Carolina Bartczak
The minute the WGA went on strike and SAG went on strike, everything ground to a halt. We're all waiting with bated breath to see what happens down south because our livelihoods depend on it as well.
In Conversation with WGA Writer Meagan Daine
Photography by Christie Vuong
Styling by Brandon Laughton
Hair by Ryan McGovern
Makeup by Viktor Peters
Carolina: I was reading this article about how a normal person at the airport has 200 touchpoints with other humans and that the whole point of being rich is to avoid touchpoints. Someone taking a private jet only has 40 touchpoints. They've eliminated all these people that they don't have to interact with. We see that as that is a privilege of the wealthy, that they don't have to interact with as many people. But what ends up happening is that you become more and more isolated, and then you have no idea what the struggle is for other people. That's what shopping malls or movie theaters were. All these people mingling from all these different classes and different ways of life. And now we're getting pulled farther and farther apart, and we're no longer interacting with each other.
Meagan: Speaking of interacting with people, have you been picketing at all?
Carolina: We haven't had picketing here [in Canada] because our union's not on strike. The issue is that I only work on American projects. So essentially, as soon as the strike happened, I was unemployed.
Meagan: I was reading about your backstory, and I mean, my gosh — you studied biochemistry, you were a travel writer, you were a photographer in Croatia. That is amazing. And I really want to know, first of all, where did you go wrong [laughs]?
Carolina: You mean, why did I end up acting? Oh, God. I ended up getting a job at a production company, and I was watching auditions come in, and literally, my thought process was, well, that looks like fun.
I do this thing that if I do something, I do it a hundred percent. I immediately started saving money to move to New York to go to theater school. I just felt so deeply in love with the idea of pulling a human being apart, thread by thread, and figuring out what they're made out of. I think my biochemistry background really helped me just because I had this foundation of evolution and what evolution has told us, told our genetics, and told our minds what we need to do. I feel like although acting and biochemistry are on opposite sides of the spectrum, there is a river of biochemistry running through all my acting.
I'm always thinking, what happened to this person? What drives this person? What are their fears? Evolutionarily, why do we behave this way? I met this phenomenal teacher in Montreal. I took a class with her, and she was doing science, but from the heart, she was explaining things, and she was so astute in everything that she had learned that she talked about that she pulled me in. I knew within a few classes with her, I was like, oh, I'm in this forever. There's nothing else that's more interesting to me.
Meagan: You were in New York. Did you stay in New York and do some acting there? Did you head straight back?
Carolina: I wanted to stay in New York so badly, but I met with a couple of agents, and everyone just said, go back home. It's so hard for a foreigner to work in the US. And because I needed to go to the dentist.
Meagan: I understand that. I lived in Italy for a while in my twenties. I came home because I had to go to the doctor.
Carolina: I moved back home, and I felt at the time that I had my tail between my legs a little bit, completely not understanding that there was an entire industry in Canada. I realized that I was quite lucky to be in Toronto and have access to some of these really amazing shows.
Meagan: It seemed like you were starting to really pick up right about the time the strike hit. Tell me all about that.
Carolina: Things definitely started picking up for me, and I'm trying not to be “woe is me,” but I had a show come out this week that is probably the thing that I'm the most proud of and have been waiting for so long to come out. And then, to not be able to talk about it — it hurts so deeply. Also, to see people who have been working on it for 5, 6, 7 years and then not be able to celebrate because of what SAG has limited us to. Two ideas can exist in your head at the same time. I'm really frustrated by it, but, I understand why.
Meagan: How long would you say it took you to get what you would consider to be a meaningful break in your career?
Carolina: A meaningful break? I think that it takes about seven “breaks” to really have a break.
Meagan: I feel you.
Carolina: The first thing that I think was a meaningful break was probably three years in. I got to play Michael Fassbender’s wife in X-Men, and Michael Fassbender is my favorite actor.
Meagan: Oh my God!
Carolina: I almost fucking died every time he looked in my direction. I’d say that was my first break, and I thought it was going to be amazing, and I was going to be super famous, and then it didn't happen.
Meagan: Yeah, soldier on.
Carolina: Watching too many movies makes you think it just takes one thing to push you into the stratosphere, but once you get into the industry, you learn that it's a marathon. It takes a lot of things to pierce through to get people to see you, to recognize you, to trust you with good material. I would say the series that I'm talking about was definitely what I most looked forward to coming out into the world because it was a very important subject matter, and I got to play a role in it.
Meagan: Yeah, I’m excited about that show as well. It sounds fantastic. I'm excited for you. Congratulations, by the way.
Carolina: Thank you. Everyone that we worked with was so amazing. The Americans and the Canadians, everyone. Everyone was so passionate and in love with this project, and it meant a lot to a lot of people. I was really excited to share that with the world. And actors need these moments. The show is hot on the streaming platform this week, but next week, it's going to be something else. It’s lightning in a bottle where you have to catch that moment and get people to look in your direction in hopes of getting another job. And obviously, we can't do that [right now], which I've found challenging. All that to say, I understand why it has to happen, and there are a lot of stories of directors who are losing their first directing gig, or that actor who finally booked a one-liner on a show and was about to shoot. I feel that. It hurts a lot of people in a lot of different ways.
Meagan: What you said about how you have to have break after break to establish a stable career is so important for people to understand because there is this pervasive myth of the one big break, and then you've made it, you're a star. It's like, no, it actually doesn't work that way. It works that way less now than, I think, it has in times past.
Carolina: Yeah, there's more competitiveness. TikTok is an entire landscape. When we come back, are we going to go back to the amount of written programming that we were used to, or are some people just never going to come back to Hollywood? The Hollywood industry of watching movies — yes, we just had Barbenheimer, amazing. But in the same way that in 2008, people drifted into reality television, are people going to drift into just TikTok?
Meagan: What do you think, biochemist?
Carolina: Yeah, I definitely think people might not come back.
Meagan: Talk a little bit about how you're coping with that feeling because if you were in LA or New York, you could be doing things that are expressing solidarity. You could be going to picket lines, and that's how I know a lot of people deal with those feelings. But being in Canada, what can you do?
Carolina: I mean, you can definitely express solidarity online as much as people have been doing. Absolutely. God, that is a great question. I don't know if I have a great answer for you.
Meagan: Well, what do you do right now?
Carolina: Right now, I have to have to be in control of things that I can control. I'm working on a screenplay, which I'm sure every single actor is doing. They're dusting off the ones they started 11 and a half years ago.
Meagan: Now's the time.
Carolina: Now's the time. I have to focus my energy on things that I can control. It's such a massive conversation, which I know I cannot influence, and so I have to take myself out of it. I can't just sit here and white-knuckle it. I have to put my energy to some good use, which is literally writing a screenplay. I'm being so cliche, writing that screenplay that I started three years ago and didn't finish and trying to do another episode for my podcast that I really care about but never have time for because auditioning is such a big part of my life. I'm just trying to channel my energies into something positive instead of teetering on the edge of anxiety.
Meagan: How is the acting community in Toronto? Do you hang out? Do you see each other? Do you talk about this? Are you texting each other every day?
Carolina: Canada's success hinges on what the Americans do. I think 70% of the series that are shot in Canada are American. So the minute the WGA went on strike and SAG went on strike, everything ground to a halt. We're all waiting with bated breath to see what happens down south because our livelihoods depend on it as well.
Meagan: What do you anticipate will happen?
Carolina: It's so hard to say. I don't want to be some Luddite who doesn't want progress to happen. But when Yuval Noah Harari is terrified of AI, it means that I am also terrified of AI. In an ideal world, we would all take a deep breath and discuss with cool heads what kind of effect AI can have on our industry and how to use it without decimating our industry. I feel like the world never stopped to have the conversation about social media, and now you can't put the genie back in the bottle. I don't want to be in a situation five or ten years from now where we've just lost control of AI. I don't want to go back to the Gilded Age, where a few people have all the consolidated power, and the rest of us are breaking our backs just trying to make a living. I really hope that we can find some way of making sure that there's a middle class of actors and writers. I know that not everyone can make a life out of being an actor or writer. It's really, really hard. It takes so much commitment, but if you take away the writers and the ideas that they create, the only people who are going to be able to survive are the people who have wealth behind them or have connections in the industry. You're going to be making content written by such a small group of society. We need people who come from all backgrounds, who may not be from the industry or wealthy families, but who can work hard to become writers and keep paying their rent. We need to be able to support a wider range of people who can sustain themselves in the industry.
Meagan: What's the most important issue to you on the docket? It sounds like it would be AI protections. Is that accurate?
Carolina: I would say yes, mostly because in Canada, we don't get residuals anyway.
Meagan: What?
Carolina: Yeah. It's pretty fucked.
Meagan: Dude. That is fucked. It doesn't make any sense at all. Okay. Next time we have a strike, that has to be fixed.
Carolina: Yeah, it's really hard to survive as an actor in Canada.
Meagan: Oh, wow. Okay.
Carolina: It does feel like the WGA and SAG are on the front lines of this AI conversation. AI is going to come after every single industry. We happen to be the ones that are negotiating and renegotiating the contracts, and so that's why it has been at the forefront. It's coming after everyone, so let's start having a conversation about what that's going to look like.
Meagan: Yeah, that's right. It's funny, I had a friend who was saying that we're the canaries in the coal mine. And I'm like, no, we're not. The canaries are already dead. We're just the ones who saw the dead canaries, and we're trying to tell everybody about it. That's what we're doing right now so that everybody else can get out and save themselves, basically.
Carolina: That's exactly right. Yeah. The canaries are fucked.
Meagan: Yeah. So, I actually wanted to circle back a little bit. Because you were working in Canada, how closely were you following news of the strikes until, all of a sudden, you're on strike? Was it something that you guys were thinking about for a while, or that you were thinking about? Did you know it was going to happen?
Carolina: Every single Canadian in the industry has been watching this very closely. As I said, our livelihoods depend on American productions. Everyone in the industry, from catering to crews to directors to actors, we watch very closely what's happening in the US at all times.
Meagan: And so when you were watching this unfold, and the writers have already gone on strike, so you're thinking, oh fuck, what is SAG going to do? Can you tell us about what your feelings were when SAG was having their negotiations?
Carolina: I don't know. I think I was sticking my head in the sand a little bit because I was like, I can't actually do anything about this. I have to roll with the punches. I can't vote as I'm not a SAG member, I can't participate in this. I had to just sit on the sidelines and watch everything unfold, which was a really big feeling of helplessness, and especially because I had been gearing up for the release of this show. I had already hired my publicist. I had already started getting hair, makeup, and wardrobe. I had already bought my flights for the premiere. I had already gotten photos done, gotten everything ready so that when press hit, I would be ready to go. When that slammed to a halt, I felt my heart drop. I just fell right on my butt. It was so disappointing. But again, big picture here. I know we're fighting for something really important, so I don't want to dwell too much on my own disappointment.
Meagan: Yeah, I really appreciate you being open and honest about that because I can't even imagine, honestly, how heartbreaking it must have been. I do know the feeling of working your ass off for years and years and years, and then thinking you get a break, and then it turns into nothing, and then you work your ass off for more years and years and repeat this whole process over and over again. I also fully believe in the marathon, and I know that what we do at the end of the day is we keep going. Because this is what we love and we're fucking crazy.
Carolina: I know. That's the thing, every time I think this is crazy, this career is so unstable - then I think, yeah, but I'm just so in love. It fascinates me. I'm in love with it. I don't want to do anything else. When people say like, oh, if you can do something else, do it. I could do 25 other jobs, I could do so many other things. I'm an intelligent person. I can get a fucking job somewhere else. I don't want to because my love for it is so much bigger than that. I'm sure you feel the same way as a writer.
Meagan: I do. Yeah. I have had to do a lot of soul-searching over the years. I don't know if it would be the same in Canada, but coming from a conservative background in Texas, artists are frowned upon. There's this “get a real job” attitude, and I struggle with that. I feel that shame, but also, I have come to the conclusion of why the fuck would I do that? If I had any hope of doing the thing that I love most in my life, why would I not fight for the thing that I love most? There's no other option.
Carolina: Yeah. I actually feel lucky that I fell so deeply in love with acting, and it wasn't at a young age. I didn't get into the industry until I tried a bunch of different other things, but I never have to look back and think, should I have done something else? No. I've found my work soulmate.
I wish we could all want to make art and be fine with it. Not having to make a billion dollars every single time, but that's not the world we live in. It just isn't. We're always going to be coming at it from different perspectives.
Meagan: Yeah, that's right. But we can make adjustments to the world we live in, and that's inspiring.
Check out Meagan’s podcast, Hollywood Confessionals here.
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