'Plan B,' 'X-Men' star Carolina Bartczak was told to stay in Canada and it was the 'best advice' she received

Yahoo

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Yahoo Canada Eh Listers: Carolina Bartczak (Danny Taillon)
Carolina Bartczak played Taylor Kitsch's wife in the Netflix series Painkiller, starred alongside James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, and Nicholas Hoult in X-Men: Apocalypse, and now leads the CBC series Plan B for Season 3. The Polish-Canadian actor comes from a family of engineers, but she didn't love studying biochemistry in Toronto, and an invitation to be on a TV redecorating show was a starting point for her to look into working for production companies.
"I was working at a production company in Montreal. ... I was watching auditions come in, I just thought, damn, that looks so fun," Bartczak recalled to Yahoo Canada. "But I've never known anyone who's an actor. I never had any contact with [anyone in the industry] and I just thought, ... I'm going to die one day and I might as well take a big swing. ... And if it goes nowhere, cool, as long as I tried."
"I always just saw it as an experiment of trying something new and something that I didn't know anything about. But also it checked a lot of boxes as to what I wanted to do in my life. I wanted to work on meaningful projects. I wanted to work with artistic people. I wanted to travel. I wanted to be a bunch of different people. ... So once I went to theatre school I was like, oh this is it. I found my soulmate as a job."
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Bartczak then studied in New York, but like many actors, success in the challenging auditioning landscape after school was difficult to come by.
"It's hell. It's so hard. I spent the first year, I was living in New York, couldn't get an agent, couldn't get anyone to even meet with me. And then finally some agent met with me and was like, 'Oh you're Canadian? You should just go back home,'" Bartczak said. "I was so determined to stay in New York, and actually it was the best advice she ever gave me."
"I landed in Toronto and started auditioning and man, it takes a long time for people to trust you, to give you a part. But I stuck with it and I've kept going. And it's full of heartbreak. ... You fall in love with the parts you audition for. ... But when it's good, it is heavenly. It is the best."
Bartczak admits she did feel like she had to be in the U.S. to be successful. Now the actor says that mostly came from her own "ignorance."
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"I didn't know that there was an entire industry in Canada, and I didn't know there was an American industry in Canada," she said.
"When you go to school in a city, I was only with Americans, so I kind of latched on to their dreams, because I didn't know what direction I could go in. But, man, am I grateful that person told me to go back to Toronto, because I've had a lot of luck and a lot of progress, and I've gotten to work on a lot of cool things, because I was in Canada."
Yahoo Canada's Eh Listers is an interview series with women and non-binary Canadians in film and television, looking back on their careers with unfiltered stories about their greatest projects.
The Smurfs 2 — 2013
But ahead of Bartczak's leading character work, her first experience on a sizeable professional projects was for the film The Smurfs 2. While certainly not one of her bigger roles, it was a particularly positive experience for the actor.
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"I had three lines in The Smurfs 2 movie. It was the most fun I'd ever had," Bartczak said. "It was also one of those movies that has a lot of financing behind it. You get to see the orchestra of everyone doing their job."
"And the thing that struck me is that everyone on set is working, is so focused and committed to doing a good job. Even the sound person, I could see him practising his microphone flicks, and the person bringing the cake onto set, and set dressing. [It was] so amazing to be in a job where people are so happy to be there."
Throughout her career, Bartczak has seen the difference between working on more big budget projects, and more indie work, with a lot of it having to do with how much control you have on set and with a character.
"When you work on something that has a huge budget, that means that there's a lot of people making decisions, and so your decision-making capability is smaller," Bartczak explained. "I remember being on a show that had so much money behind it, was so stylized, and I'm saying to the makeup artist, 'Oh, can I just fix my eyebrows?' And she's like, 'No, you can't. ... That came from up top.' ... Both of them have their benefits and their drawbacks."
X-Men: Apocalypse — 2016
Entering a huge franchise with X-Men: Apocalypse was something Bartczak described as a "terrifying" experience, sharing the screen with some of her favourite actors.
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"I don't think I slept for the three weeks that I was there. But also so exciting ... just sitting in the makeup trailer and James McAvoy popping in and being like, 'Hey guys, what's up?'" Bartczak said. "I was like, am I in a dream?"
"Actually, Michael Fassbender is one of my favourite actors ... and watching people who are at the top of their game do their job is heavenly."
But while she's had success in notable projects with famed actors, Bartczak has also had to learn to navigate the ups and down of being an actor where work isn't consistent.
"You do come off this high and then it's a crash down to earth. It's almost like you've had this dopamine high of working really hard, or having long hours and interacting with a lot of people, and you come home and you're like, oh I have to clean cat shit out of my cat litter. It's a very different life," Bartczak said.
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"Among us actors, we always talk about the crash down to real life, and you come off of a high and you're feeling great for a week, and then it's just down. So that's something that you learn as you go along, that you have to take care of your mental health. And I plan a lot of physical exercise, I plan seeing friends to make sure that I can get through that difficult comedown."
Bartczak spoke to her X-Men: Apocalypse costar, Rose Byrne, about pushing against being typecast, vying for roles people wouldn't necessarily associate with a particular actor.
"From the beginning of my career I have been cast as a mom. I guess I have mom energy," Bartczak said.
"I remember actually speaking to Rose Byrne about this when we were shooting X-Men, she was like, I couldn't get a job on a comedy. She was like, everyone saw me as the girl from Damages and they couldn't possibly imagine that I could be funny. And so she had to break through walls to get an audition for Bridesmaids. ... I think that is just the natural part of being an actor, is trying to convince people that you can do other things, and that's just part of the journey."
Moonfall — 2022
While Bartczak's latest project, Plan B, firmly sits in sci-fi as a time travelling story, she came to the project after previously experiencing the unique work of Roland Emmerich in the genre with Moonfall, which also starred Halle Berry, Patrick Wilson and John Bradley.
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"That was one of those really cool, big budget films, and Roland Emmerich is an expert in visual effects," Bartczak said.
But with all his skill, the cold Montreal winter proved a challenge for Emmerich, impacting how the film was created.
"Apparently he doesn't like the cold and we were shooting in Montreal in the winter, so that entire movie is shot on one sound stage, even car chases," Bartczak said. "He invented a way to harness vehicles so that they could move and look like we were racing, but in a room. So every day coming on set I was like, well what am I going to see today? It was very, very interesting."
With Bartczak among the Canadians actors who have worked on several U.S. productions that film in Canada, the question regularly comes up about how many of the leading roles in Canadian-filmed American work is actually made available to local talent. While Bartczak recognizes that it's "amazing" that Canadians can get work on American productions, she also wishes that Canadians were more recognized for their ability to take on more significant roles both in front of and behind the camera.
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"On one hand it is amazing that we can support American productions in Canada, because it employs so many people," Bartczak said. "On the other hand, do I wish that they hired more Canadians, that they trusted Canadians to have bigger roles and a bigger input? Yes, I do wish that."
"I understand them needing to bring in the star power for financing, and I think ... the answer is to educate them that we have very skilled and very talented people in Canada who can take those acting parts, or key hair or key design. ... I think the more productions work here the more they will feel comfortable with the level of professionalism that we have here."
Painkiller — 2023
A project that was particularly impactful for Bartczak was working on the Netflix series Painkiller, a fictionalized series based on the American opioid epidemic, including the actions by Purdue Pharma and Richard Sackler in the rise of OxyContin misuse in the U.S. Directed by Peter Berg, Bartczak played Lily Kryger, whose husband Glen (Taylor Kitsch) becomes addicted to OxyContin after being prescribed the drug for an injury.
"Because we had all done our research, we all came with this body of sense memory and images, and so I feel like we came and built this fully formed story," Bartczak said. "And also, because it's a true story, ... I heard often from people on set [who knew someone who] died of an opioid overdose. So it was also finding that nuance and respecting the people that actually had gone through some of these tragedies."
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"The subject matter is very complex and I feel like it's going to be one of those stories where we're going to be discovering new facts about it as we go along. ... I thought [Peter Berg] did an amazing job at balancing the macro story as well as the micro story, but not just making tragedy porn out of it. Not just making it about the sadness and the unfairness. He wanted to make it entertaining so that people were more likely to watch it and be able to see the whole story. ... Casting Matthew Broderick as Richard Sackler I thought was brilliant, and making it really quirky and weird, but then having this whole separate drama happen with this family in a small town, I thought that was really clever."
This was another reunion project for Berg and Taylor Kitsch, who famously started working together on Friday Night Lights in the 2000s, and have continued to collaborate on multiple projects since.
"I get the impression that they're siblings. They argue and they fight and they love each other. So that was really fun," Bartczak said.
But in playing the wife to Kitsch's character on the series, Bartczak really wanted to ensure that they were able to authentically capture the couple's relationship.
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"I forced Peter Berg to give me Taylor's contact information, because I knew that we were going to be stepping onto set playing a couple that has been married for 15 years and has a child together, and that requires a certain amount of comfort between two people," Bartczak said. "And so I didn't want to be meeting him on the first day."
"I was able to get in touch with Taylor and have dinner and talk about our characters and their relationship, and how they ended up here and how they're going to end up there, which I think really allowed us to sell our marriage and romantic relationship very well. ... I'm always most afraid ... that people don't buy the relationship, because if you don't buy the relationship, then you can't care about the story."
Plan B — 2025
In Season 3 of the CBC hit Plan B Bartczak plays Abigail Walker, a TV morning show host who faces the tragic loss of her teenage daughter Lucy (Arianna Shannon) to suicide. Desperate to save her daughter, Abigail looks to the Plan B agency to travel back in time to hopefully change Lucy's life.
None of the characters in Plan B was crafted as "good or evil," and this appealed to Bartczak.
"They're just quite holistically human. They have their character flaws. They have their character traits that are good, the ones that are bad, and they're good people who are trying their best and making mistakes along the way, which is kind of how I see life," she said.
"You're just doing your best and you're making mistakes along the way, and hoping that none of the mistakes are permanent. And that's what I really liked about the writing, is that it was very nuanced, and everyone was likeable in moments, and everyone was hate-able in moments. And when someone's trying their best, it's easier to forgive them as an audience member."
Easily the most moving and heartbreaking moment in Plan B is seeing how Bartczak portrayed Abigail finding out her daughter is dead, with the character in complete shock.
"I found that reaction quite jarring when I first read the script and thought, why isn't she reacting the way I think she's going to react? And I think we've just been so used to, on television there's a tragedy and the person breaks down into tears and has their emotional outburst. Whereas from the research that I did, more often than not, the tragedy is so great that their brain actually can't handle all the information, because it would just shut them down. So they almost put a little blinder on in order to slowly absorb the tragedy, which I thought was so brilliant in the show," Bartczak said.
"Her ex husband, Nick, and her son are so emotional as people, and vulnerable, that when they see the tragedy they're able to react. But she's so tough and impermeable that she can't actually deal with the tragedy until she can break it down in her head."
There's also an interesting element to Abigail where she's someone who does so much for people outside her immediate family, particularly women, including being a sounding board for discussions around their mental health, but it wasn't the same in her relationship with her own daughter.
"I thought a lot about that. ... We are the least forgiving to the people that are closest to us, and the least forgiving to ourselves, and it's easier to have a kind word for someone who is not in your inner circle," Bartczak said. "I don't know why human beings are like that, but she's unforgiving to herself, and she's very strict with Lucy, but then goes to her women's group and is so generous, and it's such a contradiction."
"And that's the writing of Plan B, is that all these people are contradictions. They're not one way or another, they're not angels and they're not demons. They are both. And part of Abigail's journey in the show is to be able to bring that vulnerability into her family."
Carolina Bartczak in Plan B on CBC (DANNY TAILLON)
While she has taken on many different roles in her career, from a Smurfs character to the complexity of Abigail in Plan B, Bartczak still wants to try her hand in a big action role.
"I want to be a spy. I want to learn how to shoot a fake gun on screen. I would love to do some kind of action thing," Bartczak said. "That's on my bucket list."