Mamma Nia

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This article was published 28/07/2011 (5542 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BIRDS HILL PROVINCIAL PARK — Prior to signing on to the American Girl franchise film, Nia Vardalos tended to play singles. In her monster hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding, she was mostly single (until the final reel). Same with subsequent movies Connie and Carla, My Life in Ruins and her self-directed indie I Hate Valentines Day. Single, single, single.

 

Evidently, that precedent is broken for American Girl, where the Winnipeg-born actress can be seen on the Birds Hill Park set sandwiched between a couple of little girls on a hike through the forest. (The park, just north of Winnipeg, is portraying Olympic National Forest in Washington state.)

Vardalos is dressed for roughing it, but she retains a certain Hollywood fabulousness, even when clowning with the girls — played by Kadence and Paiten Roach.

Vardalos has taken delight from her role as a mother in real life since 2008, when she and husband Ian Gomez, currently starring on NBC sitcom Cougar Town, adopted a little girl (whose name the couple determinedly keeps private).

She seems equally delighted to be playing a mom on a movie set. After a successful take, she exchanges high fives with the girls, employing the classic up high/down low/too slow move.

“This is the first time I’m playing a mom and they’re the same age as my daughter,” Vardalos says, during a break from filming.

The actress is enjoying the rustic beauty of the location. “This was my first field trip since St. George School (in St. Vital),” she says. She is also enjoying the comparative freedom of being an actor for hire. On all those aforementioned movie projects, Vardalos had other duties, including writing and producing.

“It’s great for me to have so little responsibility on the set,” she says. “It’s so much fun to be the actor on something.”

Vardalos says she was looking for the opportunity to work in Winnipeg, and a chance encounter with Los Angeles-based producer Debra Martin Chase (The Princess Diaries, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) brought her here.

Martin Chase, hiking from one location to another on this overcast day in the park, says she took a meeting with Vardalos last year “in her capacity as a screenwriter” and the two clicked.

“We loved each other,” Martin Chase says. They met again at a film festival in February where Vardalos overheard her discussing shooting an American Girl movie in Winnipeg.

“She comes over and says, ‘I’m from Winnipeg.’ And then she emailed me the next day and said, ‘Seriously, if you need any advice or anything, feel free to contact me.’ And literally that moment, we were starting to cast.”

Vardalos was as good as her word on wanting to make a movie here, Martin Chase says.

“We don’t have a lot of money, but the idea of her spending three weeks at home with her family was an incentive for her to join us, and her daughter is a huge American Girl fan, so it was just one of those things that was meant to be,” Martin Chase says.

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The movie offered a return to Winnipeg for Ian Ziering, the New Jersey-born actor who plays Vardalos’s husband. Ziering, best known from the original Beverly Hills 90210 TV series, was in Winnipeg a couple of years ago shooting the TV movie The Christmas Hope with Madeleine Stowe and James Remar. That film shot in the middle of winter and Ziering says he is amazed at the extremes of weather he has experienced here.

“I’ve never been in such a cold environment in my life,” he says of his last shooting experience.

“One day it got to 40 below and it was astonishing,” he says. “I spit on my glove to see how quickly it would freeze and in less than eight seconds, it started to crystallize. It was like my own little science experiment.”

Like Vardalos, Ziering is also bringing some of his recent life experience to the role of a father.

“I just became a father in real life,” he says. “I think playing a dad’s going to be my best role yet, and hopefully that will lend itself to this character.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca