Dark Matter is built around a fascinating question: What if your life had gone differently?
When I sat down with Amanda Brugel to talk about the Apple TV series, I expected us to explore that question through the show. What I didn’t necessarily expect was for our conversation to eventually bring that question into Brugel’s own life and career.
We started with Episode 5, which Brugel had previously shared was one of her favorites of the season.
“I love the show, and to your point, I love the questions it poses,” Brugel told me. “I love the sort of metaphysical, insanely cerebral, profound questions it asks us about our existence.”
But she also acknowledged that those questions can sometimes be a lot for an audience to process. Episode 5 offered something different.
“I loved Episode 5 because it just slowed everything down. It quieted the mind. It just followed one person and one story,” she explained. “I love that there was such little dialogue.”
That lack of dialogue was one of the things I loved about the episode, too. One of the Jason variants encounters his deaf mother, allowing the story to rely much more heavily on what we’re watching and feeling rather than what the characters are saying.
For me, it also allowed us to see a much more vulnerable side of Jason.
Brugel described the episode as “an incredibly elegant, peaceful love letter to just a glimpse into one person’s life.”
“We don’t really get that a lot in TV,” she continued. “We’re always really wanting to have chaos and crashes, and while that’s entertaining and while I’m here for it and I love it, I also love a peaceful ride.”
I then brought up something Brugel had previously discussed about her career. While trying to find representation in the United States, her agent and best friend encouraged her to reconsider how she saw herself as an actor. As Brugel described it, she was told not to think of herself as a “comedic Halle Berry,” but as a Viola Davis.
I wanted to know what hearing those words did to her.
“I didn’t think of myself as someone with the gravitas that is deserving to play a certain kind of roles or a certain kind of woman,” Brugel told me.
“Suddenly someone else gave me permission to embrace that there are all facets of myself, that I have all sides, that I can be funny, but I also can have a strength, that I also am allowed to choose the kind of roles that I can play.”
Brugel said that realization “sent me on a completely different trajectory” and helped lead her toward some of the projects and performers she would eventually work alongside.
She could even identify a dividing line between the career she had before that realization and the one that followed.
“There’s no mistake that there’s a direct line in the sand from when I made that choice and I allowed myself the power that I have within and how it translates into my career now. It’s crazy. You can almost see it in a line in the sand, which is an interesting question for Dark Matter, because if that moment hadn’t happened, I don’t know if I would be here talking to you. I don’t know what show I would be on. I don’t know if I would be an actor.”
I mentioned how performers of color can still encounter assumptions about what kinds of characters they’re supposed to play rather than being afforded the opportunity to demonstrate how multifaceted they are. Brugel didn’t hesitate to respond.
“At all. It’s still — I mean, it has improved slightly, but we’re not even remotely close to where we are,” she said.
Brugel also recognizes that her own career has been unusual. She’s Canadian, has remained in Canada and has still been able to build an international career while working on high-caliber projects.
“I understand how rare that is, but I also understand that there’s a responsibility there,” she told me.
And that responsibility influences the characters she wants to put into the world.
“I want to keep representing and playing characters that look like women that I know that exist in the world and not just repeating the same boring stories or tropes that we see all of the time.”
She added, “There’s more of us, the characters I play out there that I know personally, than just the same old crappy stories that we get.”
Watch my full conversation with Amanda Brugel on The Buzz – BuzzWorthy Radio.
New episodes of Dark Matter release every Friday on Apple TV, with the season finale to air October 30th.
