"Seventy percent of film roles written are for men," says actress Christina Cox, who is currently burning up screens as Kim, one half of the hot lesbian duo in Better Than Chocolate. "Then you take out the teenage girls, the moms and what's left over is so small. And within that tiny pot are the non-sitcom lesbian characters. I love Better Than Chocolate because it's a really great chick flick."
"It's an actress-oriented movie with an atypical love story," adds Karyn Dwyer, who plays Maggie, the second resident of Chocolate's lesbian love nest. She and Cox were in New York for a whirlwind day of meeting American journalists. "I love that this story is, 'Girl gets girl! Girl loses girl! Girl gets girl!'"
From her home in Vancouver, Better Than Chocolate's director Anne Wheeler-a twenty-five year veteran who has the marquee value in Canada that Meryl Streep has here-says Canadian actors benefit from not being chained to a star-oriented, typecasting system like America's. "Our actors don't get honed down into playing 'the mother' or 'the girlfriend,'" Wheeler says. "They always want to try something new."
Indeed, Peter Outerbridge, who plays trans diva Judy Squires, says the role was perfectly aligned for with his reputation for taking "strange" parts, like his roles in Paris, Texas and Kissed (which was about necrophilia). "We're lucky. In Canada we don't quite have the star system you do," says Outerbridge via cell phone while on location shooting near the Pacific coast.
"The American film industry is more concerned with image," he continues. "Canadian film is more concerned with ideas and discussion. So I am allowed to think in terms of shaking things up, not what people will think."
Wheeler says her leading ladies have independent streaks that supported this reality. "Karyn and Christina are both very adventurous young women," she chuckles. "We had a group of twelve to fifteen women from the community on the crew or in the cast who were all very candid about their lifestyle and their value system and what they wanted in a movie."
But Dwyer, who originates from Bell Island, a tiny place of six hundred people named for its resident cow, finds the visibility that results from having such a widely distributed film unwelcome indeed. "I was naked a lot while we were shooting because of the love scenes and the bookstore sequence at the end," says Dwyer. "That kind of nudity is rare in Canada, and it gets noticed."
"I can't walk home from the grocery store without being accosted by girls," she continues, her voice a plaintive moan. "'Over there! Hurry! There's the star of Better Than Chocolate!' And then they're running at me." (Chocolate was filmed along Commercial Drive, the heart of lesbian Vancouver.) "I went into a clothing store and this guy was so freaked out that I got a thirty percent discount. Women ask me to sign their bras and the men are afraid of me. I miss my anonymity!"
Dwyer refuses to talk about her personal life - "Those people are not in my movies" - but studiously compares herself to an actress who faced similar circumstances. "If you're wondering whether Anne Heche can play Harrison Ford's lover, you're thinking about a star, not her ability."
But Cox, who hails from suburban Toronto and has a continuing TV role on F/X, The Series, expects that very scrutiny. "Visibility is a sacrifice you make to have name recognition, which gets you better parts. There are worse things than losing your privacy, like not being together with the person you love, or not working. My girlfriend bought a place in L.A. and we didn't actually live in it for three years because she got TV series in Vancouver and Toronto. I want the community to be an audience for all of my work."