If the medium is the message, then the message that I’m far from 24-years-old was loud and clear when I conducted a Skype interview with Sundance breakout star Tatiana Maslany. This was not my usual face-to-face, over-coffee-and-a-snack format, but my schedule was tight and my pick-of-the-month was slammed with meetings and auditions with some of the biggest wigs in Hollywood.

I suppose I could have skipped to the next hot Canadian talent in my ones-to-watch queue, but the fact that this 24-year-old Regina native had just won the Sundance Jury Prize for best breakout performance in Adriana Maggs’ Grown Up Movie Star (Pope Productions) and that when I called she was reading for the part of a scooter-riding student in Larry Crowne – the new Tom Hanks/Julia Roberts pic – made me want her even more.

She’d been in L.A. for weeks when we finally made contact. Thanks in large part to her Sundance prize and new U.S. management contract with Magnolia Entertainment, doors had flung open all over the place. Ridley Scott (American Gangster), Michael London (Milk), J.J. Abrams (Star Trek)… You name the Hollywood heavy, she was meeting with his people.

‘The [Sundance] prize precedes me in any room I walk into, which is a lot of pressure, good pressure. If parts are available to me because of the award, then all the more reason to kill it in the audition,’ says Maslany. Despite her recent accolades, she describes herself as ‘awkward’ and ‘in obscurity,’ which is precisely how I’m feeling as I shoot questions at her through my computer screen.

But my young and unselfconscious subject was clearly in her element on Skype. Makeup-less, wearing a black hoodie and ponytail – with nothing remarkable in the backdrop but the white walls of a sparsely decorated apartment where she was shacked up – she also seemed right at home as a transient, in L.A., sucking on a soy latte, talking to media.

This avid tap dancer and long-standing member of the General Fools Improv Theatre Company seems to possess an emotional bravery beyond her years, favoring the gritty, edgy and dark over straight-up comedy any day. But she says a great story, even a dark one, will always find an element of comedy.

‘When characters are real and complicated, they’ll collide against each other and humor will naturally reveal itself.’ With that in mind, she’d ‘love, looove’ to do films with directing faves Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson and Woody Allen.

Despite a smattering of lead indie film roles (Grown Up Movie Star, Defendor, Ginger Snaps II: Unleashed) Maslany, who won a 2009 Gemini Award for best performance by an actress in a guest role on Flashpoint, is no stranger to TV. She has a long list of Canadian small-screen credits (recurring roles on Heartland, Being Erica and Instant Star, Bloodletting, The Listener), but she says her heart is in features. ‘There’s a conciseness to film and less pressure in the process.’

She initially wavered between Vancouver and Toronto when she decided to forgo university and leave Regina to pursue a full-time acting career in 2005. She chose the latter because of the opportunity to get leading parts in Canadian indie films. She was less interested in the sci-fi or big-budget U.S. stuff going on in Vancouver, where she says she’d have less of a chance to do the work she’s most attracted to. ‘We’re just best at telling our own stories and I see more of that in Toronto.’

She does love L.A. though. It’s her first visit and it’s nothing like she thought it would be. ‘I’ve been meeting with a lot of cool people who like hanging out with other cool people,’ she says in a refreshing tone of raw enthusiasm.

In addition to the Larry Crowne audition, she was very excited about reading for a part in the new untitled Steve Carell/Dan Fogelman comedy, rumored to be costarring Ryan Gosling. ‘They’re so down to earth,’ she says referring to Carell’s people at Carousal Productions. She seems to truly believe the ‘majority of people [in L.A.] are so not phony.’

After three and a half weeks, 10 auditions, countless meetings and the discovery of the best little coffee shop on Abbot Kinney, the little Prairie girl who could finally packs it in. She may or may not have found her Margot Tenenbaum or Annie Hall or Roller Girl on this trip, but she gleefully heads home to T.O. knowing she’ll be back. ‘I’m just happy to be transient for a while.’

Agent: Jennifer Gossack, Characters Talent Agency