Riverdale star Tiera Skovbye: ‘Canadians always feel like we have to prove ourselves more’

After messing up her third audition for Riverdale, Tiera Skovbye burst into tears. The CW’s pulpy Archie Comics adaptation – shown in the UK on Netflix – was casting the key role of Betty Cooper before the first season. “I was so nervous in my third callback that I just forgot all my lines,” recalls Skovbye. “I remember leaving that audition and just crying. I told my mum, ‘I quit. I’m done. I’m a terrible actor. This was the worst mistake ever.’” The role went to Lili Reinhart – but clearly Riverdale was in the stars. Not long afterwards, Skovbye was cast as Betty’s sister, Polly. Riverdale became a hit, and the 25-year-old actor is now in the ascendancy, with a lead role in an NBC-syndicated drama and a million-strong following on Instagram. Some mistake.

Skovbye speaks to me over Zoom from Vancouver, the city where she has lived most of her life. She waxes lyrical about her latest film, 2 Hearts, a sentimental drama about organ donation set across two timelines, years apart (I suppose you could call it The Godfather II meets Will Smith’s Seven Pounds). 2 Hearts is an exercise in lachrymosity, in which Skovbye plays Sam, the partner of the ill-fated young Chris (Jacob Elordi). Skovbye’s easy-going, earnest persona grounds the film among a host of broad performances, though Sam is put through the emotional thresher as much as anyone. To tap into the character’s grief, Skovbye drew on the death of a friend’s mother, which occurred shortly before filming began. “She donated a lot of her organs,” she explains. “For me, it opened up a world of thinking about it more than I ever had, and having a better understanding of what organ donation looks like and what it really means.”

She was drawn to the project by the unlikely real-life story that inspired it. “When a movie is based on a real story, there’s so much more depth to it,” she says. “Because you're trying to honour what happened in somebody’s life, it adds this importance to the story, gives it a bit more weight.”

Skovbye started out as a child actor, after being spotted at a children’s festival when she was six or seven years old. “I don't think I had the very typical child-actor experience,” she says. “I wasn’t home-schooled, or tutored on set ... I feel like I was able to develop a very full character just living a normal life.”

Aside from a great-grandfather who enjoyed a stage career in Sweden, Skovbye’s family did not have a background in the arts. Nonetheless, they remained supportive of her and her sister, Firefly Lane actor Ali Skovbye. She recalls a time when she was up for a role in the Twilight franchise. “I was at summer sleepaway camp for a week when I was 12 or 13, and I got a callback for one of the Twilight movies. There were no cellphones allowed at camp, and my parents called the head office. I thought, ‘Oh no, something bad happened.’ And they said ‘Hey, you got a callback. Do you want to do it?’ I was like, ‘I’m on an island in the middle of nowhere. How am I getting to this audition tomorrow?’ Well, my dad rented a boat, a little speedboat, and drove for two hours to come and get me.” She didn't get the role – but it was still worth it.

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In recent years, she has lent her charm to series such as Riverdale, Once Upon a Time (playing Robin Hood in the fantasy series’ seventh season), true crime series Dirty John and Nurses, a Canadian medical drama that recently started airing in the US on NBC. When it comes to Canadian actors trying to make it south of the border, there can be a “bit of a little-brother-big-brother kind of thing”, says Skovbye. “We always feel like we have to prove ourselves a little bit more. We have to jump through the hurdles of getting visas, of getting down there, of getting seen. Once you get to a point where you’re auditioning there, you have to almost prove you deserve to be there.”

It was a big deal for Nurses to be picked up by NBC – a sign of a growing appreciation in the US for Canadian exports, such as the multi-Emmy-winning Schitt’s Creek. “I think we're breaking down the barriers,” says Skovbye.

The series was also significant on a personal level. Being a series lead, Skovbye explains, was “definitely a responsibility that I’d not felt before”. She sought advice for “being a number one” from sometime Riverdale co-star Chad Michael Murray. “He told me all these little things,” she says. “‘When they call you to set, always be the first one to go. Always be off-book. And always say hello and goodbye to everyone at the start and end of the day.’ It sets the tone for the way we’re going to work, and we’re working really quickly.”

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The work on Nurses did not just have to be quick but unprecedentedly safe as well. After shutting down production midway through season two last year, the series restarted after four months. It was, says Skovbye, the first show in Canada to start filming again. “When we went back, it was like a whole new world ... It was something that had never been done before. But we didn't have a single case, and we didn't shut down once. Apparently, in Toronto, they were using our model and our protocol to send to other productions.”

Just as there is hope to be found for a post-Covid TV industry in the way that Canada has adapted and endured, so, too, there is optimism in 2 Hearts. For all its grand tragedy and conspicuous Christian overtones, the film is ultimately a simple story of resilience in the face of hardship. And while 2 Hearts was made long before the pandemic (roughly two and a half years), its message, argues Skovbye, is needed now more than ever. 

“It's really a story of hope, and I think we need that,” she says. “There's a lot of heartbreak in the world right now. But what this movie shows is even in the darkest of times, with the darkest of events occurring, something beautiful can come out of it in the end.”

2 Hearts is available on digital download from 8 February