In a slowly progressing industry, actor Noah Lamanna is embracing fluidity

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.

Noah Lamanna auditioned to play a 15-year-old white girl one day and then a mid-30s gay Asian man the next.

"It's really interesting being ethnically ambiguous, age-ambiguous and also gender-ambiguous," says the infinitely charming and malleable stage and screen actor, whom you may have seen in the musical series Topline or Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. 

Lamanna is a youthful-looking, non-binary 32-year-old of Italian, Jewish and Chinese ancestry. They've often struggled to figure out where they fit in an industry that can be pretty prescriptive and narrow when it comes to roles that fit in certain boxes. But they're currently embracing fluidity — both the industry's and their own — while showing up in everything from the new Nicolas Cage movie Dream Scenario to the upcoming sci-fi series Beacon 23 opposite Lena Headey and Stephan James.

"We're moving into a space where [trans-inclusive casting is] not so much in vogue — it's just kind of normalized," says Lamanna on a Zoom call with CBC Arts. "We're just starting to get folded into storytelling and into casting in a way that stories aren't all riding on queer and trans identity. We're entering a space where trans characters are being written just as people."

Lamanna is speaking with me from their apartment, where the theatre kid aesthetic is dialled up to 11. They're taking swigs of water from a gigantic honey jar and wearing a vintage light blue t-shirt promoting the Fauquier Track Festival (an event so evidently ancient that I can't find it on the Google machine). They use expressions to match the look, at various points saying "we shan't" and "what a rascal," giving the dusty sections of the English language a revival as they walk me through their milestones.

The actor, who grew up in Newmarket, started performing at age seven. "I was quite clumsy," they say. "My mom put me into musical theatre to be like, 'Figure that out.'"

Lamanna went on to do dance, even taking part in local competitions (which they say is nowhere near as cool as what we see in the Step Up movies). They scored their first paid gig at 11 as a professional Shania Twain and Cher impersonator — an admission they make cautiously, almost as a trade-off just so I don't dig for even more humiliating details from their resume. "I played all the best community centres and church basements of rural Ontario," they say. "It was a modest operation."

Throughout our conversation, they describe the various discomforts they've had with pursuing acting, even before grappling with how the industry's narrowly defined parameters didn't really make room for their identity. They speak deflatedly about the way theatre school tends to prepare students for the business of acting rather than expressing themselves. That capitalist pursuit goes against the grain for someone who says their personality can be summed up by Don DeLillo's White Noise — a novel that is essentially an allergic reaction to Reaganomics. "I often joke that I'm always kind of 10 minutes away from going to join a commune," they say.

They add that acting was the only way they could see themselves participating in capitalism, though they often would opt to perform in something rewarding for free, like community shows with the collective Echo Productions, rather than pursuing more parts as day players in police procedurals or "nacho commercials." (For the record, Lamanna has never actually appeared in a nacho commercial.)

There are so many ways that Lamanna sounds resistant to a career in acting, but, throughout our conversation, they also point to the few moments when they felt like they belonged; when they said to themselves, "This is correct. This is where I should have always been. This is the job I'm supposed to be doing." The earliest moment came at age nine, when they were being wheeled out onstage as Alice in a suburban community theatre production of Alice in Wonderland, feeling completely relaxed and comfortable in front of an audience.

Most recently, Lamanna had that same reassuring feeling when walking into rehearsal at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California, where they played the lead in the National Theatre of Scotland's production of Let The Right One In, directed by Tony-award winner John Tiffany. You're probably familiar with the material. The stage show, like the movie incarnations, is adapted from John Ajvide Lindqvist's chilling coming-of-age novel about a centuries old vampire named Eli, who appears as though she's living in perpetual puberty, befriending a 12-year-old boy named Oskar.

Lamanna tapped into the physical prowess afforded by their experience in dance to play Eli. Onstage, they would scramble up and down trees, contorting their body to move at various points like a zombie, or a lion stalking its prey, or a rat, which both hunts and hides for its survival.

The role set a high bar for what would essentially be their first professional stage gig. "In what other show am I going to be working with these world-renowned Tony winners and nominees and playing a little trans child vampire climbing trees and spitting blood down my chest?" they say. The actor has an ear-to-ear grin as they relish the space Tiffany gave them to make the role their own.

In the novel and 2008 Swedish film version of Let The Right One In, Eli presents as a girl, but there's ambiguity there (not the case in the 2010 American remake Let Me In). In the 2008 film, Eli confuses Oscar when she says she's not a girl. A shower scene reveals that there is scar tissue formed where her genitalia would be. The novel is far more explicit, containing a traumatic sequence — which Lamanna describes as " a lot" — where Eli, who was a boy, is castrated. 

That scene isn't in the play, but Lamanna incorporates the ambiguity in their performance. "It was important to my understanding of the character that I had been a boy and was living in the world as a girl for the sake of my survival," they say. "It made sense to move through the world as a girl. My ultimate goal [was] for someone to leave the theatre and be like, 'Was that a boy?'"

Lamanna says the recent wave in trans-inclusive casting inspired Tiffany to consider a non-binary actor for the role. "I do think, myself aside, it's a very smart casting choice," they say. "And I think the only one that you could make now, really."

Lamanna is embracing the moment but warns the way the industry is integrating trans and queer identities into auditions and casting can be clumsy and unintentionally harmful, especially when policing identities.

"There's just this unreasonable expectation and entitlement that actors' sexual identities and gender identities are owed to the audience in order for them to decide whether or not they're allowed to have this role," they say. They refer to how Heartstopper star Kit Connor felt pressured by fans to come out as bisexual at 18 to justify his casting in the series.

Lamanna understands the intrusiveness comes from a good place — a pursuit to centre queer people in queer roles — but worries that the pendulum is swinging too hard. "Now they're asking without asking, 'Tell us you're queer in your slate.'" 

"I think we're going to come to a place where that evens out and we have more queer creators in positions of power," they add optimistically. "That trickle-down effect is going to happen. Queer people in this industry are just going to become part of the landscape and it's going to have to be less of a conversation. We're just not there yet."