‘Virgin River’ star Kandyse McClure thrives in chasing challenges, but had to rebuild trust in herself after damaging guidance
From romance dramas like Virgin River, to supernatural thrillers like Hemlock Grove, and beloved franchises like Battlestar Galactica, actor Kandyse McClure can do it all. Born in South Africa before moving to Vancouver, McClure is a captivating presence on screen with a career spanning more than 25 years.
McClure comes from a family of academics, and her path to acting was quite organic, as she moved from one opportunity to another. But it was when she was doing a Fringe play that she really felt that connection to performing and was inspired by the collaborative nature of the art form.
“When I was doing the Fringe play, Valley Song, that was really my first piece of acting, … and it was just very challenging. And part of that challenge I really enjoyed. It drives my mother crazy, but I really like doing hard things, especially when I’m just completely out of my element,” McClure told Yahoo Canada. “There’s this moment in the play, it’s a two-hander, the character, Veronica, she’s imagining that she’s on a stage, and she’s describing the beautiful dress that she has and the cameras, and she starts to command the audience. And it’s kind of a moment in the play that could go either way, depending on where the audience is, because we incite them to clap and participate and say her name. And it doesn’t always work.”
“But this particular night, and it was our first week of the play, we had a full house, and the moment came, and I remember I closed my eyes, … the audience started clapping and saying her name. Now, the next part of this that’s so crucial is that she stops them as though she’s this diva on stage. … It was so loud in the theatre and then … you could hear a pin drop. And I thought, wow, I have people’s attention. Not me, Kandyse, but these words. This is the emotional ride that we are taking these people on. They are completely here with us. They’re absolutely present, so much so that they responded just like that. And I thought, this is an incredibly powerful medium, to hold people’s attention like that and to get them to change the way that they feel about something, and to look outward, not be so self-involved, but be so involved in something else, outside of them. And that really, really caught my attention.”
But as accomplished as McClure is, she said it took “a solid 10 years” to reach the point where she could say, “I’m an actor.”
“I kept promising my family I was going to go back to school,” McClure said.
“Actor’s such a loaded word sometimes, and people have so many feelings about it, and I was a bit shy about that for a long time, but I don’t think I can escape it now.”
Higher Ground — 2000
Going back to the 2000s, McClure starred in the series Higher Ground, with Hayden Christensen, Joe Lando, Jewel Staite, A.J. Cook, Jorge Vargas, Meghan Ory and Kyle Downes, which followed this group of students at a school for troubled teens.
McClure said being on the show was a real “training ground” for her, and specifically a project where she learned about different approaches to acting.
“Hayden was very method, … and a sweetheart,” McClure recalled. “Jewel is just so easeful and so irreverent. … And everybody was doing such incredible things. Meghan Ory was in school, literally still doing schoolwork in between takes as we were shooting this show, and I couldn’t wrap my head around how she was doing that.”
“It was also an incredibly immersive show, because we were all together all the time, even our trailer, it was one big trailer with little rooms. So it was like a dorm room, … we were always going in and out of each other’s rooms, reading scripts together. And then the built set, we had a physical built set that was the school, we had a studio to do the interior shots, but even that, it was the whole studio. … I just remember the world-building aspect of it and the different approaches to the work. And I learned a lot.”
But McClure also remembers being “very cold” while filming many moments in that series.
“I remember that time where they put me in the lake. … I remember because it was like November, and they were like to, like, ‘Get in the lake.’ But they’re all in dry suits. I’m in this bathing suit,” she said.
While we’re in the era of a lot of reboots and revivals, McClure believes Higher Ground is something deserving of a comeback, but also recalled that part of the show not continuing past the one season is because Christensen was going into the Star Wars franchise, he was testing for the role of Anakin Skywalker while shooting Higher Ground.
Battlestar Galactica — 2003 to 2009
McClure also famously played Dualla in the beloved Battlestar Galactica, but while she’s so fantastic on that show, she’s never actually watched the entire series.
“I do want to watch it now, because I think I’ve created enough emotional distance from it,” McClure said. “Every time you walked onto set was consequential. Every single time. There were no throwaway scenes, throwaway days; everything was really high-stakes in that environment all the time. Not in an unpleasant way, but just in an incredibly intense way. And my 24, 23-year-old self was just like, no, I’m not doing this twice.”
“When I left, I was just broken-hearted, I think is the best way to put it. You live with people. You’re with them every day. We spend our off times together. … I think I just really needed that separation, and then I just never got back around to it.”
But McClure does have a moment when she really understood the fandom around the series, after feeling particularly “insulated” while filming the show in Canada.
“Tahmoh [Penikett], Alonso [Oyarzun] and I drove to Los Angeles to participate in the press junket, and it was the first season, so we’re all still broke, because we’re new Canadian actors and they just didn’t pay us that much in the beginning,” McClure recalled. “And so we all went down, and we split a hotel room. I will never forget this. We got a two-bed hotel room, and the boys slept together, and they gave me the [other] bed. … But we drove into L.A. and we saw on Sunset Boulevard, where they announced all the big new shows, here’s this massive Battlestar Galactica ad. And we were like, oh, this is a big deal. This is a huge deal. That was kind of the first inkling, but I still get recognized from that show all the time.”
While McClure was a fan favourite on Battlestar Galactica, she was also going through a traumatic experience, taking acting classes with a teacher “damaging” actors. McClure shared that the experience led her to distrust her instincts.
“The most intense time that I was in that class was when I was on Battlestar, and I think that is also part of the reason I needed to kind of take some time after Battlestar and just really kind of step away from all of that work. Because I was being told that my instincts weren’t good, and that anything that I was … doing on television was just absolute garbage,” McClure shared.
“I had to take some time and really uncouple myself from a lot of those thought patterns. … There’s nothing worse than hesitation on camera. There’s nothing worse than not being able to act on your instincts immediately. … That’s what I think was most damaged in me by that, was that I constantly was looking outside of myself for that validation about whether or not I could continue in my career. … I had to go to therapy, honestly. I had to figure it out, and I had to rebuild trust in myself.”
But part of McClure’s healing also came when she saw this person perform, and McClure didn’t enjoy it, at all.
“That really clicked for me, because I was just like, why would I continue to listen to the advice or the mentorship of somebody whose process I don’t respect, and whose work I don’t enjoy?” McClure said.
“Now I will say that part of what kept me in that class was the other actors, was being able to do scenes with those other actors. And I’m glad that so many of us are still in the business, and so many of them are still my friends, and we can commiserate on what we went through.”
Hemlock Grove — 2013
Another must-see performance from McClure is in the series Hemlock Grove, which also stars Bill Skarsgård and Landon Liboiron. McClure played Clementine Chasseur, and the actor shared that the physicality of her character was something she really learned from.
“So much of that for me was physicality in a lot of ways, and just really knowing the words,” McClure said. “That was a real exercise in privacy as well. A lot of my preparation was the sense of privacy, because she is such a together in public and falls apart in private kind of person.”
“I think part of the reason I actually booked that role is I actually did most of that audition with my back to the camera. … I just really chose those moments when I turned around and looked at [Landon]. … Oh god, and then she gets flayed, it was intense. That scene was crazy because I couldn’t move, and we were in this giant abandoned warehouse. I’m lying on concrete, and I was just really trying not to shiver. So much of my career is being cold.”
Heritage Minute: Viola Desmond — 2016
While McClure has portrayed so many incredible characters, playing Viola Desmond in a 2016 Heritage Minute had a significant impact on her, inspiring McClure to create her own project around the life of this legendary Canadian civil rights activist.
“Right now, we’re putting together a podcast. … We’ve got a pitch together right now. I’m working on episode scripts. I’m hopefully going to record a first episode just as a demo so we can take that in,” McClure shared. “If we don’t get it picked up somewhere, I’m really probably just going to produce it myself and learn that way.”
“I continue to learn things, and I think maybe the timing will just be right when it happens. Because, … under the current climate, there are all these things that are looking different, the perspective on it is changing for me, particularly as this is a young woman in post-war North America, and there’s a lot of feeling of possibility, both in race relations and economically. … And also just the mechanisms of power that are showing up. … But again, this really personal interior perspective of this woman, that’s been the challenge. So I’m working on it.”
Virgin River — 2023 to 2026
A show that continues to be a favourite, Netflix’s Virgin River, and Season 7 allowed the audience to fall even deeper in love with the relationship between McClure’s character, Kaia, and Colin Lawrence’s Preacher.
“Colin and I have built up a lot of trust. … We can rely on each other quite a bit, and we do in the process,” McClure said. “I do continue to drive him crazy. I absolutely do, because I will never do the same thing twice, and he really likes to plan things out. But … I think we’re rubbing off on each other, because I’ll have some ideas and I’ll kind of calm things down a little bit, but he’s also been taking some risks … and going outside himself a bit.”
“I have an incredible amount of respect for Colin, for the man that he is, for the husband and the father that he is, and I think it’s part of what he gives to Preacher, is that that real calm steadiness. Not to say that he isn’t a goof, because he absolutely is. I’ve got some BTS, I don’t think he’ll let me … post it. I really want to, because I say that to him all the time, … I don’t think people know how funny and goofy you are.”
But in Season 7, a highlight was a beautiful moment of friendship between Kaia and Benjamin Hollingsworth’s Brady, specifically when he was considering leaving Virgin River.
“I think the relationship between Kaia and Brady is one of the highlights of the season for me,” McClure said. “I love that they redeem each other in so many ways, that they both don’t experience each other’s history, that they come to each other kind of fresh, and this great representation of male and female relationship.”
“Ben Hollingsworth works with a lot of depth. He’s quite an intense person, beautifully. So I really love doing scenes with him, because he does always come with fresh perspective. He’s always really trying to push the boundaries. But when that camera turns on, he is so with you in that scene, and I think that’s what you’re picking up in that moment.”
“It’s him, really, in between takes going, ‘You good? Do you need anything from me? You want to try something different?’ He really seeks to meet me every time, … and to me, there’s just a great respect in that, that I really cherish.”
But something that’s always been great about Kaia in Virgin River is that, while she may not be working as a firefighter anymore, her sense of independence has never wavered.
“That was something discussed early on, particularly with our writers, that Kaia maintains that sense of herself,” McClure said. “Running into the fire may not be what she wants to do anymore, but that person who needs to be a part of a team, who needs to exercise leadership abilities, who needs to be somebody who helps, that part of her has to continue to stay, and she will always be autonomous.”