From the stage to the big screen, Djouliet Amara branches out

Rising Stars is a monthly column by Radheyan Simonpillai profiling a new generation of Canadian screen stars making their mark in front of and behind the camera.

Spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't seen Barbie — Greta Gerwig's foray into franchise filmmaking that has since been elevated to the gospel according to white women. The movie ends on a triumphant but exclusionary moment when Margot Robbie's titular doll marches into her gynecologist appointment, affirming her newfound "real" womanhood. That moment — from the movie that landed too many Oscar nominations (if you ask me) — is top of my mind when I'm talking to Winnipeg's Djouliet Amara over Zoom about Fitting In, the joyful coming-of-age dramedy from Canada's Molly McGlynn. 

Amara is a glowing presence as the plucky and supportive best friend to Maddie Ziegler's Lindy, a teen diagnosed with MRKH syndrome. Fitting In is based on writer and director McGlynn's own experience with the rare condition, being born with no uterus and no cervix and having a shortened vaginal canal. She channels that into a warm and cheeky movie that shares parallels with Judy Blume's Are You There God? It's Me Margaret, only instead of being about a girl discovering her womanhood when she gets her period, it's about a girl who discovers her womanhood — along with an inclusive understanding about gender ambiguities — when she doesn't get her period. That womanhood is precisely what the last laugh in Barbie fails to acknowledge.

"Being aware of those conditions can help us uplift the people who have them," says Amara, on why Fitting In's empathetic view on gender is so crucial. "Growing up is hard. Being a girl is hard. Feeling like sometimes you don't have a support system because you don't even know what's going on with you, that would be very, very hard. I think it's great that Molly was very brave and shared her story. Period."

Amara, by the way, hasn't gotten around to seeing Barbie. "Sorry," she squeals bashfully from her New York apartment, as though Mattel's fan army can hear her. "I drank so many Barbie cocktails!"

She's been busy. The actor — who arrived in Canada as a refugee from Russia at two and grew up in Winnipeg, which she calls our country's "artsy fartsy capital" — made a fresh leap to the screen just a few years ago after performing on stage with New York's Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre. She got her start in the slasher movies Tales From The Hood 3 and Séance before making guest appearances on shows like Riverdale and Superman & Lois. She also landed a role in CBC's The Porter, the award winning series about the Black community rallying against racism in Canada. 

In The Porter, the late Charles Officer directed Amara in the role of a competitive dancer. "I learned so much working with him," Amara says. She describes Officer's openness to learning about dance in order to capture those movements on camera and a sensitivity he brought to some of the show's really difficult scenes, like the violence inflicted in a scene between two women dealing with colourism. "He was so tender dealing with that."

It didn't take long for Amara to land a lead role in Apple TV's The Big Door Prize opposite Bridesmaids' Chris O'Dowd and Black Lady Sketch Show's Gabrielle Dennis. They play the parents to Amara's troubled but adorable teen Trina in the whimsical Pleasantville-ish series about a small-town community whose lives are upended by a magical vending machine called the Morpho. For two quarters, the Morpho reveals a customer's life potential, delivered in business card form as if to stamp the idea that this is some life calling. It's like a jukebox that picks a new tune for residents to dance to, motivating drastic life changes like a shopkeeper who becomes a magician and the high school principal who becomes a biker. 

On the one hand, the series is about opening up the possibilities. On the other hand, The Big Door Prize, which has a second season dropping April 24, is about people who begin to limit themselves in pursuit of the Morpho's narrowing recommendations. Limitations disguised as possibility also describes Barbie, a movie where the plastic doll can seemingly be anything — from a swimsuit model to the US president — but remains anchored to some old school notions surrounding feminism.

"If I was a Barbie —" Amara drifts off trying to imagine where she'd fit in Mattel's universe. Could she be doctor Barbie, in keeping with the career Amara imagined she'd be pursuing as a child, or Dance'n'Twirl Barbie? "I'm not just refugee Barbie," she finally answers, refusing to pick a lane. "Girls are so many things," says Amara. "Young people are so many things, so many branches." 

"Let's say in The Big Door Prize, Trina who I play, is this one tree …" she interrupts herself to giggle at the similarities between "Trina" and "tree" before picking up again. "There's all these different branches to her. But she gets this card, it says something, and she thinks that this is her one branch. She forgets she has all these other branches, things that not only can she be, but that she IS."

Amara speaks lovingly about Trina, a character she brings so much of herself to while flexing her incredible range as an actor. Amara has a magical way of being sardonic and tender at once; or appearing cheery while still registering the depths of Trina's misery. The character is a mess of emotions, dealing with the loss of a boyfriend to a car accident but also guilt over her actions leading up to the tragedy and the joy new possibilities open — though she's not sure she deserves them. Amara plays those emotional keys like Mozart. 

I'm making that last analogy because Amara also, on a lark, recently decided to learn piano. Just another thing to add to her ever-expanding skill set. Check out her mini recitals on Instagram, and marvel at the array of personalities on display there from sultry bookworm to beatnik. 

When I compliment the versatility in her feed, she compares the curation to the red carpet looks Ayo Edebiri has been giving during her recent domination at the Golden Globes, Critics Choice and Emmy Awards. "She's not stuck being all sweetened up or being a super tomboy all the time," says Amara of Edebiri, who she worked alongside in Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between. "I think a lot of people expect young actresses to be this one digestible thing for everyone all the time. If they stray or show a different side of themselves, people are like, 'who is this person?' Well, this person has been that person all along."

Similarly, Amara treats every outlet from the movies to social media as an expression of her artistry, humour and multifaceted personality; her branches, if you will. Even the white shirt she's wearing during our conversation, which she borrowed from her friend a year ago and never gave back, contains patches of different artwork. "It's very me," she says, 

Acting wasn't part of the plan for Amara while she was working on her dance career. She left dance while dealing with an eating disorder. "I had a hard time with that in the classical dance world," says Amara about an industry that is unforgiving when it comes to women's bodies. "Just that level of having to focus on your body in that extreme way for such a long period of time and look in a certain way wasn't natural to me." 

"I think I look healthy, natural, athletic and in great shape. I'm really grateful to be in the acting world and have found my comfort and safety here," she says. "I haven't had anyone police my body in any way at all … I'm lucky that all the projects I've worked on have been led by really great people."

Amara then refocuses her attention on Fitting In, which is the perfect note to end this discussion on embracing people for everything that they are. "The cast is really diverse in terms of ability, sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity and culture," she says. "Molly did such an amazing job of creating a real world of people; people we really see in Canada."