Anne Who?

Nothing says serious like a black-and-white portrait: Actor Megan Follows. Courtesy The Noble Caplan Abrams Agency.

Playing the chatty, red-haired orphan Anne Shirley — a girl who, like her creator, Lucy Maud Montgomery, has become inextricably linked with our national identity — was a heavy weight for any teenager to bear, but Megan Follows did her best. During her stint as the star of Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea in the mid-to-late 1980s, Follows often had occasion to speak to the press. Judging by a smattering of the resulting articles, the teenager was always polite and sweet and careful to avoid controversy — as befits an ingénue. After one particularly bland interview, a reporter waspishly criticized the starlet. She has a “zest for the obvious,” the exasperated journalist wrote, and quoted Follows mouthing such actorly platitudes as, “It was great working with Frederick Forrester and Christina Lahti [on the 1987 film Stacking]... Montana, where the film was shot, was just beautiful... And working on Destiny [with Timothy Hutton and William Hurt] was intense.”

What a difference 20 years makes. The 37-year-old has a saltier tongue now, striking more ribald than prissy notes, and, accordingly, she makes for a better interview. This new off-duty persona is in keeping with her recent work.

Follows is currently preparing to return to the Toronto stage (for the first time in a decade) to play May, the brassy trash-talker in Sam Shepard’s incendiary Fool for Love, part of Soulpepper Theatre Company’s summer season. May, who lives in a seedy motel on the edge of the Mojave Desert, has for years conducted an illicit affair with a rodeo cowboy named Eddie (played by Follows’ second husband, the acclaimed stage actor Stuart Hughes).

Yes, in the last two decades, Follows has left Avonlea far behind.

In fact, Follows’ recollections of her Anne stint are larded with expletives and off-the-cuff references to the Almighty, though her co-star, the late Colleen Dewhurst, is still spoken of reverently (“She was this powerhouse, but she never made you feel less than, or inexperienced, or any of the millions of things I must have been”). When she looks back on her days as a child actor, Follows is generally less careful, less guarded than she would have been at the time.

She tells a story about her professional acting debut at age nine. “It was a commercial, and we had to make funny faces out of the back of a bus — you know, sticking your tongue out, that sort of thing. Instead, I made a rude gesture, something I would have seen my grandfather do.” Here, she cuts away from our interview to prevent her adolescent daughter from leaving their rented Toronto house. “Hang on a second… No, no, no, you’re not going anywhere; you’re staying here… We’ll talk about it later.” Then she’s back: “Sorry, just being a mother. Where were we? Yes, my inauspicious debut in the industry. So after my vulgar gesture, the commercial’s director had to cut the cameras and say, ‘Um, no, dear, you can’t actually do that. [The advertiser] Bell Canada’s not going to go for it.’”

Despite her early impudence, she went on to capture parts on The Littlest Hobo (opposite her father, journeyman actor Ted Follows), The Facts of Life and, of course, the lead in the two Anne miniseries.

The picture of innocence: Follows in Anne of Green Gables.

Follows comes to board-treading naturally — she comes from a raucous tribe of acting pros, for whom nothing is sacred but the craft. Her three siblings and both parents are involved in the theatre in one capacity or another. “The theatre was our religion,” Follows says. The clan became famous for its full-on confrontations before her parents separated in the early 1980s. “The fighting Follows, we were called,” she remembers. “People would come over just to watch.”

Post-Anne, Follows has played a succession of tough girls and difficult women, practising the family faith of choosing fierce parts. “I’ve been a mother who kills her children on Law and Order, during my pathological-parent phase,” she says with a laugh. “Let’s see, then a lesbian hospital administrator [on E.R.] and, my personal favourite, a white-trash crystal meth addict [in the 2003 miniseries, Threat Matrix]. Any role when the feds bust down your door — well, that’s a keeper.”

This spring, she continued mining this vein, cussing and rutting and weeping her way through the first episode of CTV’s ensemble comedy Robson Arms. In it, she plays Janice, an embittered, recently separated woman who in one scene inspects her underwear-clad body for signs of creeping middle age. Speaking of the younger woman who supplanted her in her husband’s affections, Janice says, “I want to grab her by her naturally curly hair and gouge her eyes out.”

Meanwhile, preparations for her saucy role in the Shepard play have presented a welcome challenge. Follows compliments co-star Hughes on his skill on stage. “He’s much more accomplished in this arena than I am. In rehearsals, I’m hungrily trying to absorb everything and watch what he’s doing.” Despite her claims, Follows is no novice, having starred in Romeo and Juliet at Stratford and in Los Angeles, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the storied Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis and Chekhov’s The Seagull in San Diego.

Which is good, because her role in Fool for Love is not for a tyro. As May, Follows must display both love and hate — or, more accurately, lust and hate — for her cowboy lover. She’s got to fall for him, then reject him, then fall for him, then reject him again in the space of one-and-a-half intense hours. All the while, the final outcome, whether her last word to him will be yes or no, must be hidden from the audience.

In addition to her acting work, Follows is currently writing a television series with her sister Edwina and veteran producer Charles Lazer. Called My Mother’s House, the show will recreate the time after Follows’ divorce, when she and her two children moved back from Los Angeles to live with her mother, the actor Dawn Greenhalgh, in Toronto.

“It’s six half-hours of black comedy,” Follows says. “I’ve been writing my first scripts. It’s about the minefield of my life with my family.”

From this vantage point, Follows’ choice to play the idealistic Anne Shirley looks like an aberration, a detour into the country of earnest optimism. Immediately after finishing with Anne in the late ’80s, Follows chose to play a small-town hustler named Micheline in Allan King’s film Termini Station (1989). At the time, she had this to say about her character: “She’s not sympathetic in the obvious sense, but I can’t be afraid of being unsympathetic.” Spoken like one of the fighting Follows.

Fool for Love opens Aug. 4 at the Harbourfront Centre Theatre in Toronto.

Alec Scott is a Toronto theatre critic.