Metro: Bang Bang Baby takes Jane Levy back to her singing, dancing roots
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
Jane Levy has a diverse resume that includes the cable hit Shameless (where she dies in a most fiery way), the sitcom Suburgatory and the 2013 remake of Evil Dead. But her new film, Bang Bang Baby takes her back to where she began: singing and dancing.
“I did musical theatre, mostly because it was the only theatre available, not to say anything negative about that, but I wanted to be an actor. I loved drama and that was the way to do it so I was in all the plays. I was in Annie. I was in Oklahoma. I was in Annie Get Your Gun and The Wizard of Oz,” When she was seven years old the California native recalls about her seven -year-old self.
She warbled her way through Broadway-style shows until she was about thirteen when she traded the stage for the soccer field. It took a few years but eventually she felt a familiar draw.
“I was eighteen and I just finished my first year of college and I hated school,” she says. “I was miserable the whole year and I couldn’t quite figure out why.
“I was in Europe with my friend and I said, ‘You know what? I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m not going to school. Why not pursue the thing that I know has always been, deep down, my dream?’”
She’s back to basics in Bang Bang Baby, a strange new big screen sci-fi musical that gives her the chance to strut her stuff. In it, she plays Stepphy, a 1960s teenager whose dreams of rock ’n’ roll stardom are dashed when a chemical leak in her town causes mass mutations and “threatens to turn her dream into a nightmare.”
When she first saw the script she says, “I thought, how cool and how strange. I thought it would be a challenge to explore singing and dancing which is something I had done as a kid but not since. And I also thought how unusual, how peculiar, how fun.”
Levy has a whole slate of films on the way, including the much-anticipated animated movie Monster Trucks, but the best part of it all, she says, is that she is able to act in a variety of projects.
“For me, I feel like this is the thing I have to do. This is the thing I enjoy the most and this is the thing I’m best at.”
