Jessica McLeod proved there’s no place like home last spring when she gave up a chance to fly to Los Angeles for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s Young Artist Awards after being nominated for her work in The Haunting Hour.
Instead, she focused on her performance as The Guard in Claremont Musical Theatre’s production of The Wizard of Oz.
A year later, she decided to put her promising screen career on hold again — this time to star as Elle Woods in Claremont’s production of the musical Legally Blonde, which opened this week.
“I really like the show. I just think it’s so funny, I love the part and I’d feel so bad leaving everyone in the lurch,” said the Grade 12 student, a natural blond and passionate devotee of the school’s Focus on Fine Arts program. “It just felt wrong to leave.”
Theatre instructor Colin Plant said he’s amazed at McLeod’s professionalism at such a young age, noting she’s put in more than 200 hours since September to prepare for the Reese Witherspoon role. He called her the kind of student a teacher only gets once or twice in a career. “Her ability to balance the rigour of being the lead in a show as well as being in a TV pilot that came together as quickly as it did is truly amazing.”
The dynamic young actor’s recent roles include Steven Weber’s daughter in the mini-series Eve of Destruction; a wisecracking teenager opposite David Hasselhoff in Lifetime’s The Christmas Consultant; and a young woman affected by a deadly weather anomaly in Stonados, Jason Bourque’s Boston-set disaster flick airing soon on Showcase. (Because of the Boston Marathon bombings, the film’s broadcast date has been delayed.)
McLeod, 16, was also featured in Christmas in Canaan, a Hallmark movie with Billy Ray Cyrus, and appeared with Benicio Del Toro in Things We Lost in the Fire. When she was a youngster, she played the schoolgirl reading My Pet Duck to Leslie Nielsen as the American president in a sequence lampooning George W. Bush’s delayed reaction to 9/11 terrorist threats in Scary Movie 4.
To meet her high school musical obligations, McLeod had decided she wouldn’t audition until May 10. Fate intervened, however, with an offer she couldn’t refuse — an invitation to audition for a plum role in Rita, Bravo’s pilot for a family drama produced by Fox TV Studios and starring Anna Gunn, the Emmy Award-winning actor who plays Skyler White in Breaking Bad.
Gunn plays an outspoken private-school teacher trying to cope with the challenges of raising three teenagers while dealing with overprotective parents and school bureaucracy.
McLeod, who wears a wig for Legally Blonde, became a redhead for her role in Rita as Kelsey Donovan, a feisty student “who goes toe-to-toe with Anna” in the dark series, which “is definitely not a kids’ show,” according to her mother, Teresa.
“We’ve been doing the Jessica shuffle,” laughed Teresa, who accompanied her daughter back and forth to Vancouver for six days of prep, including work with a dialect coach “to let her speak like someone who’s wealthy in Connecticut.”
McLeod said she welcomed the chance to play a character “I’ve never done before” and was attracted to a script that was so well-written and “super-funny,” yet also moving.
She said she felt blessed getting to work with “amazing” director Miguel Arteta (Cedar Rapids, Six Feet Under), writer Krista Vernoff (Grey’s Anatomy) and Gunn.
“I couldn’t believe my scenes with her,” McLeod said. “I tried to know my stuff and just put everything else aside. It’s easy when you’re in character as that super-annoying girl just not to think of anything else.”
It was hard work, but there were bonuses — as when Gunn’s Breaking Bad co-star Bryan Cranston, who was in Vancouver to shoot the Godzilla movie Nautilus, dropped by.
Arteta gave the young Victoria actor a thumbs-up.
“I loved working with Jessica,” he said. “She’s a really focused and talented actress. Her timing and restraint made her excel in every scene. I look forward to what she’s going to do.”
