Anna Lambe, the North of North star Hollywood keeps sending to Alaska

Anna Lambe

Photo: JoshPopov / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 25, 2000 Burin, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Heart of the Beast
Awards	Canadian Screen Award

Anna Lambe has built her whole career inside stories about the North, and the most revealing thing about her right now is how differently the two sides of the border use her. In Canada, Inuit producers handed her a sitcom and built it around her timing: North of North rests on Siaja, a young mother who walks out of her marriage in front of the entire town and then has to keep living there. Hollywood has drawn a tighter circle. Her American credits keep returning to Alaska, and the biggest of them hands her the closing minutes of a Brad Pitt film.

Iqaluit made her, even if the paperwork says otherwise. Her birthplace is Burin, in Newfoundland and Labrador, but she grew up in the Nunavut capital, where she went to Inuksuk High School and spent much of her youth on sports courts, winning a bronze medal in girls’ doubles badminton at the North American Indigenous Games and playing volleyball for Nunavut at the Arctic Winter Games. Her father, an RCMP officer, was the reader who critiqued her school essays. She has also talked about something less tidy: a shame about being Indigenous that she carried as a young person and had to unlearn.

Acting was not the plan. A drama teacher pushed her toward the auditions for The Grizzlies, Miranda de Pencier’s film about the youth lacrosse team set up in Kugluktuk, Nunavut, to answer a wave of teenage suicides. She was 15 when she was cast. The film was shot in Iqaluit, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018 and earned her a Canadian Screen Award nomination for best supporting actress as Spring. She enrolled in international development and globalization at the University of Ottawa, and the parts kept arriving anyway.

The next ones came fast and mostly in genre. On CBC’s Trickster, adapted from Eden Robinson’s novels, she played Sarah and collected a second Canadian Screen Award nomination. She was Blue Two-Rivers across six episodes of Three Pines, the Prime Video mystery series with Alfred Molina, and turned up in an episode of Alaska Daily. Then HBO cast her in True Detective: Night Country as Kayla Prior, the wife of the rookie officer played by Finn Bennett, in a season led by Jodie Foster and Kali Reis. In 2024 she stepped out of character to co-host the APTN lumi documentary series Warrior Up! with Joel Oulette and Joshua Odjick.

North of North changed the scale. Created by Stacey Aglok MacDonald and Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, it premiered on CBC and APTN in January 2025 and went out worldwide as Netflix’s first Canadian original series. Lambe plays Siaja Kudlak, who married the town’s golden boy straight out of high school in the fictional Ice Cove and blows up that life in public. The comedy depends on her awkwardness reading as nerve rather than weakness, and she makes it read that way. At the 2026 Canadian Screen Awards the show took nine prizes, including best comedy series, and Lambe won best lead performer in a comedy. On stage she reminded the creators that they had changed her life when she was 15 by casting her in The Grizzlies, and she was blunt about the conditions: “Our show is so hard to make. Shooting on a soundstage that was a curling rink in Iqaluit, in a community that has no infrastructure, only heart.”

The less flattering reading of her career sits in the American half of it. True Detective: Night Country takes place in Alaska. So does Alaska Daily. Her first studio feature, David Ayer’s Heart of the Beast, is a survival story about a Special Forces veteran and his combat dog after a plane crash in the Alaskan wilderness, and her character, Amber, enters at the end as the woman who takes the dog in. None of those parts is a failure, and the Pitt film is a real door. But the pattern is hard to miss: the industry that pays the most has mostly seen her as the right face for a cold place, while the leads and the risk have come from Inuit and Canadian producers. Her own path also carries a warning about who gets to tell these stories. Trickster, the series that earned her second nomination, was cancelled by CBC after one season when co-creator Michelle Latimer’s claims of Indigenous ancestry were found to be unfounded.

That is part of why In the Heart of the South matters more than its size suggests. Nyla Innuksuk’s psychological thriller, shot in Hamilton, Ontario, gives Lambe her most complex lead yet: Yura Ivalu, an Inuk artist building a career in southern Ontario who starts to come apart when her childhood friend Sesi, played by her North of North co-star Zorga Qaunaq, reappears. The film premiered in the Platform Prize programme at TIFF on 10 September 2026, with Elevation Pictures distributing, and critics read it as a satire of an art world that treats Indigenous trauma as currency. It is a film about the exact pressure an actor in her position is under, and she carries it.

Her public voice predates the awards. Lambe identifies as two-spirit, and in 2020 she wrote an open letter urging Nunavut’s Legislative Assembly to reprimand MLA Cathy Towtongie, who had said that two-spirit identity was not part of Inuit culture. “Cathy Towtongie does not speak for me as an Inuk in claiming two-spirit lives are not the Inuit way,” she wrote. In May 2026, Vogue followed her to her first fashion show, Louis Vuitton’s Resort 2027 presentation.

The autumn is crowded. Heart of the Beast opened in US cinemas on 25 September 2026, her 26th birthday: she was born on that date in 2000. The second season of North of North began on APTN+ on 1 September and on CBC a week later, with Netflix yet to set its date. Next comes Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, the Facebook whistleblower drama with Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong, which Sony releases on 9 October 2026 with her role still undisclosed. It is the first of her American films with a story that has nothing to do with the Arctic, and the clearest test yet of whether Hollywood can see the actor the Canadian work has already shown.

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