Sonja Bennett’s big trip to Preggoland

Interview: The Vancouver-based actress says she turned to writing to kickstart her acting career, but found a whole new passion for putting words on the page when she started to explore society’s ‘bizarre’ worship of breeding

By Katherine Monk

VANCOUVER – “I was turning into the actress cliché,” says BC actor Sonja Bennett, offering up a full confession of her life before Preggoland, the new movie from Jacob Tierney that she not only wrote, but also stars in alongside James Caan and Danny Trejo.

“I could feel myself becoming very ungrounded. I was spinning and was feeling all these things that I never felt before – like jealousy towards my peers, and I thought: Oh god. I can’t be that person. Yet I am turning into that person.”

Before she was overwhelmed by self-loathing, Bennett did something drastic: She stopped. Putting a halt to the career she’d spent the last decade building since her breakout performance in 2002’s Punch, written and directed by her father Guy Bennett, she decided to rearrange her entire life plan.

“I went back to UBC to study psychology. I just needed to change the channel. And I love my kids, but I knew just being at home with them wasn’t going to make me happy. It wouldn’t be enough, so I need to have a profession, and if it’s not in the entertainment industry, then something else because if I can’t get acting jobs anymore, I’m not getting a job at Cactus Club.” Bennett says there’s nothing wrong with service industry jobs, or any form of work. The point was she had little training, and there was a level of entertainment industry addiction to contend with.

“I had a hard time disentangling my success in the industry with my success as a human being. And that wasn’t easy…. I asked myself what am I going to do? I have no skills. I’m not making a living anymore. More importantly, I wasn’t happy. But as soon as I went back to school, it was like you know what? Do I want to be a movie star? Yes, but can I have an amazing, happy life doing something completely unrelated? Yes!”

Bennett says when she realized she could be content doing something entirely different, she found the perspective she needed to breathe again, and find joy. Not surprisingly, along with happiness came creative energy.

She started to write. “At first it was a vehicle for myself, to help my ailing career, but the beauty of it was, I fell in love with writing along the way.”

She says the idea for Preggoland was something that struck her while she was pregnant with her first child. “I saw how people treat you like a goddess when you’re pregnant, and it’s ridiculous, because the only thing you’ve done up to that point is have sex.”

Still, Bennett found herself enjoying the pampering and soon, she felt the stir of internal conflict. It was the golden nugget of truth and the dramatic dilemma she needed to create the character of Ruth – the 35-year-old screw-up sitting at the centre of Preggoland,  Bennett’s first stab at the double shingle of screenwriter-actor.

“The idea was a little bit strategic from a business point of view because I had many ideas, and not all of them were comedic. But I have watched so many of my talented friends make movies that didn’t get seen. So I filtered my concepts asking: is this commercially viable?”

Bennett says she and producer Kevin Eastwood also took the pages down to Los Angeles for feedback, and that’s when she really realized how deeply ingrained our culture’s baby worship was. Though Bennett had never even heard of Meghan Daum’s bestseller, Selfish Shallow and Self-Absorbed, she did see how judgmental some women with kids could be about women who were childless.

“The mommy club is a giant clique,” she says. “That was the other side of my journey. I am a complete introvert.  I have always had a hard time making friends, especially female friends. I never found it easy to move from the banter of being on the elliptical to hanging out as friends. So after my college friends drifted away, I found myself underfriended,” she says.

“I was really missing that, and there was this one day when I was on the bus and there was another woman who was pregnant on the bus, and we started talking about due dates and stuff…which is easy. But then she grabbed my phone and stuck her number in there and said we’ll do playdates and I was like, this is so easy, but it’s all surface.”

Bennett says after a while “it started to feel icky.” She didn’t want to lead a life where all conversation revolved around potty training and teething and schools.

“I think for some women, being a mother provides a sense of self-importance they might not otherwise possess because people say being a mom is ‘the most important job in the world’ – so we need to have this conversation, because what about the women who don’t have kids?”

In Preggoland, the central character is so desperate for a sense of female belonging, she fakes pregnancy, and walks around with a towel under her clothes for months because for the first time in years, people are being kind and thoughtful around her.

“It’s ridiculous,” she says. “But it’s real.”

Bennett says the notes she got from L.A. only proved how deep the vein of mommy worship runs. “They wanted the coda of the film for Ruth to be pregnant at the end,” sighs Bennett.

She couldn’t do it. But to appease them, she left the ending ambiguous until Jacob Tierney (The Trotsky) read it, and insisted she stick to her guns, and the character’s truth, by allowing childlessness to be a happy ending.

“I can’t say enough good things about Jacob,” says Bennett. “He did such a great job… I was the one who was having trouble… I had a hard time remembering my lines, even though I had written them, which really proves writing and acting use different parts of the brain. It’s so bizarre.”

Bennett says she’ll keep doing it because she likes having some control over her life, and the work. Currently developing a few TV series ideas as well as more feature scripts, Bennett says she’s just happy to be on the ride right now.

“I know that me starring in Preggoland was the biggest challenge in getting it made, but we’ll see how it does at the end of its journey, and continue from there.”

Preggoland opens in Toronto and Vancouver May 1. Sonja Bennett will be in attendance at the 8:05 show at Vancouver Cineplex International Village on May 2nd for a Q&A.

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