Original-Cin Interview: Canadian Strain's Naomi Snieckus talks performing during quarantine, and getting Jann Arden to sing from home

It’s just another day in plague world. I’m on the phone with Naomi Snieckus, who’d just found out that her latest film, the legalized-pot satire Canadian Strain, will have no theatre in which to open this week, anywhere in Canada.

“But that’s exactly how things should be happening right now,” she says of the film, which has gone direct to VOD and Apple-TV. “We’re all pivoting. This is a great time to be an improviser.” (Snieckus, formerly gym teacher Bobbi Galka on the CBC sitcom Mr. D, is a Second City alumnus).

Naomi Snieckus plays a provincial civil servant who knows her way around government pot procedure

Canadian Strain, from writer-director Geordie Sabbagh, tells the story of Anne (Jess Salgueiro), a young pot dealer who scores a big wack of flowery merchandise just before legalization is about to take effect. 

Unfortunately, she suddenly finds that her trusted client-list is crumbling. Even her grandmother, who’s been treating her aches and pains with cannabis for years, won’t buy from her anymore because Shoppers Drug Mart has it and they give points.

Anne considers finding another illegal drug to sell, but – after an alarming experience at an out-of-control party - realizes hard drugs are not her thing. It’s pot or nothing. So off she goes to the government cannabis office to apply for a job. There she meets an officious manager named Judy (Snieckus), who is reluctant to hire her to sell legal marijuana because her previous experience in selling it was illegal. Think Catch-22, but with weed.

Nonetheless, they strike up a friendship of sorts, and find themselves in similar straits when a new government comes in that spikes the old government’s cannabis retail plan (Sabbagh frantically rewrote the film’s last act when Doug Ford was elected premier of Ontario and did exactly that).

But that wasn’t the only thing Canadian Strain got wrong. Nearly two years after legalization, about 80% of pot sales are still black market, meaning tokers have tended to remain loyal to the people who’ve been selling to them all these years. In real life, Anne’s living wouldn’t have been threatened at all by legalization.

“I’ve heard that too, Snieckus says. “I was talking to a friend and I said, ‘What do you do now?’ She said, ‘I still go to my source.’ A friend of hers. So, I guess some things haven’t changed that much. 

“All I know is you better stock up quick before the quarantine gets really serious.”

Fun and funny, Snieckus seems a counterintuitive choice to be playing a straight-laced bureaucrat, albeit one involved in the retail marketing of marijuana. Does Judy secretly toke? “I think she probably has a history of that, for sure.

“I don’t know. I guess I must have some stodginess in my personality, because she just sort of came out of some of the other depictions I’ve had to deal with. I didn’t base her on anything. 

“It’s in the text too. And as an actor, you read the text and you say, ‘Okay, I see it.’”

Meanwhile, Snieckus has been wrestling with the realities of a world where artists perform without personal contact with an audience. A few years ago, she created The Firecracker Department, a group of women in the arts who support each other’s efforts – one of whom is the singer-songwriter Jann Arden.

In a “virtual brunch” conference on the weekend, they talked about creating, writing and editing short films online, and convinced Arden to perform a live mini-concert in her home to promote “self isolation” in the wake of Covid-19 (which she did Monday, on her Facebook page, the day Snieckus and I spoke. About 11,000 people watched the ad hoc performance).

Snieckus would clearly have no trouble adjusting to a streamed, home entertainment world. She recently wrapped a role in the Netflix film Work It, and the Disney Channel movie Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 2. She also had a role this season on the CTV drama Carter as the love interest of forensic tech Wes Holm, played by her real-life husband Matt Baram (“That was really cool,” she says. “We didn’t have to work so hard to put chemistry into it.”)

But once a live performer, always, etc. “We’re a communal bunch” Snieckus says of the acting community that must now keep its social distance. “We need to see people and hug people. It’s a necessity of our day-to-day lives. Once this passes, we’ll have a surge. We will survive and thrive.”