Leo Awards, Fairmont Hotel Vancouver, May 30 - June 1. For more information visit leoawards.com.
Children walk through the winding streets of Creston, B.C. as though drawn by the Pied Piper's song. They move toward the barn atop the Hutton acreage, but none of the children really see it.
They see the big top. Before Pascale Hutton won recurring roles on Arctic Air, Flashpoint and Fringe, she was a child of the circus.
On those days when it felt right to send in the clowns, Hutton's mother would spread the word through the neigbourhood and the neighbourhood would come.
Once inside the Hutton's barn, the children transformed into acrobats, ringmasters, and much to young Pascale Hutton's dismay, the king of the jungle.
"I was the lion, and I don't think I was that pleased about it," Hutton recalls, laughing.
A tightrope walker would dazzle the audience of parents by stepping across the two-by-four laid across the barn rafters by Hutton's father.
For the finale, the crowd was treated to a trapeze artist who'd do her best tricks while clinging to a piece of pipe hung on a length of rope, once more the work of Hutton's father.
"It sounds ridiculous to me that you would allow your child to do it, but. .. when I was 8 I got to be the trapeze artist," Hutton says.
Over weak and rotted out barn floorboards, Hutton would fly.
"I would sometimes do my big dismount and then my leg would go through the floor," she says.
The barn was eventually padded with mattresses which Hutton believes were claimed from the town dump.
"That sort of theatricality and performance was just always a part of my childhood," she says.
A veteran of living room plays including a starring turn in The Life and Death of Marie Antoinette, Hutton might have seemed fated for a career in character, but she didn't see it that way.
As she prepares to hand out hardware to the best in B.C. film and TV at the Leo Awards, Hutton reflects on how distant it all seemed from Creston.
"I was from a small town. Nobody was a professional actor," she says. "Honestly, it just didn't even occur to me that that was something that people did and could happen."
When it comes to escaping a small town, you can do as Meat Loaf suggested and hit the highway like a battering ram on a silver black phantom bike, or you can find a teacher who believes in you.
For Hutton, it was her Grade 10 drama teacher.
"She really opened my world in terms of what was possible and what I could do," Hutton says.
She took Hutton to theatre workshops in Edmonton and ultimately recommended she hone her skills in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Alberta.
Once enrolled, Hutton learned to speak the words of the bard trippingly on the tongue and of course practised walking across the room blindfolded with a bowl of water on her head.
"That is not a joke. That was a serious, serious and very earnest exercise that they made us do in theatre school, if you can believe it. We very earnestly, earnestly did it. One girl was so earnest in fact that when her bowl of water started spilling over she started crying," she says.
As more water spilled, the young actor's heartbreak intensified, causing even more spillage until the bowl crashed to the ground and the room erupted in laughter.
"So I'm a highly trained actor, obviously," Hutton says.
When asked about the purpose of the exercise, Hutton turns meditative.
"Ten years later we're all still trying to figure it out," she says.
Life after graduation proved challenging for Hutton.
"Every actor who comes out of theatre school goes through the very brutal realization that the world is not just waiting to hire you the second you graduate," she says. "I came out and I thought, 'Oh, every theatre company across Canada is going to be just itching to hire me for the lead in their big production that year,' and that was not the case."
After settling in Calgary, Hutton snagged a role in Hollywood Wives: The New Generation, a TV movie best known for not featuring pop singer Christina Aguilera.
It wasn't long before Hutton availed herself of the greater acting opportunities in Vancouver.
After a solid decade of bit parts in big movies like Fantastic Four and big parts in shows like Sanctuary, Hutton came to the attention of Leo Awards president Walter Daroshin.
"Walter called me. .. I saw that it was him and I didn't answer it 'cause I just had this feeling in my gut," Hutton remembers.
She sensed he wanted her to host the awards show.
"I had been there just the previous year where I saw Brent (Butt) and Nancy (Robertson) and they were very funny and very zany and wonderful comedians up there, and I thought 'If you're expecting that, I am the wrong person for this job.'" Daroshin assured her he wanted actors who were integrated in the community and able to bring "grace" to the evening.
Grace is often open to debate, but for an actor who can cross a room blindfolded with a bowl of water on her head, it's indisputable.
