Serinda Swan

Interview by Blaine Schlechter for I'm Here With Magazine

Congratulations on the Season 2 pickup of Coroner – which starts production soon. You’ve lived through a few of these, but it never gets old I’m sure; when you got the call saying you were coming back again to play Jenny Cooper, did you do anything special to celebrate?

I think I did a random dance in my apartment first and foremost, because you just want to celebrate and you want to let out some of the energy that you’re holding. Even though there was a good feeling from the get-go with this show, that it was going to go at least another season, you never know…this industry surprises you in good ways, bad ways and ugly ways. It’s an energy your carrying along, it’s another character…it’s another person. I have to keep Jenny close until I know that I can release her and so for me it was sort of that inhale of…’ok, here we go again’. I get to bring Jenny along for another year of life, which is incredibly rewarding and exciting.

Playing a Coroner is kind of a unique role to play, especially as a lead character. Were there any special skills you had to learn to portray this character?

Any character that you play you have to go in and make sure that you have the tools to be able bring them to life, whether that’s physically, emotionally, mentally…whatever it is, you need to make sure that you can pull from personal experience, but then you can really immerse yourself in their own experience and skill set. Whether that’s playing a super hero and I have to learn how to fight (or) I have to learn how to stand like a warrior to I need to learn what it’s like to suffer from panic attacks, or I need to know the ins and outs of an autopsy or the hierarchy and the pathology of the coroner system. So I read a lot of books, I went to an actual autopsy, I called real coroners…I did a lot of research to try to ground Jenny in as much of her own humanity as I could.

Coroner not only films in Toronto, but the series is based in and identified as Toronto and it’s great to see the unique neighborhoods in the show. Do you get to do a lot of location shooting in and around the city?

We shot a lot within Toronto, like the downtown core; you’ll see the TIFF building and certain things like that. Jenny’s house is out in Pickering. We shoot all over Toronto and I love that. We’re a Canadian show, by Canada, for Canada, written by Canadians, starring a Canadian, set in Canada and yet we’re so very universal and I always say that through specificity you have universality and that’s something that our show is sort of a testament to.

Personally…I was a big fan of Breakout Kings and your character of Erica Reed and was pretty bummed when it ended after season 2. For you, is there a particular character that you’ve played in the past that you wish you could have done more with or played longer?

Most characters you always keep close and you want to keep portraying them because you get to dive deeper into that character. I think for me it was actually Anne Bancroft in Feud. I did one of the guest stars on that show and it was so incredible to get to play a character that was not a character, it was a real human being. So some studying that I had to do there to really embody Anne and to be able to look at old interviews and see how she used her hands and how she laughed or how she held herself and it’s such a crazy responsibility, but it was so much fun. It was such an incredible opportunity and so much fun to be able to be in her energy and it’s very different from creating your own energy for a character, rather than deep diving into something that already pre-exists through another person.

I’m sure it would be a little different preparing for a role like that?

Its fun…it was amazing. As an actor, that’s just a different well…it’s in exterior study instead of an interior study and that’s really fun for me. There was definitely nights before shooting where I was like ‘oh my gosh’! I mean, she was such an incredible actress, just incredible and so just to even have a little bit of that energy inside of you and be able to play a small part and bring her essence to the screen just was really, really amazing.

Well, like I said, I do miss Breakout Kings, just so you know.

Breakout Kings was great! That was a great cast and crew, we actually shot our first season in Toronto and we shot our second season in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. We had to move it because it was too cold…honestly it was too cold for us to film!

I read that you filmed in an actual, working jail...was that true?

Ya…oh ya. As an Actor it’s kind of amazing to be able to be immersed in that, to be able to go into a real hospital, or a real jail, or classroom or whatever it is. When you’re shooting certain projects, like for Marvel or whatever it is, you’re in a fairly imaginative world and that’s the inward development that you have to do. You go into your child where you get to play and imagine. Then when you’re in these jails or real life situations, it’s a totally different mechanism. I actually forgot that I shot in jails!

Outside of acting, you are very involved in a variety of charitable initiatives, but I’d like to talk about one that you recently co-founded called Deedly. Can you tell us about the charity and what it means to you?

Deedly is a non-profit that I co-founded with my business partner, Andrew Resnick. Him and I actually met while I was shooting a show in Miami and became really good friends. One night we decided to watch a documentary called Racing Extinction and we both had this sort of profound experience where we left questioning the ability of our education system to be able to stop or address world issues. We realized this documentary, called Racing Extinction, but by the time our youth grow up, the documentary that they are going to be watching is called Extincition, because there’s nothing within their education system that actually teaches them about the extinction of animals and then gives them the tools to do something about it; or the world water crisis, or mine mapping, or the ability to be able to act vs react when it comes to your own biology. Things like that, that aren’t in our school system or our textbooks, because our textbooks are archaic. So, how can we figure out how to get in there as educators on world experiences and on world issues. Andrew has a tech company and I come from a very creative background and so we sat down with some of the best curriculum developers and production teams and creatives across the board and said we want to build a curriculum for youth that is a civil activism curriculum that is about themselves, their communities and their world. And then the stories of the communities and the stories of the people that connect everyone. So we built that and are in the process of building our tech and education platform that allows kids to learn about world issues and then directly donate to causes that they just learned about at no cost to them, their teachers or their school. We actually fund the donation dollars ourselves and give them the opportunity to immediately make change.

As a parent I think that is a great initiative and a great cause, congratulations on that.

Thank you. We are actually going to build a system into it later where parents can lock their children’s allowances into it where they have to watch educational videos in order to get their allowance. We are trying to figure out a way where ‘who do I want to be the CEO of my company…who do I want to be the Presidents of the network I want to work for?’ I want people to be educated…I want people to be global citizens and I want them to be able to know what’s really going on in the world. For us, it’s really difficult to see donation dollars not being used on the education side of things. There aren’t enough donations dollars right now going around that people will have the capacity to harness the mind and the heart at the same time and so we are really trying to put the two of those together and make sure that if you want to donate to the World Wildlife Fund, instead of donating directly to them, you can donate the $20 to us, we educate kids through our wildlife curriculum on the issues that are happening within the world and then we allow them to donate your $20 back to the charity of your choice. Because we’re a non-profit, we don’t take a cent. Your $20 stays intact and goes exactly where you want it to go, it just gets temporarily rerouted through the hearts and minds of kids and gives them the ability to really see what’s going on in the world and I think they’re going to be able to make the change that were unable to make

I wish you the best of luck with that, I love the concept…it’s really cool. Season 1 of Coroner can be streamed now on CBC Gem and Season 2 starts production this summer. Have you seen any scripts yet and is there anything you can share about what fans can expect next season?

Well…we are obviously based on the Cornor book series – the Jenny Cooper book series so we always take inspiration from there. I actually have an incredible meeting coming up with our creator Morwyn (Brebner) and our Executive Producer Adrienne (Mitchell)…they’re coming into Los Angeles and were all going to sit down and go over the second season. So I’m as much in the dark as you guys are right now. In about 2-3 weeks I’ll be able to have a lot more information. But that’s the thing, you hold the character close until you know where she’s going and then you start to develop seasons together. It’ll be really exciting, I know that their going to stay true to what was in the first season and build upon it and really push the characters further so I’m excited.

I speak for all fans when I say we can’t wait to see it and wish you good luck with production and filming.

Thank you so much, I can’t wait to get back to Toronto, I really can’t, I’m super excited…I’ll be back in August!