Hungry like a wolf-girl
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Victoria Sanchez's visualized vocation is spiced with variety
by GENEVIEVE PAIEMENT
The daughter of a Polish dancer and a Spanish documentary filmmaker, Canary-Islands-born, Montreal-based Victoria Sanchez, like many other fortuitous thespians, heard the call of the stage/screen at a very early age. "I knew when I was seven and I saw Gone With the Wind, and a TV series called Princess Sissi starring Romy Schneider, that I wanted to be an actress and dress up in period clothes," she explains. Actually, she admits to have only worn such fanciful frocks for two roles: in the CBC movie Big Bear and American TV movie P.T. Barnum. But Sanchez, 24, has shown off her brazen versatility by playing wildly diverse roles.
She's played an ex-junkie in John L'Ecuyer's Saint Jude, for which she's in the running for a Best Supporting Actress Genie nomination, she was a clumsy Latin girl on the YTV series Student Bodies and an undercover CIA agent in the HBO movie Sublet. She incarnated Medusa in a guest appearance on Fox series Big Wolf on Campus and a lost angel on Fox's Misguided Angels. She also played a thieving con-artist comic-book character in a recurring role on TV series Largo Winch, a Native-American Cree-English translator in Big Bear and, most recently, a freakshow wolf-girl, covered in hair from head to toe, in Sideshow, the latest from Thom Fitzgerald, director of The Hanging Garden.
Of course, part of her wanting to be an actress was wanting to experience other lives without the commitment of real-life career changes. "Besides acting, I wanted to be a singer, a drummer, a vet, an astronaut, a detective and a teacher. Acting was a way to be everything without all the schooling and without taking it so goddamn seriously!" she laughs. Another of Sanchez's favourite pastimes is connecting people. Three years ago, to spur creativity and solidarity in Montreal's acting community, she organized improv workshops. "It started out with four people in my living room drinking wine and it grew to 20 people, so we rented the Infinitheatre space." The workshops lasted for two years, until all the actors got too busy working to continue.
She spent most of last month playing "the most challenging role of my life": the Romanian wolf-girl lead in Sideshow, which should be out later this year. Her days lasted 18 hours and consisted of leaping through the surrounding forests of Bucharest in full body-hair makeup. But it wasn't all gruelling labour: she got to hang out with Tim Curry (who plays the freakshow's owner) and Grace Jones who plays--what a stretch--a half-man, half-woman. She describes Jones as being "very outgoing and very crazy."
As for the bright future Sanchez imagines for herself, it will certainly include the coming-to-fruition of her production company Just Believe Productions' "many secret projects." Why "Just Believe"? "Because that's what's gotten me this far--visualizing and believing in my dreams. That's what makes them happen."
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