Leon Robinovitch in the original, and Anthony Sherwood, who played Dillon Beck, will also return to the new series in guest spots. While not revealing her exact age, Chapman acknowledges she is far too young to remember even the final days of Street Legal, which ended in 1994 as the longest-running, hour-long drama in Canadian history until Heartland broke the record in 2014.
“I was still into Sesame Street, not Street Legal,” she says. “But, yeah, I did my research on it. It was so nice to have the veterans of the show, like Cynthia Dale and Eric being over there. They told me a lot about what the show was. I saw some clips of it, didn’t really see the full episodes. But, really, when it comes down to it, it’s really a completely different show.”
Few topics are more timely than the opioid crisis, which will dominate the main story arc of the show’s first season and plunge the viewer into a darkly modern world of addiction and corporate malfeasance. “Being in Vancouver, where the opioid crisis is really prevalent and I have friends who work in the addictions field helping these people, that really hit home for me,” Chapman says. “I really liked that they were paying attention to that.” If the first episode is any indication, the series will play off a generational tension between two very different sets of lawyers. The young are hardworking and idealistic, while the old-guard are corporate, self-serving, entitled and institutional.
“What I like about it, is it really reflects today’s professional attitude of millennials,” Chapman says. “Especially with Mina. That’s truly what she represents: not settling for the status quo. So she goes out and forges her own path, which I think is what a lot of young professionals are doing today. It reflects the old-time of corporate law, corporate finance, that kind of attitude, but also infuses what we’re seeing in a lot of young professionals today.”
I didn’t pursue it right away because it just wasn’t the practical path. … Acting is a really difficult profession.
It was a long road back to Street Legal for Cynthia Dale, who played tough Toronto lawyer Olivia Novak in the TV drama that aired from 1987 to 1994. In the intervening years, the actress has made her mark on the Stratford Festival, launched a singing career and made appearances on such shows as Working the Engels.
Now, as Street Legal returns with a cast of new and returning characters, Dale talks about reviving the series — minus the shoulder pads, big hair and saxophone-heavy theme song:
Q What was it like revisiting Street Legal and Olivia Novak? A It was a wild ride. It was a gift. I didn’t realize that Olivia’s in my DNA. I didn’t have to look too far. It’s not like we picked up where we left off — we picked up exactly where we would be 25 years later. I hadn’t thought about her really, or even considered entertaining the possibility of revisiting her ever in those 25 years, so to find out that she was still there was really a joy.
Q What is she doing now?
A She’s part of a big Bay Street law firm when the show starts, as she would be. She’s a powerful lawyer in a boy’s club on Bay Street. She gets screwed by the boy’s club and in no uncertain terms told “Face it — your best days are behind you, take the karmic hint and quit your job.” And she’s not ready to do that, just like any fantastic 58-year-old woman would not be ready to do that. So she joins this young upstart law firm because they both have the same legal case that they’re about to fight. We go after Big Pharma together, and the opioid crisis in Canada is the overriding theme of the show.
Q Eric Peterson and Anthony Sherwood make appearances in the new show — can you tease any of your scenes with them?
A It was really working with Eric (who plays Leon Robinovitch) that did it. I couldn’t even rehearse the scene alone at home without crying. The new cast and I had done some huge, emotional, intimate work together in the five weeks leading up to my first scene with Eric. The first thing we shot was a scene in Olivia’s apartment and we were sitting on a couch together, quite close. Then when we were in the middle of the scene — we’d already rehearsed it and done a couple of takes — I looked at him and heard him speak to me. I’d heard Eric’s voice of course over the past 27 years — we’re friends, we’d seen each other, I’d watched him in other shows — but I hadn’t heard Leon. To have Leon speaking to me after all this time was phenomenal.
And boy, did it make me cry and weep with joy and gratitude and just the wonder of it all. Like, who in a million friggin’ years would’ve ever thought this would happen? Not me.
Q Are there any other throwbacks to the first Street Legal for fans of the original?
A The wedding ring that Chuck (C. David Johnson) gave Olivia, I still had it in an old jewelry box and it has an appearance on the show. The daughter that Chuck and I had is now in her early 20s and she’s a main character on the show.
Q Do you have any other mementoes from the set of the original?
A I do have some suits, although I didn’t wear any of them in this show. And I do have some of the jewelry and the great Street Legal jackets with the logo on the back. I have the odd thing here and there.