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A graduate of the performing arts program at Canterbury High School, Holmes recalls her prospects for landing any sort of acting opportunity were bleak.
"In high school we kept being told, 'Oh, no one makes a living at acting. Only a very small percentage of people do it. You'll be so poor, you'll be broke. You have to travel, but there's no stability.' When all of us graduated we were thinking, 'Uh, I don't want to be an actor,' " Holmes says from The Comedy Network's Toronto office promoting a new series, The Itch.
"But for some reason, a couple of years later all of us made the transition back either into acting or something more artistic, because we realized we weren't being fulfilled."
Now it seems Holmes has the itch to prove her quirky comedic worth on The Itch, a sort of Entertainment Tonight satire molded in the vein of This Hour Has 22 Minutes.
Produced by Halifax's Salter Street Films (where This Hour is based), the 13-episode, half-hour weekly series, which debuts tonight at 9 on Comedy, stars Holmes and co-writer Jason Jones anchoring an entertainment desk a la ET's Mary Hart and Bob Goen, while Mike Beaver (P.R., The Daily Blade) portrays the bumbling, roving correspondent, Jeremy Pilchet.
Holmes says her lovely yet quirky Tricia Farr "uses her intelligence and bravado to mask the fact that she's barely hanging on until the next paycheque.
"She's an inch away from the nut house."
Of her machismo-fuelled co-anchor Barry Goodman, Holmes jokes "he's like the David Hasselhoff of entertainment. He's loving it, enjoying every minute of it. Whereas Tricia can't stand this."
The series allows Holmes, 26, to expand her Pandora's box of characters she's honed through her work in the Second City Touring Company and her own one-woman special, Holmes Alone (which CTV will air next month).
Of particular interest is her send-up of Celine Dion and her old-enough-to-be-her-father husband/manager Rene Angelil, which doesn't sit well with the socially responsible Holmes.
"There's nothing illegal going on, but it's just weird," says Holmes, the daughter of a feminist social worker mother and a Mormon father. "It's the equivalent of, let's say, your parents' best friends get divorced and the dad comes over and asks you out -- it wouldn't be acceptable in that situation.
"But because a star does it, it's considered romantic, a story-book love."