by Gill Pringle
This interview took place before the SAG-AFTRA/Actors’ Strike
After Schitt’s Creek propelled her to stardom, Annie Murphy has deftly defied stereotyping.
Having portrayed lovably self-involved ditz Alexis Rose over six seasons of the award-winning comedy series, the Canadian actress has since taken on an unpredictably diverse range of roles.
Tripping between dark comedy series, Kevin Can F**k Himself, Russian Doll and Black Mirror’s memorable “Joan Is Awful” episode – most recently Murphy offers up her distinct voice to portray a high school teenager/mermaid in animated adventure flick, Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken.
In a career spanning 16 years, Murphy’s role as high school siren Chelsea is actually her first animation gig – voicing her character opposite veterans Toni Collette and Jane Fonda.
“This was really my first proper voice gig, and it is so different from TV and film acting where you need to dial it down and be natural and grounded. With this, I went in, probably with food on my face, sweatpants, hair in a bun and immediately just gave it like 177% and was over the top and weird and tried a whole bunch of stuff out,” she laughs.
“And instead of the director being like, ‘Why did we hire her?!’ He was like, ‘Yeah, can we do more? Let’s jack that up a bit!’ It was collaborative and a lot of fun and just being able to be big and goofy was really great,” says the actress who knows all about goofy after years of playing the comically oblivious Alexis Rose over 80 episodes.
Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken tells the story of shy teenager Ruby (Lana Condor), whose mother Agatha (Collette) has shielded her from the truth of her being a giant sea kraken.
For a girl who just wants to go unnoticed, it’s a monstrous prospect, although her royal grandmother (Fonda’s warrior Queen of the Seven Seas) helps her understand that her destiny lies in the depths of the ocean – a world that is bigger than she could ever have imagined.
The kraken are sworn to protect the oceans of the world against the vain, power-hungry mermaids who have been at war with them for eons.
Enter Murphy’s scheming Chelsea Van Der Zee, who seeks to thwart Ruby and prevent her from inheriting the Kraken throne.
If Ruby is kind yet insecure, then Chelsea is her polar opposite. Chelsea hides her sinister motives behind a glamorous facade, immediately becoming Oceanside High School’s popular self-assured new girl.
Having witnessed Ruby’s transformation into a giant kraken, Chelsea confesses that she too, is a sea creature living on land, offering to help Ruby harness her new powers so that, together, they might heal the ancient rift between the krakens and mermaids.
Ruby is too good-hearted to sense that Chelsea’s motives are suspect, or to realise that her new BFF is concealing a shocking secret about her real identity. “Chelsea is very popular, very confident and just one of those people that you’re a little bit intimidated by. Sweet Ruby looks up to Chelsea and is eager to be taken under her wing,” offers Murphy.
If playing the popular pretty girl is something audiences have already seen Murphy do with Alexis Rose, then the actress argues that this role is quite different.
“There’s an overlap that I’m very aware of. I think especially when we first meet Chelsea, and she’s this larger than life, deeply confident, very popular new girl; we see shades of Alexis in there for sure.
“But then when we start to realise that Chelsea is in fact, an incredibly evil creature of the depths, that’s where it starts to kind of drift away from Alexis, because there’s no evil in Alexis – but there’s a lot of evil in Chelsea,” says the Emmy-winning actress.
Director Kirk DeMicco says that Murphy’s own charisma, as well as her tremendous facility for comedy, made her a natural for the role. “We needed an actress who could switch between being playful one moment and utterly terrifying the next. And of course, there’s also the fact that Annie is hilarious. Even when she’s playing a villainous character, she’s able to find the humour in every situation,” he says.
Murphy dove straight into the deep end with her debut voice role, enjoying channeling her darker impulses into the megalomaniacal mermaid character, even though she identifies much more closely with the film’s introverted protagonist. “One of the main things I love about the story is that it’s the triumph of an underdog, and that’s my jam. It was fun to be Chelsea, but it was really challenging. I am far more of a Ruby than I am a Chelsea, although I could stand to gain a little bit of Chelsea’s confidence.”
Murphy, 36, hopes that the movie will serve as an inspiration for any teenage girl struggling through those awkward high school years.
“Even though I loved playing Chelsea, the character that I identified with the most was Ruby, and I think a lot of kids are going to be able to identify with Ruby because – growing up is tough and feeling comfortable in your own skin all the time is tough and, I think, impossible.
“You’re going to go through days or weeks or months or years where you just don’t feel like you fit in. You don’t feel like you are being seen properly by people. And I think that’s a very human experience. And then as the movie goes on, we realise that all of these things that Ruby viewed as flaws are actually really important parts of herself and her personality. And she learns to love and appreciate them and learn from them. I just love that message and I genuinely feel like there are going to be so many kids that see themselves in Ruby just as I did,” she says.
As Ruby agonises over her upcoming prom, Murphy reflects on that period in her own life. “I grew up in Canada where prom is nothing like it is in America where it seems like everyone’s getting engaged. It’s just this ridiculous over the top thing; people pouring 1000s of dollars into prom-posals,” she says.
“My prom was not at all like that. My boyfriend at the time went to a different school and our proms fell on the same night, and so one of my best friends ended up going to prom with my boyfriend. I didn’t have a date, so I asked this guy who I’d met on a ski hill a couple of times. He was this big, lanky dude that I didn’t really know very well. We just kind of awkwardly went to prom together and then I remember wolfing down poutine at like 3.30 in the morning. And that was my prom. It was not a glamorous experience but a memorable one, that’s for sure.”
Ask Murphy if she has any mermaid skills of her own, she’s immediately enthusiastic. “I love swimming so much. I will swim in any body of water that is not fully polluted. Immediately. I will jump into anything that I can. My parents have a cottage with a really beautiful lake in Canada and so I’m up there every summer and I swim as much as I can.
“Not only is it so much fun, but it’s really great exercise and you just feel more alive when you get out of a lake,” she says.
Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken is in cinemas September 14, 2023
