Kimberly Laferriere, the Fugueuse villain who became a cannibal bride

Kimberly Laferriere

Photo: Canadian Film Centre from Toronto, Canada / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 3, 1982 Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Occupation	Actress
Known for	mother!, A Brother’s Love, Pride, Prejudice and Mistletoe

When a Quebec entertainment site sat down with Kimberly Laferriere to talk about Fugueuse, it introduced her as a relatively new face for the Quebec public and then, in the same sentence, credited her with two decades in the trade. Both halves were accurate. The Montreal actress had built most of her working life in English, on American and English-Canadian sets, and she came home to French-language prime time as Natacha, the woman who walks teenage girls into the hands of pimps. That odd position, a veteran treated as a discovery in her own city, is the thread running through everything she has done since.

The first feature she made was in a language she barely spoke. Laferriere has said she was fourteen when she shot Winter Lily, an English-language thriller directed by Roshell Bissett, and that the production hired an English diction coach to walk her through her lines. She played Lily, the daughter of a New England innkeeper, a girl whose presence fills the house while the film keeps her out of sight. Read now, it works as an early sketch of the career that followed.

The English work kept coming, and when the time came to train, she followed it. The actress, a Montrealer born on 3 November 1982, has explained that, since she already worked in the language, she wanted to try the big theatre schools outside Quebec; she applied to several and ended up in New York at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre. She later passed through the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto. She has also insisted that she never really left. She kept a Quebec agent and kept asking to audition at home, which, as she put it, is a little harder when you are not there.

What followed in English was the working actor’s circuit. There were guest parts in Blue Mountain State, Being Human, Saving Hope and, later, The CW’s In the Dark and Hudson & Rex. She had a recurring role as Marie Tremblay in 21 Thunder, the CBC drama about an under-21 soccer academy in Montreal that Netflix later carried worldwide. Film roles arrived in genre and television packages: Jessica Donovan in Mathieu Ratthe’s found-footage thriller The Gracefield Incident, a part in the Nuit Blanche anthology White Night, and Monica in the holiday television film Pride, Prejudice and Mistletoe, opposite Lacey Chabert.

In French, the door opened online. Chloé Robichaud’s web series Féminin/Féminin, about six lesbian women in Montreal, cast her as Anne, an anglophone whose friendship with Alex turns into a romance neither of them planned for. Laferriere has praised Robichaud for being excellent at creating beautiful awkwardness, and described the second season as the moment the couple becomes so fused that both start to question their independence.

Fugueuse, Michelle Allen’s TVA drama about a middle-class teenager, played by Ludivine Reding, who is methodically drawn into prostitution, was the role that made her visible at home. Natacha Brown is the girlfriend of Carlo, the man above the pimp Damien, and the recruiter who befriends the girls first. Laferriere called her one of the most complex characters she had ever played, and her first villain, a woman whose morals run against her own. She has said the gang-rape sequence in the fourth episode was harder to shoot than she expected. To prepare she sought out women who had danced in bars, among them a woman in her sixties who told her the trade had shifted from seduction to sex, and another who had danced to pay for law school and now practises as a lawyer. In the second season Natacha runs a brothel and wants out, hoping to build a life with a client.

The defence she offered of Natacha is the most arguable thing she has said in public. She told interviewers that viewers would understand by the end that Natacha does atrocious things but is not a bad person, and that nobody in life is entirely evil. It is a generous actor’s reading, and the series partly earned it, yet Fugueuse was sold to parents as a warning, and a recruiter with a sympathetic interior blurs the warning it was meant to deliver. She was sharper on a different point, the outrage over the teenage lead’s nudity on a medium that happily shows heads exploding at nine in the evening. The wider cost of her two-language career shows in the credits too. In English she was often listed as the waitress, the bartender or the friend; in French she arrived late, already formed, and had to be introduced.

The prestige call came from Monia Chokri. In A Brother’s Love (La femme de mon frère), Chokri’s first feature as director, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in 2019, she plays Julia, one of the childhood friends of Anne-Élisabeth Bossé’s Sophia. Laferriere said that working with Chokri was like a dream and that she could not believe the director had called her.

Her biggest English-language lead is a horror film about a marriage that only cooperates once it starts eating. In John Ainslie’s Do Not Disturb she plays Chloe, a newlywed on a Miami honeymoon with Jack, played by Rogan Christopher, when a rare strain of peyote turns their resentment into hunger for human flesh. The film premiered at the Popcorn Frights festival in August 2022, played Screamfest LA that autumn and opened in limited release in the United States on 17 November 2023. Flickering Myth singled her out for the way she changes the tenor of her voice, her expressions and her mannerisms as Chloe takes control of the couple’s bloodlust. The Movie Waffler was cooler about the film’s tonal whiplash, and drew the line through the cast: Laferriere plays it straight while her co-star veers towards broad mugging. MCM’s own review came at it from the other side: hers is the harder assignment, because Chloe is resentful and paranoid and the film still needs the audience to care whether she gets out of the marriage in one piece.

No new role has been announced publicly. The record, read whole, points somewhere specific: her richest French parts have come from women writing about women, Robichaud, Allen and Chokri, and her one English lead came from a horror director willing to give her the appetite. The next offer will show which of those two industries finally treats her as its own.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Do Not Disturb, John Ainslie, Kimberly Laferriere, Monia Chokri, Rogan Christopher

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