When it comes to performing, Danielle LeBlanc is used to being able to do it all.
Writing, acting, singing and dancing are all on the Clare, N.S. native’s resume, so when she was sidelined in May, 2019 with life-threatening deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism, laying low was the last thing she wanted to do.
But after her long recovery last year, she was looking forward to big things in 2020: producing her short film George, returning home to Nova Scotia from Toronto this summer with her children’s music group Little Buckaroos with Briand Melanson — her partner and fellow former member of the Acadian folk group Grand Derangement — and continuing her professional acting path of auditions and seeking new roles.
Then came the curveball called COVID-19. Like a true multi-talent, LeBlanc (@danielleannie on Instagram) changed lanes and made two new films that saw her adapt to the requirements of quarantine and physical distancing: the solo short Crisis and her brand new comedy creation Reading, which premiered on Tuesday with the actor playing an offbeat online psychic.
READING - Quarantine Comedy Short Film from IRAYBS FILMS on Vimeo.
After a disastrous 2019, LeBlanc was determined to show 2020 she was made of sterner stuff.
“It’s almost hilarious to me that after that, I thought I was good for a while as far as bad things happening went,” says the effervescent artist from her home in Toronto. “I just thought it would be full steam ahead, and for a while things were good.
“We were about to shoot a full-on film, we’d raised the money and done the casting and so on, and then COVID hit and stopped everything. And leading up to that I’d done a TV show (Paranormal Hotel, narrated by Dan Aykroyd), so maybe it was that thing where you feel like everything was going a little too well.”
For LeBlanc, quarantine comes with a familiar feeling of deja vu, having already lived the “life-comes-to-a-halt thing” the year before. But while she felt mentally prepared for the unexpected downtime after her previous experience, and knew how to fend off feelings of anxiety surrounding inactivity, this time around she didn’t have an illness to prevent her from feeding the need to stay creative, perform and tell stories.
“I can’t be hustling 24/7 like I was before, because there’s only so much you can do,” she sighs. “But prior to COVID, I had already started shifting into guiding my career with my own hands, in a way.
“I wanted to start making my own films, and if I can’t do the project I was going to do, what else can I do?”
Crisis from Danielle LeBlanc on Vimeo.
After teaming with Melanson to make the smartphone film Crisis, which found its way into a few online film festivals, LeBlanc and her creative partner Caroline Concordia (@careovision on Instagram) began brainstorming for a follow-up to their pre-COVID film Best Friends.
Together they wanted to make a film that would work within the constraints of quarantine, and came up with the idea of Concordia’s character Alex’s oddball encounter with LeBlanc’s flaky psychic Joy. With the help of Concordia’s partner Ian Rayburn, they filmed themselves with smartphones while conversing on Zoom — “literally shot like live theatre ... we pretty much did our scenes in one take,” recalls LeBlanc — with Rayburn editing the footage and Melanson handling additional production tasks.
The result is a hilarious and slightly surreal exchange that makes the most of the pair’s odd-couple chemistry, as Alex is baffled by Joy’s non-sequiturs and unconventional approach to making predictions.
“These characters do exist, that use the term ‘psychic’, but I don’t know exactly how to describe it ... I think intuition is a real thing, but it kind of becomes a joke when you start talking about crystal balls or calling some infomercial psychic who gives you a vague description of things until you go, ‘Oh yeah, that IS me!’
“So Joy was a lot of fun to play, she’s so wacky. You know in life how we have social fronts — who we are, who we’ve become and what’s our personality — and Joy’s front is to be confident no matter what.”
LeBlanc and Concordia wanted to come up with two very different characters who could have a unique encounter on Zoom, and come to some realization that they’re not all that different in the end. “I’m not really like Joy, but I’m more like Joy than I am like Alex. I’m definitely more of a clown,” says LeBlanc, who begins work on a third quarantine film this week.
“It can be a really tough industry to navigate, so when you find your people, it’s really refreshing,” she says of her ongoing creative relationship with Concordia and Rayburn.
“When you find the people you can create with and move forward with, and were there all along, it’s so nice to have such a solid friendship as well. I feel really lucky.”