Kaelen Ohm says what got her as a fearless young skier better and faster down mountains in small-town Canada now drives her climb onto everyone’s call sheets as a go-for-it actor, filmmaker and musician.
“For some reason, I have branched out from everything I’ve known from my childhood, in following this path completely into the unknown,” Ohm tells The Hollywood Reporter about having gone from being a powder hound in Fernie, British Columbia as a child to her latest film, The Betrayers, world premiering at the Toronto Film Festival. That’s whether she’s executing a steep cliff drop as a skier, where “you have to trust and be really present,” or her Betrayers role as Leora, a mistress to a powerful Israeli politician who ultimately decides “to go off on her own and make a mark in any way she knows.”
That need to go her own way as an actor and artist over two decades includes early TV roles in Hell on Wheels, Taken and Murdoch Mysteries. “Often you are playing against a show’s leads, so I got to walk in and watch Brendan Fraser work for a day,” Ohm recalls of a one-episode stint on Condor alongside the Oscar-winning The Whale star.
Ohm’s breakout TV role came in 2020 as Danielle, a gifted American dancer killed in a car accident in the first episode of Netflix’s bingeable mystery Hit & Run. Her husband, played by Fauda star Lior Raz, then investigates her unexplained death as Ohm’s character appears in flashbacks.
“That was an act of God,” she says of first auditioning for Raz and The Killing and The Handmaid’s Tale creators in New York City. “I thought I’m going to meet these incredible creatives with decades-long careers and I was the least nervous I’d ever been because I thought there’s no way this will work out for me.”
Ohm did get the role, which proved “totally life-changing” for the rising talent. Of course, not long after cameras started rolling on Hit & Run, the COVID pandemic delayed production for a year and, on its return, the shoot took place under stringent health precautions.
“He (Raz) was the person to remind everyone to stay kind and remind everyone that crews were working to get everything done and everyone was trying to help each other and it was a beautiful example of how someone at the top of their game can create a collaborative and friendly environment,” she recounts. A bloody death came to another of Ohm’s popular roles, as Mariella “Mari” Sinclair, a pediatric nurse working through an addiction to opioids, in the MGM+ fantasy horror series From, only this time in the season four finale.
She had already researched addiction withdrawals for her lead role as an alcoholic woman in a marriage on the rocks in the 2023 dark comedy flick Last County. “When I stepped in to play Mariella, I built on that. I really wanted to do justice to her struggle and withdrawal because since the show came out I’d received so many messages from fans who’ve worked through their own addiction and that my character really gave them hope,” Ohm says.
The From series was also a learning experience as the young actor boarded the MGM+ show in the second season. “I was under the pressure of joining an established show with people who’d been working together for a whole season already, and so I took it seriously. But I destroyed myself. It took me months to recover,” Ohm recalled.
Having done a number of horror pics since, she has mastered how to take herself seriously on set, before shaking off her character’s demons after getting home at night. She recalls an especially emotional exit on From in her character’s death scene where Smiley, played by Jamie McGuire, slashes and kills Marielle.
Ohm, intent on being present as a door slowly opened, instinctively screamed bloody murder. “He (McGuire) came through the door, and I and Pegah Ghafoori, who plays Fatima, we screamed so loud – the whole crew was laughing hysterically, because we didn’t need to do that, but it just happened. Actors can really get in the moment and forget reality,” she explains.
Ohm has made a base for herself in Nova Scotia after that Atlantic Canada province stood in for middle America in From, and where she went on to star in Ashlea Wessel’s The Miseries, where her character is trapped within and tormented by a cursed apartment, and Little Lorraine, an indie crime drama that brought her to TIFF last year for another world premiere.
For her latest role in director David Bezmozgis’ The Betrayers, a thriller set in Crimea that plunges two Soviet-era Jews — a disgraced Israeli politician and a 1980s KGB informer – into a matrix of personal and political betrayal. Ohm wasn’t sure on first reading the script she was right for the part of Leora, a young Israeli woman intent on climbing that country’s greasy political ladder.
Then her father told her about a great-grandmother whose family was forced off their farm in Poland and into Russia, only to return after the Russian revolution to restart her life with little to go on. “Her life story was shockingly similar to a lot of the points of Leora’s upbringing,” Ohm insists, including having grown up in Israel and turning her back to return to Ukraine for her own leap into the unknown.
And for Ohm, she too — whether in her choice of acting roles or as a musician and filmmaker with her ongoing multimedia project Amaara — has learned to increasingly trade the beaten track for virgin snow on steep slopes, as she did as a young skier. “For me, when something starts to feel too easy, that’s where I want to find the steeper hill to go down, because complacency in creativity can be a dangerous thing. I want to be a little nervous when I step onto a set, because it means I’m calling myself into action,” she explains.
That off-piste future, which includes an upcoming role in Sound & Fury, the feature directorial debut for Charles Wahl, includes directing her own scripted movies beyond music videos for her Amaara project. “I have some scripts in the works and a scripted film is weighing heavily on my mind at the moment, and it’s time to merge the past 20-some years of all of these different things,” Ohm adds about her evolving music, acting and filmmaking backgrounds.
The Betrayers will debut at the Toronto Film Festival on Sept. 12.
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