Actress Cobie Smulders poses at Bell Media Studios in Toronto on May 6.DUANE COLE/The Globe and Mail
Niagara Falls, one of Canada’s newest superheroes, walks into a drab room in Bell Media’s downtown Toronto headquarters looking, to use an old expression, like a tall drink of water.
Cobie Smulders – who voices this hydro-powered hero on Crave’s new animated show Super Team Canada – is dressed in a cream pant suit and high heels and her star presence is much too much for a small space normally used for HR meetings.
The Canadian-American actor’s powers, fictional and otherwise, are well deployed in this new series created by Calgary-born Hollywood comedy writers Robert Cohen and Joel H. Cohen (both The Simpsons veterans), which begins with all other superheroes, including the ones in the United States known as The Righteousness Club here, slaughtered by invading aliens.
Niagara Falls must band together with an egotistical hockey-puck shooting superhero named Breakaway voiced by Will Arnett, plus a super-jacked French-Canadian lumberjack named Poutine, a Hulk-esque prairie creature called Sasquatchewan, and a weather-controlling Inuit superhero named Chinook to save the planet. (The latter heroes are voiced by less household names, respectively, Charles Demers, Brian Drummond, Ceara Morgana).
“These are all underdogs who aren’t great at what they do and their superpowers are very questionable, but they have to band together to thwart these villains who are also questionable,” explains Smulders. “It’s poking fun at ourselves and the genre in general.”
It seems right that Smulders, whose career seamlessly straddles the border (her Canadian psychological thriller Sharp Corners is currently in theatres), is playing a character named after a natural feature that is world famous and flows between Canada and the United States.
Born in Vancouver and raised in White Rock, B.C., her original dream as a teenage girl was to work in this very building on Queen Street West. It was home to MuchMusic then and she yearned to be a VJ on a Canadian music channel.
“Jessi Cruickshank was a friend of mine growing up,” she says of the former MTV Canada host. “I was like, ‘I’m so happy for you, but that’s my dream, I’m so jealous.’”
Of course, Smulders went on to live a dream bigger by many magnitudes – breaking into Hollywood seriously 20 years ago by landing the role of reporter and one-time Canadian teen pop star Robin Scherbatsky in the long-running CBS sitcom How I Met Your Mother.
Since 2012’s The Avengers, Smulders has also been a part of the mega-blockbusting Marvel Cinematic Universe as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Maria Hill – in both live-action and animated form.
Cobie Smulders voices the main role of Niagara Falls in Crave TV’s upcoming animated series Super Team Canada.DUANE COLE/The Globe and Mail
So the 43-year-old mother of two with impeccable comic timing is far from new to the genre she’s spoofing or the cartoon voice-over business. “In Marvel, I was calling the superheroes – so it’s cool to be the one who arrives to save the day,” she says.
Smulders, like many Canadians celebrities based in L.A. (where her house burnt down in the recent wildfires), knows Super Team Canada Emmy-winning co-creator Robert Cohen from being part of his 2015 documentary Being Canadian.
It didn’t take much for him to sell Smulders, who recently bought property in B.C., and still votes in Canadian elections including the one last month, on participating.
“These shows are like a love letter to Canada,” says Smulders. “I’m sort of in the same generation as Rob and Joel and the references really hit home.”
Jokes about ketchup chips and hockey tickled her funny-bone – but Smulders was particularly attracted to an episode where an Anne of Green Gables Heritage Museum is attacked by a foreign invader.
The 1980s TV miniseries of Anne of Green Gables – Smulders calls it “the Megan Follows and Colleen Dewhurst production” – is very important to her.
She had the six VHS set as a kid, then upgraded to DVD copies and still watches them multiple times a year – when she gets sick or over the holidays.
Speaking of foreign invaders … While Super Team Canada, which has been in the works for years, was certainly not meant to be a parable for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s attempts to break down interprovincial trade barriers and resist the U.S. President’s exhortations to become the “51st State,” it is hard not to see it as such, as the Super Team Canada superheroes squabble among themselves before finally employing their powers together but separately as what they call “a mosaic” to fight off threats.
Whatever they may feel privately, however, it’s difficult to get Canadian Hollywood stars to say much on the record about any of these real-world Canadian issues – even when they’re playing superpowered Canucks in a show that starts by killing off all American superheroes, some impaled by the Statue of Liberty, turned upside down and used as a weapon.
Mike Myers, wearing a Canada’s Not For Sale shirt on Saturday Night Live, has been the noticeable exception.
On social media, a GIF of Smulders as Sparkles dancing in front of a giant maple leaf has become a meme used frequently in #ElbowsUP discussions. “I’m happy to be a meme,” she says, expressing her love of Canada while deftly dancing around saying anything more specific about threats of annexation.
As for Arnett, who also co-produces Super Team Canada through his company Electric Avenue, his team simply changed questions that I was invited to send over by e-mail for this piece to omit any of my references to how the show intersects with the issues of the day.
What I got back were answers to questions such as: “What would you like people to take away from the series?”
“I’d like them to take their frowns away and turn them into smiles,” Arnett responded to the latter.
To be clear, I don’t fault Arnett or Smulders or their personal teams for trying to steer them safely through genuinely politically dangerous times – but it is, of course, a reminder that actors aren’t necessarily what they play on television.