I still get approached constantly, my daughters don’t like going anywhere with me anymore… It’s created a huge amount of buzz, and we have the phenomenon of Facebook happening, so there were all types of people inboxing me in the first season, telling me their stories of how they sobered up, or how they lost a child due to suicide or, you know? Everything that they identified with Gail Stoney, and it hasn’t stopped. My life has changed a lot since the first season.
I can no longer walk into a Walmart anonymously (laughs). MT: Blackstone in itself changed my whole life. JD: What has it been like playing the role of Gail Stoney? It opened up so many doors, it was beyond any dream I’d ever had. I told her “I gotta go to the Geminis, and I need a dress, let’s just say the one in a million chance I win this award, I’m going to dedicate it to your dad, so it would be awesome if I was wearing your dress” So I won the award, wearing the dress she designed, and then my life just kind of went into extreme high gear, and I had to move back to Calgary and be close to an airport and have electricity, so yeah, my life changed hugely after the Gemini. So I contacted late Gordon’s daughter, Disa Tootoosis, who is a fashion designer, and a really good friend of mine. When I was nominated I thought there is no chance in hell I’m going to win this award, but I’m going to go there, and have a good time, and I’m going to meet George Stroumboulopoulos, which would have been the ultimate thing for me at that time. My mind was blown, I didn’t even know they submitted me, I didn’t even know I was capable of being nominated, it wasn’t even in my radar – it was beyond anything I’d ever conceptualized. I got the call from our producer Jessica Szymanski, she’s the one that told me I’d been nominated for a Gemini. We had just lost Gordon Tootoosis ten days before we went to camera that season, so we were all really shook up from that, and still very vulnerable and emotional, he was so important in my life, he was like a father to me. And then, in the summer of 2011, we were doing our second season of Blackstone, my daughters and I spent about 8 weeks in Edmonton to shoot Blackstone.
I was there for two and a half years, very secluded, in the woods, coming into town, you know it was a small reserve and I knew everybody there. We had solar panels and pumped our water from the river, and we used candles and kerosene for light, and a wood stove for heating the house, it was very basic, but such a beautiful way to live. I was working a show back then called Mixed Blessings for APTN, and doing other things, I teach, I use various theatrical characters to work with Aboriginal youth…I made a decision in 2009 that I was going to move away from Calgary to the country and go off the grid with my daughters. Before the Gemini, I was living in the South Okanagan, I had left Calgary in 2009. JD: What has the impact of your Gemini win in 2011 had on your career? So I just pulled all these different sources and put them into Gail Stoney.
…she was this conglomeration of all these different women in my life, you know, aunts, and my mom and my own Grandmother, just women in my life that I witnessed growing up surrounded by a lot of alcoholism.