Megan Park never set out to become one of Hollywood’s most prominent tellers of young adult stories. But through her indie films, “The Fallout” and “My Old Ass,” and now a new TV series, the Ontario-born actor-turned-filmmaker has tapped into the universal angst of coming of age.
With “Sterling Point,” premiering Aug. 5 on Prime Video, Park returns to the Muskoka shores where she spent her childhood summers. Executive produced by “Gossip Girl” creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, the show follows Annie Jacobson (Ella Rubin), a 17-year-old New Yorker who learns her estranged grandfather bequeathed property in Canada to her and her adopted twin brother, Connor (Keen Ruffalo). Upon arrival, Annie discovers her grandfather owned a small island called Sterling Point — only to find another girl, Ramona (Amélie Hoeferle), already living there and claiming the property belongs to her grandfather. Annie and Ramona, as it turns out, share a common parent.
“I’d always really wanted to create a YA show that, at the core of it, was not just a romantic story (but) more about family and sisterhood,” Park told the Star. As someone with many adopted family members, she was particularly interested in exploring the “nature vs. nurture” debate with “these two sisters who are connected by this mother — one biologically, one adopted — and how her death has affected both of their lives.”
“Sterling Point” retains Park’s deep empathy for young people navigating high-stakes emotions with humour, while clearly sharing DNA with classic teen dramas like “The O.C.,” which Schwartz created, and “Dawson’s Creek.” According to Savage, Park’s pilot script hit all the genre’s essential beats: a flawed, relatable protagonist and a dynamic core group sharing new experiences. With the extensive help of Schwartz and Savage as her co-showrunners, Park then expanded what could have been another 90-minute film into a sweeping, eight-episode series.
“As we’ve gotten older, we’ve come to learn that you can come of age at any age,” Schwartz said of the genre’s “timeless” appeal. “But these stories where people are discovering these firsts — first love, first friendships — feel so epic. It’s such a rich terrain to mine. Making shows for this audience is so fun because, when it connects with an audience of this age, they keep coming back to it and it informs their lives.”
Naturally, as Annie uncovers the truth about her mother and connects with a sister she never knew existed, she becomes entangled in a love triangle between Rory (Daniel Quinn-Toye), a childhood friend whose family summers on the lake, and Ellis (Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie), a working-class local with a heart of gold.
Ellis comes across as a “hard-to-read introvert” because he grew up isolated without a phone or social media, making him “this super solo-dolo guy” focused on working for his dad, said Whiteduck-Lavoie. The actor immediately identified with Ellis’ “quiet nature boy” persona, having grown up on the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation reservation in rural Quebec. (Ellis’ father, who owns the local marina shop, is played by “The Walking Dead” star Jeffrey Dean Morgan.)
Despite his restrained disposition, Ellis “falls in love instantly” with Annie’s clumsy, endearing nature rather than writing her off as another arrogant “city kid,” Whiteduck-Lavoie added. Though she arrives as a “little ball of chaos” on the island, Ellis quickly becomes invested in her story and “gets Annie to discover more about herself and really dig into what’s really important to her.”
Memories of Kawartha Lakes
Park wove in her own memories of growing up in Kawartha Lakes, attending Camp Queen Elizabeth in Georgian Bay, and spending time in Muskoka (also the setting for “My Old Ass”).
“It really does feel like a timeless place, which was important to the show, and it felt like a place you could escape to,” Park said, adding that she never received any pushback from Amazon or Margot Robbie’s production company LuckyChap to set or shoot the show elsewhere.
The filmmaker joked that there was also one element that makes “Sterling Point” feel like a show from a bygone era: “There is sh—ty cell service there, so it was great because I was like, ‘I don’t want to show cell phones. We’ll just say there’s no service. We never have to deal with it ever again!’”
While Park did not want to make “Sterling Point” “so specific that the rest of the world couldn’t imagine themselves being there,” the show contains numerous Canadian references: Annie jokes that she thought all Canadians were naturally polite; the characters munch on BeaverTails; and the fictional café serves a “Canadiano” rather than an Americano.
“It’s really cool to show the world the beauty of Canada and not pretend that it’s something else,” Savage said. Though she graduated from the University of Toronto, Savage spent her summers back home in Calgary — meaning she never experienced cottage country firsthand until making “Sterling Point.”
Both the Canadian and foreign cast and crew compared the experience of making the first season to going away for camp, with Whiteduck-Lavoie calling it “the best summer” of his life. That cross-border camaraderie wasn’t without its humorous moments, either. The Americans “arrived at a sensitive moment in U.S.-Canadian relations that had been tested in ways that we had previously not experienced,” Schwartz quipped, “so we did a lot of apologizing as well.”
A cottage country setting
But when she first returned to Muskoka a few years ago after a long time away, Park was “shocked” by how much had changed on the waterfront. That cultural shift is front and centre in “Sterling Point,” which explores the tension between working-class locals and wealthy vacationers.
Citing a recent Toronto Life article about Muskoka residences, Park pointed out that while authorities can fine property owners $1,000 per illegally felled tree or damaged rock face, those building $50-million mega-mansions simply pay the penalty and build anyway.
“There is a huge problem up there environmentally as well. It’s not so much that there’s too much tourism; it’s just that people are tearing down the land and destroying it to build these huge mega-mansions. And then a lot of the times, they’re just sitting empty all summer,” Park said. “If we had a Season 2, that would be something that would be fun to dive even deeper into, because I feel like the tensions are getting higher and higher with, ‘What are (the authorities) going to do to protect Muskoka?’”
“Sterling Point” is just the latest TV series to introduce Ontario cottage country to a wider audience. (Coincidentally, “Heated Rivalry” star Ksenia Daniela Kharlamova has a multi-episode arc in “Sterling Point” as another main character’s love interest.)
For Savage, the “really exciting” international success of “Heated Rivalry” stands in stark contrast to the early 1990s, when she struggled to find a Canadian PhD program in film and ultimately moved to the U.S. to pursue her degree at the University of Iowa. “It just shows that there’s no limits,” she said of Canadian content. “It doesn’t feel like it has to be this small niche thing that’s only for a certain audience. It’s for everybody.”
Casting homegrown talent
In casting “Sterling Point,” Park was adamant about featuring as much homegrown talent as possible, leading her to actors like Whiteduck-Lavoie. But early in his career, navigating Quebec’s smaller film scene as a teen, Whiteduck-Lavoie wrestled with tokenism and self-doubt. “I was questioning if I was in the business for the right reasons, or if I was only getting cast because I’m Indigenous and not because I’m a good actor,” he said. Though he nearly quit the profession, taking on a broader range of characters over time reignited his love for the job.
“It’s such an honour to know that there’s probably young Indigenous or Canadian kids that are going to see the show and see themselves in Ellis. I remember how ‘Trickster’ impacted me when I was a kid,” Whiteduck-Lavoie added, referring to the CBC series starring Joel Oulette.
Park noted that one of the silver linings of the pandemic was the advent of Zoom and the rise of remote work. “I’m starting, already, my third movie and an entire TV show from a small town in Southwestern Ontario and only having to go into Toronto occasionally, so that’s pretty crazy,” she said.
Whereas past generations of actors, especially Canadians, relocated to New York or Los Angeles “to be in the mix,” actors can now audition from anywhere via self-tapes — a change that Park believes levels the playing field. “I definitely see a shift of people being able to move wherever they want in the world and still have thriving careers,” she said. “My career has never thrived more than since I moved back home.”
