BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. _ For a person who pretends to be someone else for a living, actress Meghan Ory should be in deep trouble. She cannot tell a lie.
"I'm the world's worst liar," she says. "It's really weird, and it's funny because I have to be careful when I take a job because if I don't believe in the project, I can't do it. I have to find a way to believe what I'm talking about and know that there's something truthful in it," she says seated at a glass-topped table in a coffee bar here.
"I've been pulled over by cops and I can't talk my way out of anything. I go bright red if I'm lying and kind of sweaty."
She's neither in her latest role in the Hallmark Channel's new series, "Chesapeake Shores." Ory plays a career-focused single mother of twins whose return home illuminates the sacrifices she's made for her job and the hefty costs to her children.
The Canada-born Ory had no trouble finding something to believe in the series. She herself has been obsessed with acting since she was 8.
"It was 'The Road to Avonlea.' There was an open casting call to that everywhere. My aunt told me about it, and I really, really wanted to audition. My mom said if I really wanted to do that, I had to save up my money for my head shots. So I started babysitting and got my own head shots and mailed them to Vancouver," she recalls.
She grew up on Vancouver Island, a five-hour ferry ride from Vancouver. One agent responded to her photos. And her mother, an elementary school drama teacher, accompanied young Meghan on auditions on the mainland. "I paid for my head shots and started auditioning, and it's pretty crazy when I think about it now. I put so much effort into it."
She's still putting effort into it. She made her very first movie when she was 16 for Fox Family Channel called "The Darkling."
"It was kind of a kids' version of 'Rear Window,'" she remembers. "I had no idea what I was doing. None. I felt so bad. The director was Jeffrey Reiner, Rob's brother. And someday I'll see him again and I need to apologize. I had no idea. I'd never been on a set before, and I was the lead of this movie, and I had no clue what I was doing. I didn't know what a mark was. They would put the tape down and I don't think I stood on it once. I was pretty clueless. They were so sweet."
Three years later she launched her maiden voyage to L.A. She says while her mother and dad (a public speaker on autism and fetal alcohol syndrome) were worried; she wasn't.
"It was a show called 'Maybe It's Me' for the WB and we did the pilot in Vancouver and did the show down here. And I was the MEAN girl. So I came down for that and sort of stayed," she says.
"I don't think I was scared. I probably should have been, but I think my mom was scared ... I was pretty young. But I had a couple of friends on the show, and it's what I've always wanted to do. I think I was too excited to be scared."
She spent about a year in college studying philosophy and traveled between Canada and the U.S. working on various projects.
But it was her role in "Merlin's Apprentice" that really changed things for Ory, 33. And it had nothing to do with her career.
She met her husband of seven years, actor John Reardon, on that miniseries. "I was doing my wardrobe fitting and he walked in the door with a friend of mine, and they were chatting. And I saw him and thought, 'He's sooooo dreamy.' We were really good friends first. We'd actually met a couple of years earlier and we just became really good friends and just joked around a lot," she grins.
"When we finished working on 'Merlin' _ I never think it's a good idea to date somebody you're working with _ so we started dating after that."
They courted for four years before they married. Their only problem, she says, is that their work often pulls them apart. "So we have the rule that we try not to go more than two weeks without seeing each other. That's the big thing," she pats her palm on the table.
But in the early part of their marriage they suffered a serious setback. Neither could find work during the prolonged writers' strike. "We lived in a 400-square-foot apartment in Hermosa Beach but ... we were right off of the strand, so we were right off the beach," she says.
"My best friend lived up the street so we would see them all the time. So even though I think I didn't have more than $400 in my bank account for a really long time, and I was working so hard to pay rent and everything, at the same time it was beautiful ... "
ACTRESS IS EXHAUSTED BY STUNTS
Filming begins this week in New York on Season 6 of Showtime's "Homeland." Star Claire Danes admits she's been through some perilous stunts on the show. "By the time we wrap, I'm fairly stripped," she says. "But I always think, 'Well, I'm not pregnant.' So I have that comparison, that it was never harder than when I was seven months pregnant and doing all those things. It's very strenuous work, but the quality is so sound that it carries me. I would rather apply myself within a context that's secure and inspiring and well designed, than have a kind of cruisey, silly time in gobbledygook."
VILLAINS CRUCIAL TO SUPERHERO DRAMA
Greg Berlanti is one of the wizard executive producers behind CW shows "The Flash," "Arrow," "Legends of Tomorrow," and now "Supergirl," which has moved over from CBS. According to Berlanti, it's the villains that often define the heroes. "We spent almost as much, sometimes more time, talking about the villains than we even did about some of the heroes," he says.
"Obviously, they're driving the plot a lot of times, because they have something they're trying to achieve in the plan. And so that's sort of setting the tone. It's reflective of what the hero character is going through ... We don't feel like we always hit it out of the park. And so at the end of the year, we look at what we do well, what can we do better, and how strong is the hero and how strong was the villain? How complex and how interesting (the villain) a lot of times determines the quality of the season, I think ... So we do take a lot of time developing it. And I think when we look at it, we probably look at it in terms of _ first and foremost _ what the hero or hero character is going through, and then how can we exploit that or engage that with the bad guy or bad gal."
SUTHERLAND SUCCUMBS TO EXPERT WRITING
Kiefer Sutherland will be on TV this fall in ABC's ace-thriller, "Designated Survivor." Sutherland says the last thing he wanted to do was another TV series after his smash sojourn in "24." But his friendship with producer Mark Gordon goaded him into reading the script for "Designated Survivor."
"I was doing a small film in New York. Very busy. I've known Mark for 20 years. When my daughter was born, I would walk her in the carriage down the street, and Mark was doing the same thing across the street. And we became friends. And I've had huge respect for not only how prolific he is as a producer, but the incredible quality of work that he has done.
"Having said that, I had no intention of doing a television show. And I was very busy, but I felt I needed to give this script a cursory read so that I could at least respond with some intelligence and explain why I couldn't do it.
"And I found myself on Page 22, and I remember saying, 'S__. I've got to go back and start from the beginning,' because it was shaping so beautifully. And I remember getting to the very end of the script and realizing that I was potentially holding the next 10 years of my life in my hands. I called Mark and told him I wanted to do it. And he said, 'Well, what notes (changes) do you have?' And I said, 'Actually, I have to be honest with you, I don't have any.'"
