Spotlight

Amanda Crew: Driven to Act

It isn’t easy to act in a moving car. Ask Amanda Crew, star of this month’s teen comedy/road picture Sex Drive. The Langley, B.C., native plays Felicia, who accompanies her best friend Ian (Josh Zuckerman) on a cross-country drive so he can hook up with a woman he’s met online. The movie was shot in Florida, and Crew was excited about filming on the road.

"The first week was straight car shooting, and at first I thought, ‘Cool, it’s going to be so awesome,’” says Crew on the line from L.A., “and by the end it was like, ‘Get me out of this car.’ It’s not easy to act in a car, as weird as that sounds. You have only a certain stretch of road to do a scene, so we’d do four takes without cutting and you’re talking to a director through a walkie-talkie and he would yell, ‘Do it again, but this time do this...’ and it was like, ‘Aaahhh.’ The first couple of days were stressful, but fun.”

You might recognize Crew from her role as Carrie Miller in CTV’s Whistler, or from her breakout turn in the YTV series 15/Love. Not only was the show (which focused on teen tennis players) Crew’s first acting gig, she was hired to replace one of the two cast members who’d been killed in a car accident. Talk about pressure.

“It had only been two or three weeks,” she says, “and I’m coming into this family that had just lost two members. That was kind of intense on its own, and then going onto a set for the first time and people saying, ‘Okay, so you have to hit your mark here and you’re doing 10 pages of dialogue today.’

“It was really scary, but probably one of the best experiences of my life so far. I grew so much in that year. I was in Grade 12 at the time and I left school in September to film and came back to school in January, and I came back a completely different person.”