Poetic poster child

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This article was published 11/08/2016 (3629 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In 2012, Toronto-born actress Sarah Gadon was cast as a gorgeous, desirable celebrity named Hannah Geist in Brandon Cronenberg’s sci-fi oddity Antiviral, a movie about a future culture in which people were so obsessed with celebrity, fans would pay money to be infected with the same viruses afflicting their obsessions.

In a nod to the Kardashian craze, the movie suggested a world in which a “celebrity” is a self-contained entity, not necessarily affiliated with any particular talent.

Rest assured Gadon herself is no such person. Personable and chatty, she asks about Winnipeg during the course of a phone interview from Toronto. (Her boyfriend is Winnipeg-born film editor Matthew Hannam, the guy who edited Antiviral, in fact; Gadon has had personal experience with local institutions such as Boon Burger.)

She studied film at the University of Toronto, but she has been acting for the better part of her 29 years, including an early stint on the series Are You Afraid of the Dark?, in which she shares fledgling IMDb credits with the likes of Ryan Gosling and Jay Baruchel.

In her new film, Indignation, Gadon plays Olivia Hutton, the object of a more adult obsession on the part of her fellow college student Marcus (Logan Lerman), a bright kid from New Jersey who falls under Olivia’s spell while attempting to negotiate the tricky social impediments facing a Jewish student in a Midwest college of the 1950s.

The story was written by American novelist Philip Roth and is brought to the screen by James Schamus, a celebrated screenwriter with some experience (The Ice Storm, Taking Woodstock) in translating the social and sexual mores of generations past for contemporary film.

For Gadon, Schamus was the main draw.

“I was such a fan of his. He is such a pillar of independent American filmmaking,” Gadon says. “And I thought I would like to make it with a genius like James. I knew it was going to be very special.”

Gadon was also fascinated by the character of Olivia, who presents as a perfectly coiffed beauty of the period, but with an powerful undercurrent of melancholy.

“I think she is pretty well-crafted by Philip Roth. All of the dialogue I say is from the book,” she says.

“James did a lot for me in terms of opening up my idea of her by suggesting that Philip Roth was heavily influenced by Sylvia Plath,” Gadon says, referring to the brilliant poet and novelist who suffered from clinical depression and took her own life in 1963.

“So I went back and reread a lot of her work, and something I had never read, which was the Plath journals,” she says, referring to the collected diaries of the celebrated writer. “It provided an incredible road map for what it was like to be a woman attending college at that time, struggling with depression, and struggling with fitting in.

“It was really really helpful for me,” she says. “What I love about Olivia, and I think this exists in the novel, is that she is kind of coded on her exterior to be the kind of classic, iconic 1950s girl, like the poster child for this young college student.

“But everything that’s happening in her interior fights against that exterior image and it’s that tension that makes her electric,” Gadon says. “That makes her compelling. It’s that tension that draws Marcus to her and it’s what I found really interesting as an actor.”

Indignation opens at the Grant Park Cinemas on Friday, Aug. 12.

randall.king@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @FreepKing