Sam Mercury is an emerging actor and writer based in Kitchener-Waterloo. Past credits include Subterranean with JM Drama (2016), The Vagina Monologues with Green Light Arts (2018), and Red with Knockout Theatre (2018). She is also the co-founder of Chill Spot, a Let's Play/Podcast comedy channel, where she can be found making goofs and gags about how many gaps there are in her acting resume.
In Ontario, things are slowly going back to "normal", but for essential workers like yourself things have been far from "normal" for the past several months. How have these past few months affected your artistic practice?
I hate to get so heavy right out of the gate, but it has completely petrified me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a tough girl to get down, and I refuse to allow myself to be completely broken, but I’m...very, very bent. I thought simply working in retail was enough to unveil the dark underbelly of the human psyche, but the circumstances of these past few months have shown an unprecedented amount of selfishness, ignorance, childishness, and so many other negative traits in humans. I had so many tangible plans that were going to get me out of my essential service job, and while I’d love to be the kind of creative who can really buckle down and use their frustration to churn out great art, I find myself too depressed by all the callousness that I see at work every day to even write in my personal journal. It hasn’t rendered me completely lethargic, but it does get me down a lot.
I guess if I had to put it into a nutshell, this pandemic has turned my artistic practice into just that-practicing. I don’t know what theatre is going to look like once we’re fully open again, and that scares me a lot. But I’m practicing for when that day comes. I’m scared shitless that there will be nothing to go back to, or that being an essential worker has turned me too sour, but I have to keep working on my craft. I owe myself that much.
Still from University of Waterloo's 2015 production of Unity (1918). Photo credit: Innes Creative
Tell me more about your podcast. How long have you been doing it?
We just passed the 1 year mark! It’s called “Chill Spot” and my boyfriend Cameron and I started it because we’re both aspiring actors and were going through a bit of a dry spell. We wanted to create something for ourselves so that we could always be creative and have fun, even if we weren’t booking gigs. Cam grew up watching Let’s Plays on Youtube (it’s like watching sports, but instead you watch someone play video games), and we thought we were funny enough to start a podcast, so we just kinda did that too! We also just started streaming games on Twitch, which I’ve never done before, so that’s a whole new world that I’ve enjoyed learning about as well.
We talk about a mishmash of topics in our videos and podcasts, but the overall themes are growing up, the highs and lows of being an artist in Canada, pop culture/entertainment news, and video games (game design, consoles, dev culture, writing etc.). At first we were just messing around, but we really enjoy doing it, and would love to grow it into a full-blown operation with more focused podcasts, sketch comedy, and any other artistic ventures we want to try. We’re not nearly where we want to be, but looking back to a year ago when we started all of this, it’s been so rewarding to see that we’ve made any kind of progress at all. I’m really proud of how far we’ve come in such a short period of time.
You've been accepted into the 2020 TENT Program. For the uninitiated, what is TENT and what do you hope to get out of this program?
So TENT stands for Theatre Entrepreneurs Network and Training, and it was created in 2014 to address a need amongst emerging theatre artists for important skills like grant writing, marketing, budgeting, and fundraising. It’s an excellent opportunity for those who are new to the field or are fresh out of theatre school (like me) to meet with people currently working in the industry, and learn about all that it takes to be successful in Canadian theatre.
I’m really excited to meet the other emerging artists in the program who I’ll be learning alongside, and the mentors that will be visiting us. I think one aspect of being an artist that doesn’t get talked about enough is the importance of having a solid circle of artist friends who want to make stuff in the same vein as you. Look at Thomas Middleditch and Ben Schwartz, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler (female comedians in general, really), or any sort of sketch comedy group like “Baroness von Sketch Show”, “Astronomy Club”, or “A Black Lady Sketch Show.” They all met in some way, gelled really well, created something that brought them joy, and then that joy spread to their audiences. It’s important for like-minded artists to find each other, recognize that they want to make the same kind of thing, and then team up to create and support one another. I’ve definitely been lucky to find that with Cam and “Chill Spot,” but I’m greedy! I want more artist friends who are hungry like I am. I want to make so much more art in my lifetime, and I hope that TENT will be a great beginning to all of that.
Do you think you'll get the same benefits from a virtual program?
I’ve come to believe that if you want to make something work, it will work. As of this writing TENT hasn’t started yet, but all of my correspondence with the Program Director has shown me that they’re trying their darndest to adjust and give all the participants the best experience they can despite the circumstances. So maybe I won’t get the same benefits as previous years, but I believe I’ll get valuable ones just the same. Overcoming setbacks is what theatre is all about anyway, so having to adapt to an online learning space feels pretty par for the course!
Last year you interned with Green Light Arts as an Administrative Intern. What did you learn from that experience?
Not to gloss over the practical stuff, like all the different ways a single show gets funded (spoiler alert: it’s a lot, we need more artistic grants in Canada), and the difference between a production and a co-production (very, VERY different, especially when it comes to getting credit for working on a show)-but simply watching Matt and Carin (the husband and wife team who founded and run GLA) was one of the greatest lessons of all. Since I’m trying to start an entertainment company of my own with my romantic partner, not blowing up my relationship in the process is very important to me.
I remember after GLA’s run of The Seat Next to the King last summer-which came almost immediately after their run of the now Dora award-winning Guarded Girls-Matt asked Carin how she was and she said “I’m fine, but I think it’s really important that we have breakfast together tomorrow.” I think about that a lot. As Cam and I dream more and more about where we want to take Chill Spot, things are only going to get busier for us-and that’s exciting! But I don’t want to lose myself, him, or my relationship in any of it. So whenever things would get busy at GLA, I always watched how Matt and Carin treated each other. And what I saw was two people who approach projects very differently, but with respect and consideration for how the other person operates. I only hope I can accomplish the same with any artistic partner that I work with in the future.
What's the best artistic advice you've received?
I’ve heard this piece of advice in different variations from different people over the years, but it’s essentially “it isn’t real until it’s in writing.” For TV/Film it’s not even that, since you can film a whole season/feature and never have it see the light of day. Essentially, it isn’t real until it is.
Also, in a similar vein, Mara Wilson once tweeted something like “in Hollywood, if someone doesn’t explicitly say that you’re friends, you’re not friends.” I know people can just lie and say you’re friends to your face, but the principle of it is something I keep in mind. Artists love to talk about how friendly we all are with each other, but you have to really look at your friend group and see who’s there when it’s time to do the not-so-glamorous parts of being an artist. Who’s there when the grant money doesn’t come? Who helps with poster runs? Who’s willing to help you strike your set on closing night when someone doesn’t show up? Who spreads the word about your show with the same vigour that you do? Who knows when to tell you that your show kinda sucked, but that you’re capable of so much better? Friendship is one of the most beautiful things that comes from making art, but it’s not really beautiful if it’s rooted in superficiality. It’s worth it to take the time to identify who is with you for real.
What is your dream project?
I’m biracial, and I feel like that’s something that doesn’t get talked about in any medium enough, or with any air of seriousness when it does. It’s a whole different life experience and I’d like to do some kind of slice-of-life style piece about it--be it a play, show, or movie. I haven’t figured out how I want to even begin approaching it yet, but I feel like it’s a story that no one is talking about.
I’d also love to do a documentary on Black Canadian history, and Black culture in Canada. For Afro-Canadian culture specifically, I feel like it’s different but gets lumped in with Afro-American culture, and I want to connect with it and tell the whole world about it so that we can have something of our own to be proud of. It’s also very personal, because I grew up in Kitchener, Ontario my whole life and I always felt like I had to code-switch. I remember my friends listening to these awful scenecore bands like Brokencyde and Bring Me the Horizon, then I’d go home and be super into Shad and K-OS. I felt like I had to hide Blackness. Like if I did anything that reminded people that I was Black, I would get rejected by my friends. But I’m older now and caring less and less every day about who sees what part of me. I want to tear apart all the little compartments I’ve set up to make people comfortable and just be me. And what better way to do that than with a GIANT project like a cross-country documentary?!
A+ selfie. Photo credit: Sam Mercury