From Scarlet to starlet

Fledgling actress and corset designer Karen Simpson keeps it reel

by LORRAINE CARPENTER

"I get called Cyndi Lauper all the time, and I fucking hate that. I guess it's the red hair and the big fat face."

Karen Simpson has an image problem. Like anyone with a loud look, she's accustomed to the daily stares and commentary from gaping passers-by reacting to her cyberpunkette mohawk and self-made clothes, things that began well before her co-starring role in Saved by the Belles. It was when the tables turned, when she couldn't escape her own face in the film's ubiquitous promo, that she began to freak out.

"I couldn't handle it," she says. "I was at a bar around the time the first ad came out and someone told me they'd seen it and I just started crying, which was the stupidest reaction ever."

Back in April, the Plateau was plastered with Belles posters and littered with flyers and, fitting Simpson's heavily self-deprecating sense of humour, she soon had the strange satisfaction of treading on her own face up and down St-Laurent.

As you may have guessed, Simpson is not a professional actress. She spends most of her days running Ritual Designs with Sandra Chirico (for more info on their "clubby fetish wear," go to www.ritualdesigns.com). Aside from a brief modelling stint and some movie extra work as a teen, she had no acting experience prior to being cast in Saved by the Belles, and her account of being "discovered" by director Ziad Touma is like something out of old Hollywood myth.

"I met Ziad renting a video at the Boîte Noire and he asked me if I wanted to be in his movie," she says. "I figured he needed an extra and I was kind of snobby with him like, ‘Oh yeah, I've done that before, whatever.' He almost didn't call me back, but then I got the part even before doing a screen test."

Persona grata

In Touma's neon ode to Montreal's gay club culture, actors Brian C. Warren (aka Sheena Hershey), Steven Turpin, Danny Gilmore and a sprawling who's-who of real-life clubland characters were cast for their eccentricity and personality rather than training and experience. Inter-actor rapport was crucial because the dialogue was almost entirely improvised.

"Some bits were mildly scripted but generally it was like, ‘Go crazy!' Sometimes the spontaneity worked right off the bat, and when we did multiple takes, it was to make us go further and further into outrageousness. I wasn't outrageous enough a lot of times," Simpson admits. "My character wasn't really me, although maybe that's the perception that they had of me."

As Scarlet, she played a lonely, conflicted club kid who fills the voids in her life with partying, whereas the real Simpson is a bespectacled sci-fi buff who spends most of her days sewing and mothering a pair of lazy cats. One link between Simpson and her persona is her loft's continuous, beat-laden soundtrack, not unlike the movie's homegrown score. Be it electropunk, techno, new wave or downtempo, Simpson swings towards the electronic, "As long as it's not Happy Hardcore," she states. "I'd rather die than listen to that. I used to be into industrial - angry hardcore - but I'm not so angry anymore."

And it's no wonder. In the wake of Saved by the Belles, which won the Best Canadian Film award at Toronto's Inside Out Lesbian & Gay Film & Video Festival, Simpson is pursuing acting part-time. Her second film - Pure, directed by Jim Donovan - recently wrapped and is due in theatres this summer.

"It's a drama about club kids (laughing), so I'm typecast. I play Angie, the blonde bimbo party girl who's best friends with the lead character. It's more of a relationship-ey film than the flash, glamour and trash that Saved By the Belles was."

Despite her niggling shyness - her dream role is a Star Trek alien, "So no one will see me under the make-up" - Simpson is confident and comfortable with her new career twist.

"It's weird, it's like a calm has settled in," she says. "This makes sense at this point in my life. The hours are really long but it's been surprisingly easy - aside from having to watch myself.

"I figured I wouldn't get the part [in Pure] because you don't go to two auditions and get both roles. But it seems like someone's decided it's okay for me to do this."