SERIES PREMIERE: CAPRICA

When and where: Friday night at 6 on Space

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The new sci-fi series Caprica has been eight months of fun and hard work for plain-speaking Vancouver actress Magda Apanowicz.

The Vancouver-filmed prequel series to the long-running Battlestar Galactica features the 24-year-old Apanowicz as a high-schooler caught between reality on the 1950s-style planet Caprica, and a virtual world where the spirit of her dead best friend still lives.

"I'm pretty exhausted," she said yesterday, a rare day off. The pilot showcased the Yaletown neighbourhood as the retro streetscape of Caprica City, but later episodes have put cast and crew on sound stages as the action shifts to a colony on another planet. Filming wraps Jan. 27, just five days after the pilot airs.

"We've been working like 14-, 15-hour days on top of each other," she says. "I went to bed before midnight last night and I got up around noon. They've been beating the crap out of me at work."

Apanowicz isn't complaining. She's part of an ensemble cast that includes Eric Stoltz, Esai Morales and Polly Walker, in stories that touch on such issues as racism, religion, science ethics, and the nature of the soul. The new show traces the origins of Galactica's running battle between humans and artificial entities called Cylons.

"I love sci-fi, the craziness of it and the reality of it, how it's based in truth and there's so many places to go with it."

The show hasn't left her a lot of time for her off-camera love of hard-core hiking, but she'll be thinking of work when she finally does hit the Squamish and North Shore trails again.

"It'll be nice to have a breath of fresh air, but my God, I'm going to miss working."

Apanowicz, a self-described high-school loner, has been busy ever since scoring her first role at age 16 as a traumatized teen on an episode of the post-apocalyptic series Jeremiah. Her parents immigrated to Canada from Poland just before she was born, and she went back there for a year to live with relatives in Grade 9.

"I quit school — I was sick of being picked on and made fun of all the time," she says. "I've always had a weird sense of humour. I didn't understand myself growing up, I didn't know how to fit in."

Her first clue about where she might fit in came at age 10, when her six-years-older brother introduced her to the movies of Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith. The 10-year-old Magda watched Pulp Fiction over and over again.

"I was like, I don't know what they're doing, but I want to do that," she recalls. "Pulp Fiction changed my life, the emotions it made me feel."

The year in Poland helped her learn more about herself, and when she came back to a new high school, Coquitlam's Centennial secondary, she found a place to belong in the theatre program. By 15 she had an agent, and on her 16th birthday she auditioned for Jeremiah, working alongside star Luke Perry.

"I knew nothing about the industry," she says. "I was so excited, I was like, I get to work with Luke Perry, I used to love watching 90210. He was such a nice guy on set and he could tell that I didn't know very much. He was trying to teach me some things."

Another supporting role in the horror move The Butterfly Effect left an impression on that movie's director, leading them to write a regular role for Apanowicz on the TV series Kyle XY, giving her two years' worth of episodes. Cancer survivor Andy on Kyle XY is Apanowicz's favourite role so far.

"Vivacious, quirky, weird, a really out-there sense of humour — the character was going to be called Magda, but they changed the name to Andy. Magda wasn't generic enough."

Which sounds like a motto for the kid who had trouble fitting in at school. Does she think she's fitting in now?

"I think that's happened over the years," she says. "I just feel like I'm in the right place when I'm at work. I get to be my crazy self. If I was in any other job, I wouldn't get to be me to this extent."

gschaefer@theprovince.com