Local actress has blooming acting career.
Actress Meghan Heffern came to Toronto to film American Pie, then opted to move here and make her home in Toronto's west end Beaconsfield neighbourhood.
Photo/COURTESY
She is fashionable and has an affection for old movies, Trinity-Bellwoods Park, Toronto theatre and musicals.
Add to that a budding acting career and one might consider Meghan Heffern a classic Queen West persona.
Heffern is from a small town outside of Edmonton. It was when here family moved there, just before her high school years, that she said she found an interest in acting, an art she immediately loved and which would eventually bring her to Toronto.
"I didn't have a lot of friends and I didn't know a lot of people," she said. "I looked in the phone book for modeling agents and acting agents and I gave a list to my mom and told her that was what I wanted to do for the summer while I was bored."
She didn't like modeling at all, but Heffern said she really took to acting.
"My mom and I actually took acting classes together and she ended up getting booked in a bunch of commercials and I didn't get booked in anything until I was like 20."
A graduate of the Vancouver Academy of Dramatic Arts, Heffern moved to Toronto three years ago and now lives in the West Queen West neighbourhood of Beaconsfield.
"I came here to do American Pie and I just liked it here so I stayed," Heffern said. "I work more here."
Heffern is featured in Beta House, the sixth installment of the popular American Pie movie franchise, shot in Toronto and Hamilton.
In one of her latest projects, Heffern is featured alongside Liam Neeson in Atom Egoyan's newest work Chloe, which screened at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival and opens in theatres March 19.
Heffern, 26, plays Miranda, the university student suspected of having an affair with Neeson's character. His wife, played by Julianne Moore, hires a young woman to test her husband. The movie was shot at Cafe Diplomatico on College Street.
"I was excited to work with this really amazing director and then you add in Liam Neeson, who my scenes are with, and that was surreal," she said.
This fall, Heffern wrapped filming on the upcoming horror movie The Shrine in which she plays one of three journalists who travel to Poland to investigate the disappearance of a backpacker.
Heffern also plays the role of the head cheerleader in Spike TV's comedy series Blue Mountain State, which follows the antics of three college football players.
She said she has her fingers crossed for a second season with the show.