Although it’s been years since Alexia Fast attended Doncaster Elementary School as a French immersion student, she says Victoria still has a magical hold on her.
The Vancouver-based actor found herself in a nostalgic mood during a return visit to shoot scenes for The Ninth Passenger.
“I have thought about moving back. It’s just so beautiful here,” said Fast, 23, brushing her windswept hair aside at Cattle Point.
In The Ninth Passenger, she plays Jess, a socially conscious young woman who teams up with an adventurer (Jesse Metcalfe) to expose corporate malfeasance during a party cruise.
Fast was about to shoot one of the thriller’s opening scenes with Cinta Laura Kiehl, the German-Indonesian actor and singer who plays her best friend Nicole.
The young women would soon be gleefully anticipating the big voyage on camera, explained Corey Large (It Follows), the film’s Victoria-born producer and co-screenwriter.
What begins as an idyllic excursion for the film’s young cast becomes a nightmare when a mysterious ninth passenger comes aboard after their luxury yacht drifts toward a dark island.
“I kind of become like Nancy Drew on the boat,” explains Fast, who describes her character as “the serious one,” in contrast to Nicole, who, like Kiehl herself, “is really bubbly and fun.”
While most of the passengers are party animals, Jess is an activist “trying to fight against corporations doing shady things like polluting and animal testing,” she said.
This isn’t the first time Fast has played a serious character in a movie with a Victoria connection or in one filmed here.
She made her feature debut in Victoria-raised filmmaker Andrew Currie’s 2006 zombie satire Fido, and played Ryan Reynolds’ missing daughter in Atom Egoyan’s 2014 drama The Captive.
“That was a delicate role, so I felt a responsibility to tell that character’s story in a reasonable way, because it happened to people in real life,” said Fast, whose character is held captive by a pedophile.
“Atom is such a nice guy with such a strong vision,” she said. “He is direct and communicates well and knows what he wants and gets it really quickly.”
Despite the dark material, they laughed a lot, said Egoyan, who was impressed with Fast’s musical skills — her father, a musician, coached her on how to play the keyboard.
“She’s very talented and she’ll go far,” said Egoyan.
In The Party Never Stops: Diary of a Binge Drinker, a 2007 Lifetime drama filmed here, Fast played a concerned adolescent who discovers her sister (Sara Paxton) is a binge-drinker.
“I’m a lot more introverted and serious than the extroverted actors I meet,” Fast admits. “So when it comes to fitting in, sometimes I do feel a bit different.”
She said her own experiences being an outsider inspired her to appear in Jason Buxton’s tense 2012 drama Blackbird.
Fast played Deanna, a pretty and popular high-schooler whose fondness for Sean (Connor Jessup), a bullied goth loner falsely accused of plotting a Columbine-style attack, ignites tension.
“I was 17 then, and I was bullied so much at school,” she recalled. “So it was fun to express myself that way and take a stand against that.”
Since her career began at age seven, when she wrote, directed and starred in the short film The Red Bridge, Fast has often gravitated toward darker material.
“I had a dark side to my personality, I guess, and it affected the characters I related to,” said the actor, who also worked with the late Cory Monteith (“a really nice, good person”) on the MTV series Kaya.
“I tend to take it role by role, but usually my characters mirror who I was at that stage in my life, so with this [Ninth Passenger] role, I’ve kind of grown into a more serious side of myself. It suited me.”
Fast admits that she could even relate to her damaged-goods character in 2012’s Jack Reacher — Sandy, an auto-parts-store worker whose attempt to pick up Tom Cruise’s character sparks trouble.
“My character was sexy and naive and didn’t have the best judgment, and that is actually what I was like at that age,” she said. “I, too, wore tight-fitting clothes and I was into the boys, but I was also naive and had that vulnerability.”
Describing Cruise as “one of the nicest actors I’ve ever met,” she said he was considerate and concerned about her welfare and made her feel comfortable.
“He’s really passionate and has so much energy and brought so much enthusiasm to set every day, even the 16-hour days,” she said.
“He had this amazing coffee truck where the guy would make anything you wanted, like lavender hot chocolate,” she said.
Despite online speculation, don’t expect to see her in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back this fall.
“I was like, ‘But I’m dead!’ ” she said with a laugh. “It’s not a sci-fi movie. I’m not coming back from the dead.”
