Post City Magazines 3/08: Amy Lalonde (Britney Zadora)

Amy Lalonde: How the area’s hottest new star turned a career in modelling into horror film glory and a hit TV show on ABC
by Adam Nayman

YOU KNOW HOW it is: you sit down with someone to discuss her breakout role in the latest installment of a venerable, gore-splattered zombie franchise and you wind up discussing her career as a teacher at an inner-city high school in Auckland, New Zealand.

“I like to flitter about,” says Amy Lalonde, and she’s not kidding. The 32- year-old long-time Yonge and St. Clair resident has taken a circuitous route toward stardom.
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Eventually, she got her chance, though it was, by her own admission, something of an inauspicious debut. “I was channel flipping the other day, and I caught the episode of Mutant X, where I had my first role,” she says sheepishly. “I was a nanobot Stepford wife clone.”

Not exactly a part to show off a full range of dramatic skills, but Lalonde was thrilled. “It was my first time onset, and I’ll never forget how ecstatic I was,” she says. “All the veteran actors around me were telling me, ‘Never lose that.’” A couple of years and many, many gigs later, Lalonde says she understands where they were coming from. “I will admit that there’s been a bit of a shift,” she continues. “I’ve accepted that it’s work. There are some days when I’m exhausted, when I never want to get on a plane ever again, when I realize that I’ve been living in hotels and at the airport for weeks on end. Then I stop and remind myself of the times before, when I was pounding the pavement to get a role as the nanobot clone with three lines.”

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