Like mother, like daughter, like… fun!

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This article was published 10/02/2023 (970 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Perhaps in another life, Lea Thompson could have been a Royal Winnipeg Ballet company dancer.

Before her role as Lorraine Baines-McFly in 1985’s Back to the Future catapulted her to a household name, the actor was a professional ballerina, winning scholarships to the San Francisco Ballet, the Pennsylvania Ballet, and the American Ballet Theatre. But despite growing up in Minnesota, Thompson had never been to Winnipeg.

That’s why, when she was in Winnipeg last year shooting her latest TV show, The Spencer Sisters, with co-star Stacey Farber (Degrassi: The Next Generation; Saving Hope), she made it a priority to see the RWB’s production of The Handmaid’s Tale.

“It was really great,” Thompson says via Zoom. “I was determined to see them. I was hoping we could go to a gala or something because I wanted to meet the dancers, but we didn’t.”

Thompson did, however, receive some tango choreography from Amazing Race Canada winner/RWB School alumna Catherine Wreford-Ledlow for the show, which makes its official premiere on CTV Friday. A preview of the first episode aired last week.

“I was really excited to go (to Winnipeg) because I feel like an honorary Canadian,” Thompson says. “I mean, the people, the way the city even looks, all the lakes and the rivers — it just felt like home to me.”

It helps that The Spencer Sisters began filming in July, which is Winnipeg in all its glory. “There was always something wonderful going on,” Thompson says. “I think people are just so excited about summer they have to have festivals every weekend.” (She gets us.)

“There was a blizzard on our last night of filming, which was at the end of October,” Farber, the Canadian, adds. Ah yes, there’s the other face of Winnipeg.

Produced by Entertainment One and Winnipeg’s Buffalo Gal Pictures, The Spencer Sisters is a one-hour procedural about a mystery-solving mother-daughter duo, or “two nosy redheads,” as Thompson says, who are mistaken for sisters.

Toronto police officer Darby Spencer (Farber) investigates crimes. Her mother, internationally renowned mystery novelist Victoria Spencer (Thompson), writes about them. And so, when Darby finds herself jobless and back in her hometown — the fictional Alder Bluffs, Ont. for which Winnipeg stands in — and Victoria finds herself on the leeward slope of her career, they put their skills together and partner in a private detective agency, all while navigating their complicated relationship.

Although The Spencer Sisters is a procedural, it has a light touch, which is precisely what attracted both women to the project.

“When I read the first script, I thought it was so funny,” Farber says. “And I knew that it would be fun to play, like, the cop who bumps into the medical tool tray at the hospital when her ex-boyfriend who’s super cute is there.”

“I just love to make people laugh,” Thompson says. “I think it’s a worthy occupation. It makes the world a better place to give people a little vacation from their brains. And this is something I learned during the pandemic — weirdly, after being an entertainer since I was 12. I realized it was really important and useful to entertain people. And I found this show to be very entertaining.”

There’s no shortage of drama, either. Farber’s character is harbouring some deep-rooted resentment about the fact her mom — “a fabulous, super successful and famous mystery novelist,” Farber says — was not as present in her childhood as she would have liked.

“So, there’s some wounds there and they come up as they would in any real-life, mother-daughter relationship,” Farber says. “You think you’ve resolved something or thought about it, or talked about it to death and then it just, you get triggered in different moments in different ways. But it’s the same core problem at the heart of it. So I think that’s what we explore.”

Thompson, meanwhile, relates to Victoria’s perspective; she is both an artist and a mother herself, as well the daughter of an artist mother.

“If they can’t create, they wither,” Thompson says. “(My character) is defending myself, ‘I had to do this, I had to make a living, I had to do my work.’ And I can relate to that as a mother. And my mother was the same way. She’d be like, ‘I have to paint all night, you got to get up and make your own breakfast, that’s just the way it is.’

“It’s a lot to be a mom. And there’s a lot of pressure put on moms to be everything, to everyone, all the time. I like that this character fights back against that.”

Despite their generational and personality differences onscreen, offscreen was a different story. The two women relished working together.

“How lucky am I?” Farber says. “I learned (from Lea) every day. She just has such a wealth of knowledge. She has amazing stories about Hollywood, and movie making, and because she works so much as a director, she views everything in a different way. It was really cool to be next to her experiencing all of it and the building of the first season of a new show with her in my ear and her vision of it next to me.”

“I really respect her work,” Thompson says of Farber. She turns to her co-star. “I think you’re great. And so multifaceted. I liked that we both have different energies that seemed to work together. And that’s magic, honestly, because it doesn’t happen all the time.

“Like, I made a movie called Back to the Future, and it happened in that movie. Everybody was cast perfectly. And when someone wasn’t cast perfectly, they fired ’em and got someone else. So it’s rare, and it’s really hard to find. I think we achieved that on the show.”

The Spencer Sisters airs Fridays at 8 p.m. on CTV, CTV.ca and the CTV app.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com