Erin Karpluk plucked out of obscurity by CBC
Glen Schaefer , Canwest News Service
Published: Tuesday, April 22, 2008Erin Karpluk has played best friend to stars all over the TV schedule, but now the Vancouver actor is getting her own chance at the centre of the screen. She got word this week that the CBC is picking up The Session, an hour- long comic-drama pilot she filmed last November, for 13 episodes this fall.
Karpluk stars as Erica Strange, a woman with a lot of regrets whose mysterious new therapist (Michael Riley) is able to send her back in time to erase those regrets.
"It's not by any means a sci-fi, the whole time-travel element is kind of quirky and funny,'' she says. "In the pilot episode she goes back to Grade 11, where initially she got wasted at the high school dance - really sloppy, making out with guys - and gets dumped by her boyfriend. I play a 16, or actually more like a 32-year-old woman in a 16-year-old's body.''
Vancouver actor Erin Karpluk has had guest roles on The L Word, Bionic Woman and Godiva's. Now, she's set to star in The Session, an hour-long comic-drama pilot she filmed last November, for 13 episodes this fall.
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Karpluk herself is in her late 20s, putting her between her character's real age and the youth she keeps going back to. The show is from some of the writers behind Degrassi: the Next Generation, who know their '90s nostalgia.
"It was funny to go back to that time, it was 1992, the grunge era. The fashion alone - we revisited the baby-doll dresses and the Doc Martin boots, the 90210 hair.''
Karpluk is talking after a night spent working on another pilot in Vancouver, this one for a U.S. sci-fi series called Revolution starring American actor Billy Campbell. She plays an interplanetary revolutionary, also one of a string of best-friend roles she's done lately.
If that series goes ahead, she'll be able to do recurring appearances on it alongside her work on The Session. Earlier, Karpluk was part of the ensemble in Godiva's, the sex and spices Canadian series set behind the scenes at a Vancouver restaurant.
She was another recurring best friend on U.S. lesbian soap The L Word, and for the reinvented Bionic Woman on that recently cancelled NBC TV series.
"I was there basically every time she (the Bionic Woman) needed to blow off some steam,'' says Karpluk. "I didn't know about her secret powers, so I had all the 'You've been acting strangely' lines.''
When she starts five months work on more episodes of The Session in Toronto this summer, the rest of the cast will be getting those "you've been acting strangely'' lines.
"The one cool thing about being the lead is you get to tell the story, obviously collaborating with the director and the writer,'' she says. "I'm not really nervous about it, but I'm trying to train my body to be physically in shape and healthy. We did 18-hour days on the pilot and towards the end I was getting ... I wasn't looking 16 years old, let's put it that way.''
As to working in Toronto, the travel is something she's already used to, having mastered the working-actor's shuttle between Los Angeles and Vancouver for the past few years. She was in L.A. filming exteriors for the mostly B.C.- filmed The L Word last year when she got word that she'd won the lead role in The Session.
"I went to Toronto to shoot for two weeks. Then I flew to New York to visit a friend. I felt like quite a jet-setter,'' says Karpluk, who's close to getting her U.S. green card. "If I get it, I'll be down in Los Angeles doing guest-starring stuff in the winter months, but Vancouver is always going to be home.''
