It can read like a head-scratching equation to people on the outside of the film industry, but it’s almost always true: the scarier a horror film is on the big screen, the more fun it was for cast and crew to shoot.
This equation holds up in the case of locally shot horror feature Residue, according to Taylor Hickson.
The Kelowna-born actress plays the estranged teenage daughter of Luke Harding (portrayed by James Clayton), a world-weary private investigator who takes a job from a crime lord and ends up accidentally unleashing the evil contained in a possessed book. Soon, Luke’s got the mob on his tail and a murderous dark power taking root in his apartment (located in the iconic 2400 Motel on Kingsway) at the very moment his headstrong daughter Angelina (Hickson) shows up for an extended visit.
On-screen, Residue is high-stakes genre cinema – a gritty hybrid of action-drama, supernatural horror, and future-noir – but life on the set was pretty much the polar opposite, says Hickson, who traces the fun-factor back to writer-director Rusty Nixon.
“He’d sprint to the monitors for playback after wrapping a scene, and his eyes would get so big, and he’d rub his hands together and he’s got this giant smile, and he’d say, ‘Yes, we got it!’” Hickson recalls in a recent phone interview. “It was so cool to see how much passion he pours into the art he makes.”
Residue – which shot around Vancouver and also stars Elysia Rotaru, Orphan Black’s Matt Frewer, Dan Payne, Costas Mandylor, Michael Matic, and William B. Davis (otherwise known as The Cigarette-Smoking Man of X-Files fame) – had its Vancouver theatrical premiere at The Rio Theatre earlier this month and hits VOD and iTunes this week.
Angelina was a meaty role for Hickson, 19, and even more impressive when you consider that Hickson only entered the film and television industry a couple of years ago. “A lot of actors get started in early childhood, but I didn’t get serious about acting until quite a late age,” she says. When Hickson was eight years old, her mom had tried to get her into the biz after she’d shown a proclivity for performing in a children’s dance class. They spent a few months driving back and forth – between Vancouver and Kelowna for commercial auditions – four hours each way. “I was eight so of course I was exhausted by the time I got to every audition and she’d have to bribe me with McDonald’s to do it,” Hickson recalls. “That didn’t last long.”
Despite her late start, Hickson’s more than made up for lost time: Her first on-camera role was a non-speaking part in 2015’s Blackway, which starred Sir Anthony Hopkins – and shortly thereafter, she booked her first speaking role: Meghan Orlovsky in Deadpool, a young woman who hires Ryan Reynolds’ Merc with a Mouth to intimidate her stalker ex-boyfriend (the film currently holds the record for highest-grossing R-rated film of all time).
“I didn’t know what Deadpool was when I booked it,” says Hickson, who also co-starred on SyFy’s post-apocalyptic series Aftermath. She didn’t know who Sir Anthony Hopkins was when she booked Blackway either. She attributes these gaps in her pop culture knowledge to the fact that she “grew up a music nerd. I only watched music documentaries, so I’d never seen any classics. I’m still playing catch-up.”
But Hickson found a true-blue passion for acting and a home in the biz when, at 16 years old, a family friend who recognized her raw talent facilitated a meeting with a Vancouver agent. After reading a scene for this agent wherein a girl fought with her mom (“I thought, ‘Well, this is easy, I do this every day!’”), the agent was eager to sign her on the spot. “He said, ‘I want to sign you today,’ and I said, ‘How much does it cost?’ And he’s like, ‘That’s fraud; it doesn’t cost anything, we get paid when you get paid.’”
Every project brings new lessons for Hickson, both about her own abilities and how the industry works. On Residue, Hickson received a crash-course in “insane full-head prosthetics. I didn’t think I was claustrophobic until they had me in that chair suffocating in rubber. It was all brand new territory for me.”
It hasn’t all been Mercs and happy sets and smooth-sailing, though: an on-set accident in 2016 left her with a nine-centimetre scar on her face, and because of that accident, Hickson says she lost a couple of high-profile jobs. “I’ve had a lot of reasons to walk away, but I want to keep doing it, and I hope the me five years from now would tell that to the me speaking today,” she says.
She’s currently filming an indie feature out east, and writing new music whenever the inspiration finds her. “I’m having the time of my life, and I want to stick with it.”
Residue hits VOD and iTunes on July 18. Follow @TaylorHickson and @residuefilm
