All-in Madonna star Melanie Rose Wilson felt right at home in film's West Coast woods
The Burnaby actor’s breakout performance explores a strikingly different kind of female teen character
Melanie Rose Wilson plays Madonna Croft in All-In Madonna.
The Whistler FIlm Festival premieres All-In Madonna December 9, and streams it until December 31. Melanie Rose Wilson is also featured in the fest’s Stars to Watch panel on December 16
WHEN MELANIE ROSE Wilson first read the script for the new BC feature film All-in Madonna, she knew she had found a perfect fit.
The title character, 17-year-old Maddie Croft, who is raised in a rural bush community by a single father, feels most at home outdoors. Constantly dressed in a toque and flannel shirt, she spends her days chopping wood, shovelling hay, hanging laundry in the yard, and hiking a West Coast rain forest so lush that you can almost smell the cedars.
For Wilson, who was born and raised for part of her childhood in Squamish, that setting--shot in some of the wilder parts of southern Vancouver Island--felt familiar.
“I was definitely comfortable in the woods,” she tells Stir over the phone from her home in Burnaby before the film’s world premiere at the Whistler Film Festival this week. “It was very beautiful and it made it easier to slip into that character’s mindset--they were so out in the middle of nowhere. We were actually out in the woods; we really did hike to some of these locations.” Still, Wilson adds, it wasn’t till she saw some of the movie’s sweeping overhead drone shots that she realized the true grand scale of the forests that surrounded her.
But there was something else about the character in Vancouver director Arnold Lim’s dark-tinged first feature, written by Susie Winters, that appealed to her, too. In the coming-of-age story, her homeschooled teen pushes to go to a public high school, and that opens up a new world of social expectations, small-town rumours, and conflicts for someone who’s been more than a little socially isolated, save for her much-younger sister.
Maddie is no extrovert--and that was an attribute Wilson could relate to from growing up.
“I was the very, very, very socially fearful, socially awkward little girl. I used to hang onto the lunchtime supervisor, I was so afraid,” she says. But that didn’t stop her from trying out for her first school play at seven or eight: “I just decided I was going to audition for the lead role...and it was just love at first performance.”
For Wilson, who moved with her family from Squamish to St. Albert, Alberta, before returning her at 19 and studying acting at Capilano University, performing onscreen is not at all at odds with her inner introvert.
“The ability to slip into another person’s skin can give me confidence,” she explains.
That’s clear from a breakout performance that brings to life a different kind of teen character--a strong, self-sufficient girl who spends more time thinking than talking, and who still has a lot to learn about the world. “That’s something I loved about the script: there’s a minimal amount of dialogue,” she says. “I love when things are unsaid, when you leave it to the audience.”
In the film, Maddie has to reconcile troubling secrets she finds out about her millworker father when she starts high school. That leads to her trying to unravel her upbringing. That includes coming to terms with the absence of her poet mother, who left her at a young age.
“Often female characters that are strong don’t show vulnerability at all--and Maddie definitely shows vulnerability a lot,” Wilson reflects. “She’s really raised herself for the most part, and her dad is so incredibly similar….He hasn’t done a hell of a lot for her. But she knows he’ll always have her back.”
Melanie Rose Wilson
In developing the character, Wilson remembers a phone call she received from Lim in the days before the late-2018 shoot. “He said, ‘I have a weird question: Do you think Maddie would shave her legs?’” she recalls with a laugh. “And I thought, ‘No, she wouldn’t.’ Who would have told her that is even a societal expectation of women or part of social norms? I loved that about her.”
All-in Madonna touches on some unexpectedly dark subject matter as well, from domestic abuse to murder. And though it was sometimes tough to go to those places, Wilson has nothing but fond memories about shooting this little indie film in the middle of the woods.
“It was a total learning curve for both of us,” she says of working with Lim, who’s previously made short films. “I've never played the lead--I’m always a side character or smaller role. And this was his first experience leading a film. So we learned a lot together.
“We worked on a micro budget, so everyone there really wanted to be there,” she adds. “They were there because they believed in Arnold and they believed in the project. So that was incredibly fulfilling to go through the whole process together.”
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