The ice blond in the red dress was going to cause an accident. Forget cellphones or spilled coffee causing distractions, drivers speeding through Hollywood last year had their gazes pulled off the road by a towering Last Supper -style billboard in which the centre point wasn't a doomed Jesus, but a celestial goddess.
In a town attuned to glamour, the iconic image of Tricia Helfer's Cylon Number Six character that transcended her role on the popular Battlestar Galactica TV series proved she had arrived in Hollywood with all the powerful charisma of a celebrity hitting her stride.
Often cast as "beautiful, but tough," the 35-year-old screen queen from Donalda, Alberta rides a Harley, has legions of fans and boasts a February 2007 Playboy cover that would make even Helen of Troy book emergency Botox. Daring to go where so many former cover girls have fallen on their six-inch heels, Tricia jettisoned a successful 10-year career as a supermodel and set her sights on Hollywood in 2001. "It was daunting, to say the least," she recalls. "I knew no one in L.A. and I had no acting credits." Undeterred by "walk-by-in-a-bikini" auditions, Tricia fought the model-turned-actor stereotype and emerged as a scene-stealing artist. "Of course, it was a big challenge," she admits. "But I guess I thrive on challenges. I don't like when things are too easy, then the rewards don't seem earned."
The many incarnations of her Cylon Number Six character challenged her enough that she is continuing that role in the upcoming Battlestar Galactica movie, The Plan , which will be released on DVD on October 27 and on the SyFy channel in November. She's also set to make new fans on a grander scale when she guest stars as a brainiac in need of a bodyguard on Fox's much-anticipated action series, Human Target , set to air in January. Sought on both sides of the 49th parallel, Tricia also recently played the starring role in a pilot entitled The Dealership , co-created by Calgary's award-winning writer and showrunner, Andrew Wreggitt.
Having portrayed Farrah Fawcett in the 2004 TV movie Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Charlie's Angels , Tricia has an idea of what it might be like to be a household name. But she's not just another pin-up girl; those who work with her discover there's plenty of grit under the gloss. "Boy, she knows how to work," observes Wreggitt. "She's a very dedicated person."
More than just commitment, successful actors need that elusive "X-factor," something Wreggitt believes Tricia has. "When you see Battlestar , she's a presence every time she's on screen. You can't help but be drawn to her ... Yet when you talk to her, she's a real sweetheart, a very down-to-earth person."
Tricia might have ended up just another pretty face around Holly-wood but for her emotional range, professionalism and feet-on-the-ground realness, which have their roots in her farm girl upbringing.
Tricia was born on April 11, 1974, during a Donalda spring that flooded the local bridge and left her in the hospital with jaundice until the water receded and her mother could take her home. "That's the world I was born into," she explains - a world that for Tricia seemed to be dominated by wheat and weather. The third of four daughters in a grain-farming family, Tricia notes: "My parents are very hard workers, and my grandparents are very hard workers - so you know we definitely had to work."
Work on the farm in her younger days included collecting eggs and taking the slop out to the chickens. When it was time to graduate to mowing the farm-size lawn, she was so "super-skinny" she kept triggering the emergency shut-off. "The machine always thought I was falling off," she says. There were other clues that Tricia had unique physical attributes that would one day make her ideal for modelling. Her feet were so narrow she could barely find shoes, and she often towered above her peers.
But far from walking runways, Tricia was walking the halls of her small, rural school, and she was stung when a teacher commented to one of Tricia's sisters that she looked like "legs and a head." Able to laugh about it in retrospect, Tricia says she now loves the fact that she has long legs, but at the age of 10, she was very self-conscious. "I grew up trying to stuff myself to gain weight and it just wouldn't work. It works now, mind you," she laughs. Luckily, she found her niche in basketball and volleyball and sidestepped the usual kid torments.
"I look back at it and I feel really blessed by the way I grew up. I remember just running around barefoot, and sometimes in the summer having lunch out in the garden because you go out there and pick some carrots for Mom or whatever for lunch and you end up having a few beans here and there, some tomatoes, shelling a bunch of peas, and by the time you get into the house you're full. I had a kind of really free, open lifestyle," she says.
Ironically, it was the same teacher that made the "legs and a head" comment who twigged Tricia to her potential at the age of 13, when he played Robert Palmer's famous Addicted to Love music video in class. Oblivious to the MTV generation, Tricia didn't see the fuss.
"Everybody else in the class was like, ‘This is disrespectful to women!' I didn't see anything wrong with it." Tricia didn't realize she was seeing a mirror of herself. She recalls the teacher asking, "Who's the only one in this class that could be in that video?" To her surprise, everybody said her name. "That was the first time, I guess, that people said I should be a model or that I was what society considered beautiful."
Despite that nudge toward the catwalk, Tricia was considering a university degree in animal psychology at the age of 17. Then, fate called. While standing in a movie line in Edmonton with her high school sweetheart, Tricia ran into a friend of her sister's, who was an emerging model. She gave Tricia her agent's card. "My friends were goading me into it," Tricia says, but she didn't dial. "At 17, you don't think you look like the cover of a magazine. You don't know about airbrushing, you don't know about hair and makeup and lighting and all that kind of stuff."
Tricia might have remained in obscurity, but her sister's friend passed Tricia's number on to the agent. Kelly Streit of Mode Models saw enough in the 5'10" brunette, despite her having no experience, to send her to New York. Tricia did test shots while staying at the home of Jerry and Eileen Ford, co-founders of international modelling agency Ford Models, and then went to Montreal, where she was draped in bridal wear for a wedding magazine. "I remember coming home after that three weeks and having $36,000."
At that point, she figured, "OK, maybe I should try this for a year, because I'll get to travel and see Europe."
Two months shy of her 18th birthday, she was sent to Milan, a fashion capital crawling with party promoters in search of pretty young things to lure into clubs. "It was a very odd experience for me, because you're basically a bunch of high school and college-age kids living together with no guidelines - no classes to attend, no grades to get - and I remember a lot of kids just kind of going crazy and partying." Rather than fall into that trap, Tricia focused on booking gigs, instead. "Growing up having to be responsible and having to work hard, you don't take things for granted as much."
Prairie values may initially have saved her from sin, but within a couple of months it became apparent they might also be saving her life. "[My roommate] had gone out Saturday night and we were at a grocery store on Sunday and I remember her having some sort of a seizure and me riding in an ambulance with her to the hospital. She didn't want me to tell the doctors that she had taken drugs. I said, ‘I can't not tell the doctor that you've taken drugs. I mean, maybe you're overdosing.' That was my first experience of people doing drugs and that really kind of scared me. If you get sidelined by a bunch of silliness, you're not going to achieve your goals."
Shortly after turning 18, Tricia won the 1992 Ford Supermodel of the World contest. Recovering from her initial shock, she parlayed that win into assignments for the biggest names in fashion, including Armani, Versace, Channel, and Dolce & Gabbana. "It was always a business to me - it wasn't like it was my dream to be a fashion model."
But the common sense that made Tricia a top cover girl for Vogue, Elle and Cosmopolitan tripped her up when she hosted the first season of Canada's Next Top Model . "I was trying to instill in the girls that it's a business and you have to be smart about it ... and that's just not fun TV. So it was best for me to part ways, because I couldn't be the one to go, ‘You gotta be fierce!' ... and try to do the cattiness and stuff. I'm not a catty person."
What was more important for Tricia was to look for new challenges. "I wanted to travel less and to use my mind more," she says. She auditioned for the last vacant spot at an advanced on-camera acting class at the Penny Templeton Studio in New York - and that's where her love for acting was spawned. Tricia finally had a dream, so she cut ties with New York and with modelling, and moved to L.A. in 2001.
After changing modelling agencies and finding a manager who believed in her, she landed her celebrity-making role on Battlestar Galactica a year after arriving in L.A., even though her lack of ex-perience initially made the producers nervous. "They had to debate it internally forever." She ended up being the last to cast and the first to shoot among an illustrious ensemble. "I was a sponge, I would watch ... what the other actors would do before scenes and how they talked to the director, and realized that I had to just believe in myself and do what worked for me," she says.
That remains her mantra when she makes intriguing bold choices, whether it be as a dominatrix in Walk All Over Me ; her terrifying part in the indie thriller Open House , opposite Anna Paquin, who also wrote and directed it; or her controversial 2007 Playboy cover.
Still a self-described "tomboy," Tricia's Playboy spread exposed more than just skin - it exposed the walking contradiction of a strong-willed, independent woman who is also seen by some as a sex object.
"Coming from a modelling background, I am certainly not a prude and I think photographing the body can be art," she says. By that point in her life, Tricia was married to entertainment lawyer Jonathan Marshall, who impressed her as an honest and caring human being who wasn't afraid to speak his mind. While discussing the Playboy shoot, some apprehension did emerge for the couple. "[Our] concerns were basically: how do we think this will be received? Have I moved beyond modelling enough? Will it be bad for my career, etcetera ... We ultimately decided to go for it and I'm very happy we did."
The publicity of the Playboy feature only furthered her career, but Tricia has seen enough of the world now to treasure her homeland. She and Marshall are building a green vacation house next to her childhood farm in Donalda. "Personally, I can't quantify in words how important it would be to me to have a home on the land that I grew up on."
In addition to the green home, she also dreams of opening a shelter for the furry set. "I have always loved animals and I say quite often - and fully feel that way - that I like animals more than I like people. They are just so true and honest and have no agendas."
Her blunt honesty is evident in her advice to model/actor hopefuls. "Don't do it if you have stars in your eyes ... It's sad to see when somebody's self-worth gets wrapped up into it and then they get taken advantage of by the leeches that are out there. If you realize that it's work and are willing to train and study, then be smart, take care of yourself and surround yourself with people who have a similar mindset," she says.
Despite her obvious acting success, Tricia's commitment to the craft precludes ego, and she is not too shy to say she still has lots to learn from other actors. "I want to be challenged and do good work," she says. She will admit to having one grand ambition, one that is every actor's Holy Grail: "OK, one goal I have is to get to a place in my career where I don't have to audition!" She may soon get her wish, as industry hype hints she's primed for fame.
As Wreggitt observed while pitching The Dealership pilot to networks in L.A. in the hope of triggering a full series order: "There's a lot of interest in her. I think she's poised to do great things." The sentiment is echoed by Fox's executive vice-president of casting, Marcia Shulman, who said in a TV Guide interview about Walk All Over Me : "She was so incredible in it. She had a pretty remarkable range. She showed vulnerability and strength. She is a star."
