Anna Lambe Interview: North of North Actress on Fame, Work, Filming & Netflix

The Woman Who Hasn't Made It to the Till Yet

I brought her a haunted house and she declined to move in.

That is the honest version of what happened. This is the POSSESSED issue, and I built the whole interview to catch our cover star in the act of being possessed — by the fame, by the platform, by the weight of being a symbol at an age when most people are still losing their keys. I had the frame loaded before she said a word. You got the thing everyone chases. Now it owns you. Tell me where it hurts.

Anna Lambe listened to all of it, warmly, generously, the way she seems to do everything. And then, without once raising her voice, she handed the whole premise back to me.

"I don't perceive it so much as a cost," she said. And later, when I would not let it go, when I told her flatly that she is a symbol now and symbols pay for it: "If it cost me anything at all, it is refunded in the benefit of the community impact that the show has had."

Reader, I pushed. It's my magazine and my issue and I wanted my thesis. Every other voice in these pages is writing back from the far side of the thing they wanted — the mother who went missing while the baby turned out fine, the man who caught the car and learned some physics, the therapist whose purpose grew teeth and started sending emails at 3am. They are all holding the receipt. I wanted Lambe holding one too.

She isn't. And the reason she isn't is the most interesting thing she said all day, because it is not naivety. It is arithmetic.

"We Haven't Made It to the Till Yet"

"We haven't made it to the till yet," she told me. "Things haven't started costing too much."

Sit with that, because it is the sharpest thing a 25-year-old has ever said to me about success. She is not claiming she got out free. She is telling you she is still in the store, arms full, walking the aisles, and the cashier has not yet looked up. She knows there is a till. She knows there is a bill. She has simply not been handed it, and she is refusing — politely, deliberately — to pre-pay in dread.

Here is who she is, for the two of you who somehow haven't met her yet. Anna Lambe is Inuk, from Iqaluit, and at 25 she is the lead of North of North, Netflix's first Canadian original series, a show made with CBC and APTN that put an Arctic town and an Inuk woman named Siaja in front of a global audience and landed in the platform's top ten. Before that she was the teenager who broke out in The Grizzlies. Before you could catch your breath she was sharing a call sheet with Jodie Foster on True Detective: Night Country. Season two of North of North wrapped this spring. She is, by any reasonable measure, in the exact spot the rest of this issue is warning you about.

She found out about the renewal in a café in Washington, D.C., where she'd flown in that morning for a Season 1 screening. Her showrunners called and put on a performance — "acting skills, they were putting them to use," she said — arranging their faces into something grave before delivering the line: we're sorry to let you know that you're going to be dating around a lot real soon. She cried. Then she had to swallow it whole, because that evening she was at dinner with Micah Harper, who plays her on-screen mother and is, in Anna's words, one of the nearest and dearest people to her heart, and the announcement hadn't dropped yet. She sat there watching Micah dream out loud about a season two that Anna already knew they had, notifications lighting up her phone under the table, until she finally cracked: Micah, you should check your phone.

I tell you this because it is the kind of story a possessed person doesn't tell. There's no flinch in it. She was not performing gratitude or bracing for the catch. She was just delighted, and then she was keeping a happy secret at dinner, which is a very specific and very un-haunted thing to be doing.

The Cold, Not the Meaningful

She is not soft about the work, though, and I want to correct any impression that her peace is the peace of someone who hasn't suffered for it. Ask her about the hard days and she doesn't reach for the meaningful ones. She reaches for the cold.

They shot on the sea ice. The whole bay frozen, the location twenty minutes out by snowmobile, hauled there on a wooden box sled with every piece of camera gear lashed down — out onto the ice where the crew set up tents and generators and tried, and mostly failed, to stay warm through minus 50 for ten and twelve hours at a stretch. If you needed the washroom it was twenty minutes back to town and twenty minutes back out. "Nobody is unscathed by it," she said, "whether you're from the North or you're not." And then, because this is where her mind actually goes: "There were people who went through literal blood, sweat, tears, frostbite to get some of these shots." She is not precious about her own comfort. She is genuinely, specifically impressed by the local hunters and outfitters who drove the gear up the hills so the shots could exist.