Erika Prevost found acting by accident. Growing up dancing, young Erika was working toward professional dance. Her ultimate goal was to be a backup dancer for a major artist. “My big dream [was] to dance for Janet Jackson or Beyoncé and tour the world.”
She succeeded. At 19, Erika was working as a dancer, chasing her dreams, when a Facebook casting call for the teen dance drama The Next Step was sent her way. She knew that she would have to dance on the show, but it wasn’t until she actually got the job that things started to click into place. “I thought it was a dance role. It was a series regular role,” Erika said. “I was like, ‘Wait, you want me to speak?'” Turns out the whole cast was just like Erika, professional dancers who were cast to have acting roles molded around their personalities.
This sudden introduction to acting was a master class for Erika, and it completely changed her path. Today, Erika is a full-time actor. She graduated from the National Theatre School of Canada and has taken on roles in short films, movies, and TV shows from The Next Step to The Boys.
Erika’s career change gave her perspective on a variety of life lessons. Her approach to career goals, mental health, and the arts have all grown with her acting. Part of this she credits to her parents, a bass player and a former ballet dancer, for surrounding her with music and understanding her decision to pursue a career in the arts. The rest comes down to storytelling, “sharing an experience truthfully to an audience that otherwise might know nothing about that experience.”
For Erika, acting added a new layer to how she could tell stories, using her voice and her movement to bring characters to life. She’s still using her dance skills. She shared that so much of acting is choreography. “My body awareness helps me so much,” she said. Erika explained that blocking, timing lines with movement, and even fight scenes are easier because of her dance background.
Most recently, Erika has been fighting crime as Patty on the police drama Saint-Pierre. Like Erika, Patty is all-in when it comes to her job. “What drew me to Patty is honestly just her sheer love and passion for her job,” Erika shared. “She’s like a kid in a candy store when she’s at work. She just loves everything she does, and I want to be more fearless like that.” Season 2 of Saint-Pierre hasn’t been announced yet, but Erika is hoping there’s more Patty in her future and that we’ll get to see her in the field and dive into her personal life. “I would love to get to know a different side of Patty,” she said.
Patty is one of a few characters who have let Erika exercise another part of her skills and experience, being multilingual. Erika grew up in Japan, living there until she was 5 years old, and when she and her parents returned to Canada, she only spoke Japanese! This relationship with her first language has shaped her understanding of the world and how she communicates in French and English as well. Speaking in multiple languages is Erika’s day-to-day, but she says it opens up a different part of her for acting. “Using different languages to act is such a gift.” Being able to speak French as Patty in Saint-Pierre or Japanese as Tala in The Boys allows Erika to further the stories and experiences of her characters and bring more layers to the lives we witness on screen.
Despite all this progress, Erika is still a dancer at heart. Now, she says her relationship with dance is more “recreational” and “therapeutic.” She takes the occasional hip-hop class in the city and dances at home, using her lyrical and contemporary skills to move or to understand a character better. This transition might shock a younger Erika, but today, she finds it healthy. “…I think I have a really healthy relationship with dance where it’s a space where I can really just have fun, and being good doesn’t matter because that’s not my job anymore, and my livelihood doesn’t depend on my ability.” (That doesn’t mean she doesn’t find herself occasionally tempted to get back to her previous level.)
It seems that dance has taught Erika a lot about love and being able to enjoy art in a variety of ways. She can immerse herself in dance without competing with herself or others, and that bleeds into her other projects. During the pandemic in 2020, and later during the SAG-AFTRA strikes, Erika turned to writing and realized that she could use it to understand her life and her creativity better. She even began to journal in scenes. Now she’s in the pilot stages of creating her own series with director Graeme Campbell. She is also one of the founders of the artists group Snacks & Play, a monthly creative space where actors can support one another, exercise their skills, and share their goals.
Erika has seen her relationships with dance, acting, and writing grow and change over and over again. With that change, she has learned how to express herself, tell new stories, and open up her understanding of the arts to include other people. “In any art form, any artist knows that it’s quite unstable…You can have an amazing year of work, and next year it can be very scarce, so finding inner stability while your environment is extremely unstable can be challenging. So, I think in the arts, at least for me, what helps me with feeling stable and feeling healthy in the arts is faith and community. Those are my two pillars.” She knows that she will find stories that she is meant to tell, and that she will find understanding in other artists, no matter where she is in her journey.
