Order in the Court
A UCalgary Haskayne alumna is currently playing a hip young lawyer on Street Legal
By Deb Cummings
Remember standing in front of a mirror rockin’ out with your hairbrush? Or inventing plays in your bedroom with you as the star attorney, doctor or teacher? That childhood phase is often just that — a phase, one that typically gets mothballed.
Not always, however. A case in point is alumna Yvonne Chapman’s story that began in her Calgary home, decades ago, when the self-described “introverted child” played the part of lawyer in her stuffie-jammed bedroom. Today, Chapman, BComm’10, has gone public, performing before her biggest audience yet in the role of a crusading lawyer named Mina Lee on CBC’s reboot of the 1980s-90s drama, Street Legal.
Chapman’s career path has been many things, but never linear. Growing up as a second-generation Canadian, her parents valued a traditional route to law or medicine — precisely why she began her post-secondary education in biological sciences at UCalgary.
“After two years of struggling with chemistry and physics, I switched programs and went into business where I took finance,” explains Chapman, who now divides her time between Vancouver (where there’s more work in the film industry) and Calgary (where her husband and family live).
“People assume I hated corporate life, but they are very wrong,” says the Haskayne School of Business grad who went on to work as a corporate development strategist with mergers and acquisitions, first at Agrium and then at Secure Energy. “I really enjoyed that career and the freedom that comes with a good paycheque every two weeks.”
At the same time as she was toiling in finance, Chapman began taking acting classes, “just for fun” . . . remember, she had never had an audience outside of a room full of stuffies and toys. “I still thought I was too shy to ever pursue it as a career and then the words of a cab driver — a complete stranger — hit me in the gut and altered everything,” she says.
Chapman recalls she was chatting to the driver, en route to the airport, about being torn between her career in finance and acting, when he said: “‘Look . . . you can’t think about failure. With success, you never know.’ And he was right — I was already thinking about failure and how I probably wouldn’t be any good at it; how I was too old [Chapman got into acting at 27]; how I didn’t have enough experience; how I had a mortgage and a husband in Calgary.”
That little chitchat became pivotal for Chapman who, soon after, upped stakes, moved to Vancouver, hired an agent, enrolled in acting classes at Capilano College and began auditioning for anything and everything. After dozens of rejections, small roles tumbled her way from the TV series The Crossing to a feature film called Darc — but this is her first major role in anything so bright.
As for her Street Legal character, Mina Lee is “the perfect role as she’s like myself, but not,” says Chapman, explaining that Lee is “a little reserved, not looking to showboat,” and cares about her clients in a compassionate, highly principled way. The basic plot follows Lee’s boutique law practice (RDL Legal) on Queen Street which has launched a class-action lawsuit against Big Pharma’s deceptive marketing of widely prescribed and highly addictive opioids. Enter Olivia Novak (Cynthia Dale — fans will remember her from the original series), a partner in a large Bay Street law firm of hotshots that is also behind the class-action lawsuit, but RDL has beaten her to the punch and filed first.
Of course, there’s the expected friction and legal skirmishes between the young idealistic lawyers and the ruthless old guard, although Chapman isn’t saying much more, other than to add that her favourite episodes are numbers two and four.
Chapman’s character has layers beyond her legal skills. If you watch these two episodes very closely, you may notice some subtleties that suggest “Mina is part of the spectrum,” reveals Chapman, adding her research with the Autism Aspergers Friendship Society of Calgary where she spent time with experts and volunteered with kids, helped tremendously. “So many characteristics we associate with autism are male-centric, but how it is manifested in females is often very different,” she explains. “I wanted to show those nuances and differences in subtle ways. After all, it’s called a spectrum for good reason.”
Researching characters is one of the aspects of acting that Chapman adores most, alongside, what she says gives her life “a bit of balance” — a part-time job working with kids in an after-school program as well as tutoring. As we all can imagine, auditioning (on average, once a week) and managing rejections must be a grind.
“It is,” admits Chapman. “Which is why I suggest that people who are interested in pursuing acting find something else that they like doing. The first couple of years in Vancouver were all about acting for me. That’s all I did. It wasn’t optimal for my mental health and, really, I had no balance in my life.”
Balance and pursuing outside interests is one of Chapman’s regrets about her UCalgary years.
“I was so focused on academics, that I didn’t join any clubs or fill my time with things that gave me joy and balance,” she recalls. “I learned how to be disciplined, how to learn and how to work — all great things, but I could have had more fun.”
As for advice for those of us with secret passions who have yet to meet a cab driver full of sage advice, Chapman says, “It’s OK not to have your life all figured out when you graduate. And it’s definitely all right to go down another path like I did with finance — in fact, a bit of business acumen will help you in anything. Approaching acting with a different perspective and a skill set I can always fall back on has helped me. A lot.”