Comedian Lisa Gilroy is tapping into Canada's 'pure creative energy'

Lisa Gilroy was caught off guard when she was asked to host this year's Canadian Screen Awards.

"I pushed my team to say yes immediately before they changed my mind, because I couldn't help but feel like it was a mistake that they asked me," she says, adding that she is particularly flabbergasted that her name will be added to a list of hosts that includes Andrea Martin and Martin Short, "people I would absolutely die for."

But then again, the Edmonton-born comedian and actress — known for her viral social videos, appearances on comedy streaming service Dropout, and role on Hulu's Interior Chinatown and Prime Video's Jury Duty — kind of feels that way about her whole career. 

"When doing improv for free leads to real jobs, it's kind of criminally insane," she says. "It takes a lot to wrap your head around it….I'm always just tickled and feeling so grateful for any and every opportunity."

Gilroy didn't set out to become a performer. Coming out of high school, she wanted to be a teacher. She enrolled in the University of Alberta's dual Bachelor of Fine Arts/Bachelor of Ed program with the ambition of being a drama teacher. But she found herself drawn to performing, and when she found improv, she fell in love. 

"It just looked so fun to me," she says. "You know, like, when you see someone doing something that you really want to do and you just get that burn in your belly and you're like, 'Oh, I have to get up there or I'm going to explode.' That's kind of what happened to me when I saw my first improv show. So I hung around at the back stage door and asked, like, how can I watch every show or be in a show? And then I never looked back."

From there, she moved to Toronto, performing with long-running sketch comedy troupe the Sketchersons, and then with Second City, before moving on to Los Angeles. It's a career that Gilroy describes as "just kind of a pattern of thinking that I'm never going to do something, and then doing it."

Even though Gilroy, like so many Canadian actors, is now based in the United States, she still very much identifies as Canadian. 

"I'm talking about Canada, probably ad nauseam to all my American friends," she says. "They're aware that that's what makes me who I am."

She adds that, working in Los Angeles, she can often tell who's a fellow Canuck. Canadian entertainers, she says "have their own flavour," which comes in part thanks to a different approach to the industry.

"I've made a lot of friends [in L.A.] who were child stars or were plugged into the entertainment industry when they were really young, in a way that I just don't think Canada has… we don't have that like toxic energy that sometimes I think American kids, unfortunately, can fall prey to," she says. "That's like, 'My baby's a star. She's going to be in a dishwasher commercial.' If you didn't live in Toronto or Vancouver, you probably didn't even know [working in TV] was a possibility for you growing up. And that's something that I experienced in Edmonton."

As a result, she says, Canadians are more inclined to be "creative just for the joy of creating," even after they head to the States. 

"There's a lot of pure creative energy in Canada that isn't hinging on, like, 'I'm going to start booking TV shows when I'm 14 years old… it feels unfiltered in that way," she says.

For her, the Canadian Screen Awards is an opportunity to celebrate that creative energy, as well as our shared cultural identity.

"I just think it's a really cool time to be celebrating Canada," she says. "I feel like national pride is in a swell right now, and I couldn't be more excited to be present in the country for that, celebrating at this time when we're having to tell other countries that we're not for sale. I think it's kind of cool when push comes to shove that we're [having] this national pride party, and I'm here for it."

The Canadian Screen Awards air June 1 at 8 p.m. on CBC, streaming on CBC Gem.