Allegiance’s Supinder Wraich is a star, if Canada had any star system to speak of | Canada Voices

If there is a playbook for Canadian actors on how to succeed in the industry, then Supinder Wraich is following it to the letter.

The India-born, Toronto-raised actress has the educational background, having studied film and television at Sheridan College and acting at the Canadian Film Centre. She has the onscreen credits – graduating from bit roles in such genre series as The Strain and The Expanse into a lead role on CBC’s police drama Allegiance – as well as the behind-the-scenes bona fides, writing and producing a handful of short films as well as the web series The 410. And she has the awards hardware to back it all up, having recently won the 2025 Canadian Screen Award for Best Lead Performer (Drama Series) for her role as a rookie cop in Allegiance, which is now prepping its third season.

And yet, Wraich showed up to the Banff World Media Festival earlier this summer wondering what was going wrong. Not only in terms of her career, but the path of any Canadian actor who, from the outside, possessed all the hallmarks of a successful career.

During a Banff panel on how Canada might better promote homegrown film and television talent, Wraich became a surprise topic of discussion after one of the panelists, Reelworld Screen Institute founder Tonya Williams, noted how the actress was just one of the emerging stars that the domestic industry needed to support if there was any hope of Canada’s screen sector surviving.

At Banff World Media Festival, Canadian film and TV players push a new kind of star system

“Producers need to be braver. Supinder is here … producers should be developing her next show,” Williams told the crowd. “She is one of our Canadian stars, and she needs to be treated that way. But she’s told me stories about how her agents say, ‘Oh yeah, we don’t do that.’ So she’s on her own trying to make her show a hit.”

Wraich, who was in Banff to network but had no idea that she was about to be name-checked in front of the audience heavy with industry gatekeepers and power players, stood up afterward to address the room. After a few days of vaguely concerned handwringing over the film and TV industry’s many crises, it was a moment that landed like a brutal but essential reality check.

“The next day after I won the Canadian Screen Award, I called the [show’s] PR person, I called the reps, and asked, ‘So what happens the day after the awards? What are we doing?’ And it was, ‘I’m sorry to say, nothing.’ No interviews, no appearances, no press – crickets,” Wraich told the room. “If you want to be an actor, the industry tells you, go be a lead. Okay, done. Go win an award, done. But where are the growth opportunities?”

The question struck a chord with Banff attendees – including Wraich’s Canadian agent, who happened to be on the panel and who promised on-stage to have a sure-to-be-fun conversation with her afterward – but no one had an answer, either. If the Canadian screen industry, even in this current era of elbows-up patriotism, cannot find a way to promote one of its own rising stars, then what hope does anyone have?

A few weeks after the festival wrapped, Wraich was back in B.C., where the Surrey-set Allegiance is shot, and still trying to figure where she fit into the system – and what that system should even look like if it wants to avoid being swallowed whole by the American machine.

“As actors, we’re kind of siloed, but especially in Canada because the system doesn’t exist,” says the actress. “The fact is that we’ve lost so much of the support systems that we once had over the years, and quietly. Magazines, talk shows. I used to produce music videos and we used to have BravoFACT or the MuchMusic grant for emerging filmmakers to cut their teeth on. To see those things go by the wayside, you awaken to it when you’re at the forefront of something and expect something to happen. And then it doesn’t.”

Wraich says that Banff talk led to productive conversations with her U.S. agents and other players in the sector – and it’s not as if she lacks projects, with a short film based on an Emma Donoghue story having just wrapped, and a CBC Gem project that she plans to write and direct also in the works. But the actress believes that the reality for Canadian actors – perhaps since time immemorial, but especially today, when audience attention is fragmented to dizzying degrees and the war for eyeballs is based on an economy of scale that this country cannot hope to compete with – is that they simply have to become their own best advocates.

“I’m the person that’s going to be pushing this train forward, until hopefully one day I’m not,” she says. “Maybe some of it was my own fantasy that didn’t come to fruition the next morning. You get dressed up, you go to this thing, they call you by name, you give this speech and then the next day you wake up and you’re still yourself. You’re not in a castle, there’s no prince.”

Perhaps the reality hit Wraich especially hard given that she knows exactly what happens to a production when it is given the attention that it deserves. As the co-star of CBC’s sitcom Sort Of, Wraich got to witness first-hand the power of the U.S. media machine after the Canadian-produced show about a non-binary millennial (Bilal Baig) and their circle of friends was picked up by HBO Max in the United States. That led to a flood of positive press on both sides of the border, and the series winning a prestigious Peabody Award.

“We don’t have a creation problem, and Sort Of is such a great example, because we have the voices, we have the stories, we have the production companies,” she says. “The bump is in the marketing and awareness.”

Sort Of isn’t the only example. Myriad CBC productions – Schitt’s Creek, Kim’s Convenience, even this year’s North of North – have made genuine household stars out of their Canadian casts. When, that is, they’re picked up by global outfits like Netflix. And then there’s the insularity of the Canadian landscape, which is only getting increasingly more protective of itself.

“Even in terms of CBC, their hands are tied in terms of where they can promote their stuff. At the Canadian Screen Awards, Global TV is not going to want to talk with us,” Wraich adds.

Until the marketing budget of the CBC magically balloons – an unlikely scenario given that Prime Minister Mark Carney last month asked the public broadcaster to cut up to 15 per cent of its budget over the next three years, despite campaigning on a pledge to provide a $150-million annual funding increase to the network – Wraich is busy developing her career in every possible direction. Not only is she continuing to look for producing opportunities, but she’s also shadowing directors as Allegiance shoots its third season.

“I just like stretching a little bit. The multihyphenate background, it comes in handy in terms of the longevity of a career as a Canadian filmmaker, actor, artist,” she says. “There’s so many people creating great work, and especially in this moment right now, there’s this constant battle of being your own cheerleader. But we do this because we want to move people. We want to share our hearts with each other, so that we see the world differently.”