Tag Archives: Trenna Keating

Orphan Black Cast News – James Frain in ‘Headlock’

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– also Géza Kovács in ‘The Child Remains’

Brendan Fletcher and Allie MacDonald
in the CTV drama CARDINAL

Allie MacDonald (Trina) has been cast as Kelly Bailey in MISFITS, a science fiction series inspired by the award winning British series that ran for five seasons in the UK on E4 (2009-2013). The show is about a group of young offenders sentenced to work in a community service programme, who gain supernatural powers after being struck by lightning. In the original series, Kelly is quick-tempered and violent, and the superpower she gains is telepathy. (In a sort of inverse wish fulfillment, the lightning strike gives each character the superpower they would least like to have.) All five seasons of the British series can be streamed on HULU.

Kristin Baldwin (Trenna Keating) is interviewed by Detectives Cardinal and Delorme in Episode 5 of CARDINAL

Others cast in the reboot so far are Ashleigh LaThrop, Tre Hall, and Jake Cannavale. Diane Ruggiero (creator of iZombie) wrote the two-part pilot, which will be directed by Victoria Mahoney. If the series is picked up, it will air on Freeform Network (formerly ABC Family) later this year.

And MacDonald is Edie Soames in the six-episode CTV drama CARDINAL, an adaptation of Giles Blunt’s award-winning mystery novel Forty Words for Sorrow, which stars Billy Campbell as Detective John Cardinal and Karine Vanasse as his partner Lise Delorme. Other ORPHAN BLACK cast members who appear in the series are Trenna Keating, David Richmond Peck, and Andrew Moodie. CARDINAL can be streamed on HULU, and has been renewed for two more seasons.

Geza Kovacs in BORN DEAD, a film by Robert Gulassarian, due for release later this year, about a down and out Toronto actor bent on suicide. (A trailer is available on YouTube.)

Géza Kovács (The Messenger) will be Talbot in Michael Melski‘s supernatural thriller THE CHILD REMAINS in which an expectant couple’s intimate weekend turns to terror when they discover that the country inn where they’re staying is haunted because it was once a maternity home where unwanted infants and mothers had been murdered. The film was inspired by the true story of the ‘Butterbox Babies‘. Writer/director Melski told Sea and Be Scene: “I’m a huge fan of old-school horror movies like The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby, and this film is an homage to those creepy classics,”. Shot in Elmsdale and Windsor, Nova Scotia (some distance inland from East Chester, where the Butterbox Babies scandal took place), THE CHILD REMAINS will have its world premiere at the 2017 Shanghai International Film Festival.

James Frain and Diana Argon on the set of HEADLOCK

James Frain (Ferdinand Chevalier) will be James Hooker in THE JESTER FROM TRANSYLVANIA, a fantasy about an American scriptwriter (played by Emmett J Scanlan) who picks up an English hitchhiker in the middle of a Transylvanian forest. The hitcher turns out to be Touchstone (Jordan Prentice), the ghost of a former court jester, who turns the pacifist screenwriter into a cold blooded serial killer. JESTER should be released later this year.

Frain will also be Dr. A in the spy thriller HEADLOCK, which stars Diana Argon as Mary, the wife of an injured CIA recruit. Herself a former CIA operative, Mary becomes determined to find out just how her husband (Mark Polish) sustained the injuries that left him in a coma. Producer Juan Pablo Reyes told Dave Rolland of the Miami New Times: “We shot the wife’s story for twelve days in Los Angeles, where the husband is in a coma and Andy Garcia plays an intense government agent as a character you’ve never seen him play before. Then we tell the husband’s story.” The husband’s part of the story was shot in twelve different countries. Reyes said he is hopeful that the film will screen in Miami this summer.

Melanie Nicholls-King as Amelia
in ORPHAN BLACK Season One

Melanie Nicholls-King (Sarah and Helena’s surrogate mother) is Lou in MARY GOES ROUND, a film written and directed by Molly McGlynn. Mary (Aya Cash), a closeted alcoholic and substance abuse counselor, is a few months away from getting married when she’s arrested for a DUI and loses both her job and her fiancé. She returns to her home town in New Jersey where she begins to take responsibility for herself and her family after learning that her estranged father is dying of cancer and is desperate for Mary to form a bond with her teenage half-sister. Filming of MARY GOES ROUND was completed last December. No word yet on a release date. A trailer is available on Vimeo.

Dark Matter Cast News – Kirstin Rae Hinton in “Alias Grace”

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Trenna Keating and Gord Rand on the set of CARDINAL. — Keating is Isla McNeil in the film AWAY HOME, written & directed by Jana Stackhouse, which had its first screening at the Ryerson University Film Festival in Toronto on 6 May.

Trenna Keating (Felicia Brand, the attorney for CoreLactic Industries in DARK MATTER Episode 2.1) is Kristin Baldwin in the CTV crime drama CARDINAL, which tells the story of two detectives, John Cardinal (played by Billy Campbell) and his partner Lise Delorme (Karine Vanasse), who determine that a serial killer is in their midst after a girl’s body is found frozen in ice. The tale, which is based on the novel Forty Words for Sorrow by Giles Blunt, is set in a place called Algonquin Bay (a thinly disguised version of North Bay, Ontario, where Blunt grew up) and was, in fact, filmed in and around North Bay and Sudbury. All eight first season episodes of the critically acclaimied series will be available to stream in the US on Hulu on 16 June. A trailer is available on YouTube. CTV has renewed CARDINAL for two more seasons.

Melanie Liburd (Nyx Harper) will be Alexis in GYPSY, which will follow Manhattan therapist Jean Holloway (Naomi Watts) as she begins to develop inappropriately intimate relationships with people in her patients’ lives. Six of the ten episodes will be directed by women, two each by Sam Taylor-Johnson, Victoria Mahoney, and Coky Ciedroyc. Created by Lisa Rubin, GYPSY premieres 30 June on Netflix.

Kirstin Rae Hinton as Sadie Hopkins,
and Richard Davis as her son Finn in MURDOCH MYSTERIES episode 7.9 “A Midnight Train to Kingston”. The episode can be streamed on Netflix (US).

Kirstin Rae Hinton, (The Android’s diagnostic double at the end of Season One) will be Grace’s mother in ALIAS GRACE, a six-episode series based on the 1996 novel by Margaret Atwood (which was in turn based on the true story of Grace Marks, a housemaid and immigrant from Ireland imprisoned in 1843 for the murder of her employer and his housekeeper). A decade after her conviction, the fictional Dr. Simon Jordan tries to help Grace (Sarah Gadon) recall her past. (Grace became one of the most notorious women of 1840s Canada for her alleged role in the double murder, and was eventually exonerated after 30 years in jail.) Margaret Atwood will make a cameo appearance as a “disapproving lady in church“. Written by Sarah Polley and directed by Mary Harron, ALIAS GRACE will be broadcast later this year on CBC in Canada and on Netflix elsewhere.

Yvonne Strahovski, Amanda Brugel, and Margaret Atwood. Brugel is Faith in the TV movie SOMETIMES THE GOOD KILL, which will next air on 13 May at 8/7c on Lifetime

Amanda Brugel (Keeley in the DARK MATTER pilot) is Rita, one of two domestic servants assigned to the Commander’s household in THE HANDMAID’S TALE, a science fiction drama based on the 1985 Margaret Atwood novel of the same name. It takes place in an alternate USA, one which has been transformed into a totalitarian theocracy and renamed Gilead. Women’s rights have been taken away and a class system imposed forcing some women to bear children for powerful men and their infertile wives. Atwood has a cameo in the first episode. (She gets to slap Elisabeth Moss.) New episodes of THE HANDMAID’S TALE happen Wednesdays on HULU in the US (Episode five aired on 10 May). In Canada the show is seen on BravoTV Sundays at 9/8c. (Episode three aired on 7 May.) THE HANDMAID’S TALE is the most popular show in the history of HULU, and has been renewed for a second season.

Showrunner Joe Mallozzi‘s first live-action production was STUDENT BODIES, a high school comedy that ran on FOX and YTV from 1997 to 1999. A 20th anniversary reunion special is in the early planning stages. Fans of the show who would like to see this happen should go to the Student Bodies 20th Anniversary Facebook page and let them know.

Orphan Black Cast News – Allie MacDonald as Lillian Gish

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Evelyne Brochu as Aurora Luft and Connor Price as Harry James. The third and final season of X COMPANY will premiere
11 January at 9pm on CBC

Evelyne Brochu (Delphine Cormier) is Wendy in REMEMORY, a film about a well-known scientist named Gordon Dunn (Martin Donovan), who is mysteriously found dead just after unveiling his newest invention, a groundbreaking device able to extract, record and play back a person’s unfiltered memories. Dunn’s wife (Julia Ormond), with help from an unlikely friend (Peter Dinklage), uses the invention to get to the bottom of her husband’s death. REMEMORY will premiere 25 January at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.

Tatiana Maslany will appear at WIZARD WORLD in Portland, Oregon, 18 & 19 February. She will participate in a Q&A Panel, sign autographs, and pose for photos with fans. — THE OTHER HALF, a 2015 romance with Maslany and Tom Cullen, will be released in the US, both in theatres and on VOD, on 10 March.

Nora McLellan on the set of SOMETIMES THE GOOD KILL, currently filming in Montreal
.
.

Nora McLellan (Brenda, the woman bribed by Prometheans to betray Mrs. S.) will be Genevieve (the innkeeper’s best friend) in a Company Theatre production of JOHN, written by Pulitzer-winning playwright Annie Baker. The story involves a cheerful bed and breakfast owner, and a young couple struggling to stay together. Hilton Als, writing for The New Yorker in 2015, said: “While most new plays run for two hours or less…Baker’s fourth full-length original script clocks in at three hours and fifteen minutes, the running time of, say, a short, late-career Eugene O’Neill drama. By not rushing things…Baker returns us to the naturalistic but soulful theatre that many of her contemporaries and near-contemporaries have disavowed in their rush to be ‘postmodern’.” JOHN will be at Toronto’s Berkeley Street Theatre (upstairs) from 29 January until 19 February.

Trenna Keating as “nouveau politico” Kim Campbell in THE DEATH OF MRS. GHANDI

Inga Cadranel (Detective Angela DeAngelis) will be Nancy Alpert in episode 12.6 of BONES due to air on FOX on 7 February at 9pm.

Trenna Keating (Vera the soccer mom from Season Three) is Kim Campbell in a Toronto production of THE DEATH OF MRS. GHANDI AND THE BEGINNING OF NEW PHYSICS, a satirical play by Kawa Ada about a meeting (which never happened) between some of the strongest female politicians of the past half century (Margaret Thatcher, Benazir Bhutto, and Imelda Marcos). The meeting occurs in 1984 at the funeral of Indira Ghandi. Playwright/director Ada looks at how these women wielded power and questions how they might have done so differently. THE DEATH OF MRS. GHANDI will be at Factory Theatre (128 Bathurst Street) until 15 January.

Trina (Allie MacDonald) talks to Sarah in Season four of ORPHAN BLACK

Allie MacDonald (Trina, the body-mod neolutionist) will portray Lillian Gish in THE FIRST, the life story of silent film star Mary Pickford, who co-founded the movie studio United Artists in 1919. The film is based on Eileen Whitfield‘s 1997 biography, “Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood“, and directed by Jennifer DeLia, who told Indiewire: “[Pickford’s] journey of going from the ‘unsophisticated’ world of vaudeville to working with D.W. Griffith as he experimented with the language of cinema makes this a universal story. It’s more complicated than a simple profile of America’s Sweetheart. She was constantly ahead of the game.” The film will be released sometime in 2017. — MacDonald also sings, and has released an EP called THANK YOU (under the name Sureilla) which is available on iTunes.

Maria Doyle Kennedy as Vera Bates in DOWNTON ABBEY (2011)

Maria Doyle Kennedy (Sarah’s foster mom) has an as yet unspecified role in three episodes of REDWATER, a spinoff of the British soap EASTENDERS, in which Kat and Alfie relocate from Walford to a town called Redwater in a effort to find Kat’s long-lost son. Series creator Dominic Treadwell-Collins, said this about the six-part series: “…viewers will witness several huge twists for Kat and Alfie Moon that will change their lives forever…My team here are very excited about creating a whole new drama that stands apart from EastEnders while taking our style of storytelling to a place of stories, myth, secrets and immeasurable beauty.” Shot in Dunmore East, a small fishing village in southeast Ireland, REDWATER will premiere on BBC One in early 2017.