She was a popcorn girl at a North Toronto cinema and an extra on the set of The Freshman when the picture was shot here in the early '90s.
Since then, Mia Kirshner, 23, has added to her movie industry credits with a single-minded determination to be an actor, not a movie star.
Most recently, the Los Angeles-based, Toronto-raised actress returned home to work on David Weaver's Century Hotel.
The film, written and directed by Weaver, is made up of a series of vignettes that take place in the same hotel room from 1900 to the year 2000.
Doing a movie in her hometown was handy on the homecooking front. It also allowed her to get re-acquainted with old friends.
More importantly for Kirshner, Century Hotel is a career benchmark of major importance for her.
"It was the first time I had done such explicit nudity," she says after shooting the closed set sequences recently. "I have to say I have no regrets about doing them."
In one of the stories making up the movie, Kirshner plays a female escort who gets involved with a lonely businessman (Tom McManus) over a 13-year period, starting in the '80s and ending in the new millennium.
Other mini-yarns include an unsolved murder, a character coping with madness and a virgin's deflowering.
But there's no question that the Kirshner-McManus piece is the most intense, involving and demanding.
"It turned out to be a liberating experience," says Kirshner, giggling at what she thought the less-effective result might be. "I really did think I'd be grossed out by the dailies, but I wasn't."
Mind you, Kirshner has immersed herself in edgy roles before this breakthrough adventure. It's not like she was a wide-eyed waif before.
You might recall that she was a dominatrix in Love And Human Remains and a stripper in Exotica.
Three other upcoming Kirshner portrayals, in films set for release in the next year, underscore her dark arts abilities.
In the movie, Saturn, with Connie Nielsen and Scott Caan, "I play a drug user who brings this guy into an underworld." In Mary Jane's Last Dance, with Taye Diggs and Dominique Swain, Kirshner is a naughty vixen. "I even have a kissing scene with Dominique," she says.
Now And Forever has Kirshner "playing a bad woman with a tormented background" opposite Theresa Russell and Adam Beach, the very same Beach that Kirshner made her bad-girl debut with in Cadillac Girls.
Ironically, Kirshner made her big 1998 studio movie showcase -- with John Travolta and Dustin Hoffman -- in Mad City by defining a bright and eager TV news intern. Mad City was definitely an exception to her rule of always getting the deeply disturbed, moody parts.
"It would be really nice to do a light, bright funny role," says Kirshner, laughing, "but people don't seem to want me to do that."
Perhaps she could try a musical comedy with a fancy dance number. That's a little too much.
"But it would be a break," she admits, "to do something where I don't have to go to dark places as a woman with a lot of loss and unrequited love for strange people."
Yet she's smart enough to know that the role an actor gets "is usually decided for you." Besides, she adds, "Being bad is usually the best thing an actor can do."
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