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Meaghan Rath isn't used to this, talking about a character who is, you know, alive.
It's a mid-January afternoon, and Rath, 27, is in New York City doing the press rounds for the fourth season of the SyFy original series Being Human. She has something else on her mind, though—her new indie film Three Night Stand. Co-starring and co-produced by Rath, the offbeat romantic comedy follows a vacationing couple trying to keep their relationship together while staying at a ski lodge run by the boyfriend's ex-lover. In less than 24 hours, the Montreal native is scheduled to hop on a plane and head out to Park City, Utah, to attend the film's premiere at Slamdance, the quirkier cousin to the neighboring Sundance Film Festival. "It's really exciting," says Rath, "because it's the first movie I've ever produced, but it's also a little strange talking about it. I'm usually trying to explain the afterlife to people."
That's what happens when you're the star of Being Human, SyFy's quietly successful adaptation of the British show of the same name. Rath plays Sally Malik, a sassy, sarcastic firecracker who also happens to be dead and the ghostly roommate of a vampire and a werewolf. She's not your ordinary apparition, though. Over the course of three full seasons (season four's third episode airs tonight at 9 p.m. EST), Sally has, in no particular order, battled a hunky Grim Reaper, briefly turned flesh-and-blood again and had a fling with a virginal mortician, inhabited human bodies, and been treated to manicures and pedicures while trapped in the limbo between Heaven and Hell. Oh, and there's also her ability to "shred" other ghosts.
No wonder the simplicity of Three Night Stand feels so jarring. "The mythology in Being Human becomes really complicated for me," says Rath. "I constantly have to map it out for myself to make sure I'm not lost in it. I often wonder, does the audience fully understand all of this? I'm sure there are people who watch the show and are lost, but thankfully enough people seem to understand it. Or if they don't, they just love the characters enough to stick around."
It's precisely that. With its lack of media fanfare, Being Human continues to be one of television's best-kept secrets, a funny and often powerfully dramatic look at social alienation and twentysomething insecurities channeled through classic horror tropes. For the wolf man (Josh, played by Sam Huntington), marriage is even more difficult thanks to he and his wife both changing into hairy, murderous beasts; the 200-plus-year-old vampire (Aiden, played by Sam Witwer) struggles with his addiction to blood like it's a drug and his sexual urges like a self-loathing playboy; and Sally's inability to fully connect with others is compounded by the fact that, well, she's dead.
In a perfect world, Being Human would receive as much media attention as The CW's like-minded, though far more melodramatic and superficial, The Vampire Diaries and The Originals. Yet Rath, for one, doesn't mind its position. "Being Human feels like an underdog, and I love that about it," says Rath. "I've always felt a bit like an underdog myself."
As told to Matt Barone (@MBarone)
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On Growing Up in Montreal
"Montreal is very debaucherous. Our most recent Being Human wrap party was, to me—optimized is in its essence. Everyone was just getting crazy and by the end we were all messy and sweaty. And then I went to a wrap party in Toronto and everyone there was like, 'Oh, hello. It is so nice to meet you,' and all proper and serious. It was so weird."
"There's a real energy to Montreal, especially the artist area I live in. People make enough money to pay their rent and then have a good time. When I was growing up there, I didn't see it like that, of course. I'm bilingual, which is a byproduct of coming from Montreal, so I actually find it helpful when I'm traveling. I was lucky because I traveled a lot as a kid, and that helped me since I was living in a city with so many diverse people doing so many diverse kinds of jobs. It's not a city like Los Angeles, for example, where everyone is in the entertainment industry, or is trying to be in the entertainment industry. Montreal opens your mind up to so many different things."
"Neither of my parents are in the entertainment industry. My dad is a CFO for a pharmaceutical company, and my mom is a dentist. But my younger brother [Jesse Rath] is also an actor, so there was something about the entertainment industry that spoke to both of us. We often talk about this, but my brother is the kind of guy who is amazing at everything he does. Like, he tried to do this stop-motion animation film, and I watch it and it's incredible, it's this piece of art. He's that kind of guy. But acting was something I wanted to do since I was a kid, and when he saw me doing it he then fell into it himself."
"I've been trying to answer, for myself, the question of why I wanted to become an actor for years, and I think what it is is that I watched a lot of movie and TV while growing up, and I saw all these people dealing with these complications and feeling all these things. My family life, luckily, was very stable; I come from a really great family, so I never experienced that kind of turmoil. When I saw these people, I wanted to feel everything they were feeling. I wanted to go through all of that."
On Her Early Struggles as an Actress
"I had just turned 13, and I got a role in this independent film that made it into Sundance, called Lost and Delirious. I played 'Allison's Friend #3.' [Laughs.] So, yeah, I was the third friend in this beautiful, dramatic, romantic movie about these girls in a private school who fall in love. Mischa Barton, Piper Perabo, and Jessica Pare were the stars. After that, I finished high school, so I didn't get back into acting officially until after high school, though I was still going on auditions here and there. I remember, the day I graduated, I found out that I booked a role on this TV show, 15/Love, that I worked on for three years. So I started acting full-time immediately out of high school."
"Before 15/Love, it was very much being at the right place at the right time. My parents had put me into acting classes ever since I was a little kid, so I was always training. I was in this one acting class and they had our pictures on the wall. The casting director for that film came into the class one day, looked at the pictures, saw mine and asked if I could come in and audition."
"It's harder to break into movies in Canada for a unique reason. In L.A., there are so many people there all trying to break into the same thing, but there aren't as many people doing that in Canada. There are very few films being made, and roles available, especially when I was younger, for people who look like me. Usually, parents were involved in the roles, so they didn't know what would happen if they cast me. Like, 'If we cast this girl, what will her parents look like?' My dad's family is part British and part Austrian, and my mom's family's from Goa, in India. I'm mixed, so it all became very complicated. I was either too ethnic or not ethnic enough. I didn't fit into a category."
"I don't know if that was ever the official reason why I didn't get jobs, but it definitely limited the auditions I was able to go on back then. It's just part of the game, though, right?"
On Growing Up as a Genre Fan
"My mom loves the sci-fi world. We watched Star Trek: The Next Generation together all the time. In fact, I almost wore my Star Trek: The Next Generation T-shirt today, before opting to wear my Jaws shirt. [Laughs.] We also watched The Twilight Zone and tons of movies."
"My brother is the biggest comic book fan in the world. He has tons of comic books that he collects, these one-of-a-kind editions and all that, and he's always made me read his favorites. Of course I read Watchmen, and I really loved Swamp Thing, but the one that has always stuck with me the most is Black Hole, by Charles Burns. I was shooting something in Vancouver and I brought that book with me on the plane there from Montreal, and it gave me a panic attack that lasted—this is so embarrassing—an entire week. My mom had to fly down to Vancouver to calm me down because I was freaking out so much. [Laughs.] I was deathly afraid of STDs because of Black Hole. It's really embarrassing."
"My family wasn't so intensely into the genre stuff that we'd do family trips to conventions or things like that, but it is kind of funny that I get to attend so many conventions now because of Being Human. My brother went to those, though, and when I started going for Being Human he would get so jealous and angry. Like, 'Why do you get to go to those and not me? That's my thing!' And now it's so nice because he has his own SyFy show, Defiance, so we get to do it together. He's not angry anymore."
On the Joys of Working on Being Human
"Being Human required quite a few auditions. I know they searched far and wide to find someone to play Sally, but I try not to think about that too much. It was tough. I connected with the character so much that I got this feeling that, as an actor, I've only experienced maybe one or two other times, where I read something and say to myself, 'If I'm not a part of this project, it will completely break my heart.' I just knew, I just had this connection with it. Luckily for me, that worked out."
"The chemistry I have with [co-stars] Sam [Witwer] and Sam [Huntington], my two Sams, is a weird thing because it happened so immediately and so easily for us. We met for the first time in L.A., and the second they put us in the room together, there was this immediate energy that we were all sort of shocked by. It's never gone away; those two are my best friends. I'm so close to them. They know everything about me, even right down to all the little sick details. [Laughs.] That's very rare in this industry, too. After the first season finished shooting, we all went to Hawaii with [fellow co-star] Mark Pellegrino, which is weird because you'd think we'd all want some time apart from each other after filming together for six months straight."
"One thing that still amazes me about Being Human is that we have these script meetings before we shoot every episode, where we're allowed to give input about our characters and let the writers know if there's anything that's really bumping us. I've never been so into that, though. Sam Witwer is so great at it, though, because he's obsessed with his work—that's a terrible thing, but it's also an amazing thing. He's so dedicated and so passionate, and that's what makes him so great at what he does."
"Me, though, I'm not a writer—it's just, you write for me and I'll figure out a way to make it mine. I'm always uncomfortable with challenging the writers too much because I don't feel it's my place, but I also know that they care enough to ask me what I think, and I love that."
On How Sally is a Lot Like Meaghan
"After the first season, I think the writers started writing specifically for us, the actors. I've gotten to know the writers really well over the last four years, and they've now gotten to know my sense of humor and what I do well. They write for that, they write for our strengths."
"I love comedy, but I've also developed this love for drama from working on Being Human. I feel like a mix of the two is perfect for me, that's where I'm in my happy place. That's what's so great about the show—we find the light in all this tragedy. There's a nice balance of that."
"Being Human, up until recently, was certainly the most dramatic thing I'd done. Before it, I'd done a lot of comedy because comedy comes easily to me. Now I think I've fine-tuned the comedy because I can balance it with the drama and the character's tragic side."
"Sally is such an amazing, endlessly fascinating character to play, too. There's an element of her being self-centered; when people deal with something very traumatic, they become self-involved—that's just how it is. That's why I like her so much; she's realistic. When you take away all the supernatural stuff, her behavior and her needs are really common among people. I like how she uses humor to mask what's really inside, this deep insecurity. She's lost, she doesn't know where she belongs. I love the idea that she finds that and becomes who she is in her death; she didn't know who she was while she was alive. And I like that."
"Growing up, I also didn't know my place. I didn't look like everyone else around me, and I was really insecure about that. I got made fun of a lot. The way I dealt with that was through humor and presenting myself in the way that I want to be seen, and I've found that in Sally, too."
"In Montreal, there weren't that many mixed kids around when I was growing up, which is funny, right, because now it's the complete opposite. But back then, most of my friends were Italian girls who were super developed really young, and there was me, this skinny girl. I went to a Catholic high school, but, while my mother is Catholic, my dad is Jewish. So I was always never fully anything that everyone else was. I always just felt different; I was brought up differently than everyone else was. It was something that made me really insecure, but when I became an adult, I started to really appreciate those things and valued them. That's what sets me apart from everyone else."
"Acting really helped me because I was shy growing up, because of those insecurities. It helped me open up and start appreciating everything that makes me different."