“I was a struggling actor for years. Then I blew up on YouTube overnight”

In 2008, when I was 18, I decided I wanted to become an actor. I’d been the improv captain at my high school and acted in school plays, and I loved the idea of creating things that made people laugh. So I turned down an engineering scholarship and moved from Calgary to Toronto to go to acting school. Engineering sounded like a more sensible route, but acting was my passion. When I told my parents, both accountants, that I wanted to pursue the arts, my mother said, “If you think you’ll love it every day, that’s what you should do.”

I completed an acting degree at York University, found an agent and started auditioning. When I was 21, I landed my first paid industry gig, as an actor for a non-televised interrogation competition for lawyers. I made $110 and used the money to buy a Tiffany’s bracelet to commemorate the moment. To me, it was huge. I didn’t need to become famous; I just wanted to make a living as an artist. 

For a while, that gig was an anomaly. I couldn’t seem to get my foot in the door. I auditioned once or twice a week, usually for one-liners in shows like Rookie Blue or Suits. Months of fruitless auditioning turned into years. I would study each role, present myself in front of casting directors and respond to prompts like Show us your hands. How much do you weigh? How old are you? Then I’d wait for callbacks that never came. I had a good agent, but he eventually dropped me, saying it wasn’t working out. I thought, He’s not wrong. But it hurt.

Still desperate to make it, I enrolled in expensive acting classes, which I funded by moonlighting as a customer service rep at the now-defunct Nike store in Yorkville and a bartender at Scallywags at Yonge and St. Clair. I worked long hours—easily more than 40 per week—yet money was tight. In university, I’d saved on rent by living in an apartment building at Jane and Finch with a bad cockroach infestation. Then I moved into a mouldy basement in Forest Hill Village that was so damp my bedsheets were constantly wet. Meanwhile, I stashed all my cash tips in my freezer and put them toward more acting classes. 

By 2014, I’d run out of money for classes and was feeling disheartened. But I refused to quit; I believed that I’d eventually find a way to break through and make a living doing what I loved. Around that time, I started dating my now-husband, Samuel Larson, a director who was also struggling to find work. We thought, If nobody will hire us, maybe there’s something we can make together. “YouTuber” was not a common term at the time, let alone a career. The platform had yet to roll out a robust payment structure for creators. Still, I started making food videos with a sketch comedy element and uploading them to the platform. It gave me an opportunity to practise acting, producing and writing. There was a stigma in the acting world about being a YouTube creator because it signalled that you couldn’t make it in the traditional way. But I didn’t care: I was banking on the off-chance that one of my videos would grab a casting director’s attention. 

Sam and I made videos every week, with him behind the camera and me in front of it. An early video that people loved was my rendition of a passive-aggressive yoga instructor. I also created a character with a 10-second memory who attempts to host a cooking show that inevitably goes off the rails. The channel wasn’t lucrative; we made just enough in ad revenue to sustain it. To supplement our income, I got a corporate job at a private equity association, and Sam worked for a video production company that filmed commercials. We also took on a variety of other video projects, some originals and some for brands. It was an exhausting few years. We’d both work eight- or nine-hour days, then film videos and respond to comments in the evening.

By 2016, we’d landed enough creative work to quit our day jobs. We spent the next two years posting at least one video a week and growing our channel to 50,000 subscribers. We branched into cooking and food shows again for a while because there was a market for it, but my heart wasn’t in it. By 2019, we’d switched back to sketch comedy, but the audience we had built wanted cooking videos, so our views went from more than 4,000 per video to fewer than 1,000. It was demoralizing, but I was determined to find something that would stick.

In April of 2020, we caught a  huge break. In our series “Explaining the Pandemic to My Past Self,” I tell a pre-pandemic version of myself what’s in store for the spring. We thought the concept would resonate because most people’s lives had changed drastically in the span of a few months. To date, the video has more than 21 million views. The reception floored us, because making it had been like tap dancing through laser beams. I was thinking, How can I bring comedy into a situation where people are losing their jobs and even their lives? I was stepping outside of my comfort zone, addressing serious themes like illness, racial injustice and vaccine hesitancy. But I think the video caught hold because people were looking for something to make them laugh. We created a series of sketches with the same premise and recorded six more videos.

That series catapulted the channel to a new level of visibility: we shot up from 50,000 subscribers to 700,000 in just nine months. People came for the pandemic videos and stayed for the dozens of sketches we had previously released. I didn’t know what going viral would be like, but it felt amazing. Our videos received thousands of comments, most of them positive. Knowing that so many people were watching added some pressure, but I didn’t mind; I felt like my work was finally reaching a larger audience.  

Eventually, our channel became a springboard to working in film and television. Someone from the CBC reached out and asked me to write for a not-yet-green-lit show that eventually became Run the Burbs. When the show got picked up, I auditioned for—and booked—the role of Sam. It was a full-circle moment, and it made me realize that the perception around YouTube was changing. Now, casting directors want to hire actors who already have audiences because it brings more attention to their shows. That exposure completely transformed my financial reality: as a member of the YouTube Partner Program, I earn a percentage of ad revenue from my videos. In the early days of the program, I was getting monthly cheques for $50. Now, they help me support my family and pay the costs of running my channel, like working with an editor.

All of that allowed us to build a new life. Last year, we bought a house in Dovercourt Village. We also had our first child, and I was able to take maternity leave without feeling the pressure to keep working. Our channel has become a real business: an incorporated company with accountants, taxes and overhead. The content is very much the same—funny sketches on relatable topics, like remembering strangers’ names and the perils of having kids. But there is now a relentless schedule behind it, including  writing, scheduling, shooting and editing. Currently, I’m putting in slightly reduced maternity hours—at least four hours per day, seven days a week. Sam is balancing the channel with making branded content and commercials for the CBC. Together, we release one video every Thursday. 

I’m encouraged by how the culture is shifting around online creators. Breaking into traditional acting is incredibly tough—only five people in my graduating class at York, which started with 100, are working actors. The industry is dealing with an impending Canadian writers strike. Actors are locked out of commercials because unions can’t come up with fair agreements. It’s forcing many talented Canadian actors to leave for the United States because they can’t make a living here. I’m glad that my channel allowed me to stay in Toronto and tell Canadian stories. A few years ago, my husband and I made a short film called Oil Men that’s based on my family’s complicated relationship with the oil-and-gas industry.

I’m grateful that I didn’t give up on myself when times were challenging and it felt like every door was closing on me. I don’t think I’ll have to work at a bar or a shoe store ever again. Making my own content was always the dream—I just needed time to realize it.