Our culture has a strange, almost fetishistic, obsession with pregnancy.
When a “bump” pops out, a pregnant woman can suddenly find herself bombarded with unsolicited advice and chivalrous gestures, as well as an unspoken assumption from other mothers that she’s now prime BFF material.
It can be an overwhelming and jarring experience. For Sonja Bennett, it was creative fodder.
“When I was pregnant with my first, I was just shocked at how people treated me, like I was a goddess,” says the Vancouver actress in a recent phone interview. “That got me interested in the pregnancy pedestal.”
Hence Preggoland. The locally shot comedy – which Bennett wrote and also stars in – will have its hometown début at the 2014 Vancouver International Film Festival after premiering to rave reviews at Toronto’s film fest.
In Preggoland, Bennett is Ruth, a 30-something, hard partying, CeCe Peniston-loving grocery store cashier, and the only member of a group of high school friends who hasn’t embraced the marriage/kids paradigm.
After a couple of egregious blunders (one involving a dildo, the other a piñata and a kid’s face) at a baby shower, the friends decide to kick Ruth out of their group – until Ruth fakes a pregnancy, and finds herself in over her head as the toast of her clique.
Bennett had been working the local film and television scene for years – her lengthy credit list includes Godiva’s, Cold Squad, YPF, and Random Acts of Romance – when she realized she wasn’t enjoying her craft anymore.
“I remember once having an audition to play a possessed nurse or something, and I’m in the living room convulsing pretending to be possessed and my son, who was two at the time, looks up at me, and he’s like ‘What are you doing, mom?’ And I’m like, ‘That’s a really good question,’” she says.
“I didn’t want to do crap anymore, because as a mother, my time was valuable,” says Bennett. “I decided to only audition for really awesome things, and essentially all of those roles that I wanted went to movie stars, and I could feel myself starting to get jaded.”
So Bennett sat down to write the juicy role that she’d been craving, and Preggoland was (pun intended) born.
“The lucky accident is I fell in love with writing along the way,” says Bennett.
Come production time, it wasn’t difficult for Bennett to turn off the “writer” part of her brain and focus solely on acting, especially with The Trotsky director Jacob Tierney at the helm. “I was so relieved to not be in the driver’s seat, and just give the project over to Jacob, and be an actor,” she says.
The cast list reads like a who’s who of the Vancouver scene: Paul Campbell; Carrie Ruscheinsky; Laura Harris; Aliyah O’Brien.
It also features a couple of Hollywood icons in surprising roles: Danny Trejo (Machete) as a big-hearted store janitor who’s party to Ruth’s lie, and Godfather alum James Caan as Ruth’s dad.
“I felt like I had to just live in gratitude to them for being there, and neither of them would have it,” says Bennett. “Danny came up to me on his first day on set and gave me a hug and said, ‘Thank you so much for this part, in every movie I do, I kill people, so do you know how nice it is to come to work and not murder somebody?’”
As for Caan, Bennett says, “There is no denying it: When he’s on camera, the man is a movie star and you understand why. He is just magnetic.”
In the end, Preggoland doesn’t yield to rom-com tropes.
“It was very important to me that the message of this movie wasn’t, ‘When you’re grown up, you have to want children,’” says Bennett.
And Bennett’s been changed by her time in Preggoland.
“I was so happy when we were shooting this movie,” she says. “So I’m now going to let myself off the hook about this being something that’s a luxury for me to do, and I’m going to write and I’m going to act.”
Preggoland screens Sept. 30 at the Vancouver Playhouse and Oct. 2 at Cineplex Odeon International Village Cinemas. For showtimes and ticket information, visit VIFF.org.
