CAN | Sarah Polley created an environment on the set of Women Talking that was different from most: you and the cast were supported emotionally and your work hours were humane. What was it like working on a set where everything was structured to respect everyone as collaborators and human beings?

SM ── Sarah’s philosophy of having a set that was kind to everybody was incredibly deliberate. And I think it stems from her needs. She has three young children, and I think she gave it a great deal of thought. She grew up on sets where that was not the case, and she was not particularly well-protected. Her book Run Towards the Danger is full of stories about her childhood gigs. She was very concerned with Women Talking being a set that collaborated with everybody. She was kind to parents and was sensitive to our working hours─enabling everybody to go home, put their children to sleep, and have good sleeps. She was so concerned that everybody be very careful with each other. She wanted to protect us because of the subject matter, but also have the luxury of time to shoot this movie.

It’s hard because I do a lot of low-budget stuff in Canada where time is money and there is no money, and it’s a very difficult thing to achieve. But Sarah did have a lot of support from people like Dede Gardner, the president of Plan B Entertainment, and Frances McDormand, who fully supported this notion of civilised shooting.

CAN | How does the subject matter of Women Talking relate to the experience of women in an America where the bodily autonomy of women is under siege? 

SM ── I heard this great quote that Bono said: “Art is the discovery of beauty in unexpected places.” And I think that when I think about Women Talking. Miriam Toews took the real story of a colony of women in Bolivia who were sexually assaulted and wrote about it, and the film Sarah Polley carved out of the book is one of hope. It’s the hope that by telling these stories, things can improve and awareness can grow. Maybe there will come a day when we don’t need stories like Women Talking, but we’re nowhere near that yet. On the world stage, a movie like Women Talking speaks volumes. I’m meeting tons of people now who have seen the movie — focus groups, gender study groups, and lay people — who are incredibly moved by this story and having conversations. They’re talking about Women Talking! And that’s a great first step. It’s a drop in the water.

Even though the movie takes place in a specific world of Mennonite women, and perhaps watching it you feel a bit distanced from your own experience, at the same time you can feel, “Oh my God, I’ve been there.” It’s not just for women, it’s for all genders. Anybody who has been at the hand of any kind of assault, whether it’s verbal or emotional, in the workplace or at home, the takeaway from this is tell your story. Speak out. Because it is just one story at a time, isn’t it?

CAN | What was your experience like of working in that kind of cloistered environment as an actor?

SM ── We were right in the thick of COVID and so there were restrictions: everybody was masked up in rehearsals and the crew were masked up the entire time. I never saw Sarah Polley’s face. And when I think about it now, it really gave a purity to working on this movie. I didn’t see anybody, and I was fine with that. I was alone, happily just mired in the story of the film. The isolation really fed us─we were all down the rabbit hole of this and nothing else.

CAN | How did you view your character Greta's role within the group?

SM ── There were two elders in the group, Agatha and Greta, and we were eight women. The two of us were elected to impart some empathy and patience, since there was some hotheadedness from the younger ones. We were the ones that bided our time in making the decision of what to do: to stay and fight? Stay and do nothing? Or leave? And my particular character, Greta, she had a lot of humour and rye storytelling that I just loved. Especially since we’re discussing such horrifying experiences that happened to all of us, and happened to our children, and our grandchildren as young as four─that we were all horse tranquilized and raped.

I think, for Greta, her crisis and her conflict with that is that she’s allowed her daughters to be at the hands of these men and not done anything about it. She enabled it. And that was my cross to bear, and Greta is apologizing for the very first time. We are women who are speaking about this for the very first time in our lives and it’s not easy. The denial’s been going on for years and years because one doesn’t talk about those things. It’s as if we think, “if I just make my bed after my rape then that will never have happened,” and we’ll just tuck it away and compartmentalize. To be an older woman and to have to come to terms with having denied my daughters and grandchildren a voice for so long, it’s pretty tough. You’re finally talking about it and there’s no going back.