TORONTO — Canadian actress Missy Peregrym wanted to bring a sense of realism to her stunt scenes in the sexy homegrown cop series Rookie Blue, debuting Thursday on Global and ABC.
So when props or pummels came her way, she didn’t flinch.
“I’ve been choked,” Peregrym, 28, said in an interview conducted while the show was shooting last fall.
“I was just hit with a car door yesterday. It’s one of those things where, you know, I’m not trained in stunts so I have to kind of let it happen to me otherwise it’s not realistic.”
“I think it’s more real if I actually get my ass kicked,” the former model, who grew up in Surrey, B.C., added with a laugh.
“It’s fun. I mean, it’s hard, you know — it kills and your chest gets really tight so you come to work the next day and you just have to like, breathe differently sometimes because your body is recovering from it. But I like it.”
Peregrym also brings vulnerability to her character, Andy McNally, the core member of a group of five cops who attended police academy together and are now starting out in the same division.
“I play the character who is very honest and open and tries to do the right thing all the time,” said Peregrym, whose previous credits include Heroes, Reaper and Dark Angel.
Co-stars include Toronto native Gregory Smith as thrill-seeker Dov Epstein; Travis Milne of Lac La Biche, Alta., as over-achiever Chris Diaz; Vancouver’s Enuka Okuma in the role of single mom Traci Nash; and Toronto’s Charlotte Sullivan as devious Gail Peck.
“I always wanted to (play a cop) my whole life,” said Smith, 26, who previously starred in Everwood.
“I thought I was going to have to wait until I was like 40 or something, but this is perfect.”
Smith says the first time he put on his uniform, he snapped a picture of himself with his iPhone and immediately posted it on Facebook and Twitter.
But there was one problem: “I got in big trouble because that picture went all over the place,” he admitted.
“It was supposed to be a secret and I got my knuckles rapped a little bit.”
Smith displayed a bit of rebelliousness in the auditions, too.
Producers and writers wanted him to try out for the part of Chris, but he had his heart set on Dov.
“So I auditioned for Chris but I took Chris’s lines in the audition and I crossed out his name and I wrote Dov on them,” he explained.
“I did the whole audition for Chris as Dov and they got the point and it worked.”
Rookie Blue is drawing comparisons to the hit medical series Grey’s Anatomy. Both see their characters forging bonds — in some cases, romantic ones — while they learn the ropes together. And, as in Grey’s, Rookie Blue characters also cap their rough workdays with a drink or two at a local watering hole.
Behind the scenes, though, there was very little time to get to know one another before production began last summer, said Peregrym.
“It was really crazy because we all had to come and relocate to Toronto,” she said. “So basically we got here, we had one training day with real officers where we got to learn how to really hold our gun and do all that kind of stuff — this is where we met everybody for the first time — then we had the read-through.
“And then pretty much from there we just kind of had to go right into work.”