Canadian screenwriter and actress Nia Vardalos was recently fêted as one of The Hollywood Reporter’s Most Powerful Women in Canadian Entertainment – an inaugural and diverse list that the publication compiled “to showcase not just the female talent running TV and film sets across the border, but to celebrate the rainbow of identities that make up Canada’s film, TV and music industries.”  

The list includes recognizable heavyweights like Sandra Oh, Alanis Morissette, Tatiana Maslany, Alessia Cara, Shania Twain and Tracey Deer alongside behind-the-scenes industry leaders like TIFF Chief Programming Officer Anita Lee and breakout stars like Indigenous director Danis Goulet. So, when included among such illustrious company, what does it mean to the 61-year-old Vardalos to be a powerful woman in entertainment today? 

The actress believes it is the ability to tell stories that matter. “I think it is a moment of reckoning with yourself to say, ‘You have this power. Who can you hire? Who can you promote?’” She adds that, “To be a woman in the industry means that you’ve broken through every single barrier.” 

Vardalos, of course, is the reason Canada can lay claim one of the highest-grossing romantic comedies of all time: My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002). She was only trying to find a job at the time and, when she couldn’t, she created one for herself by writing the fictionalized story of her life and then playing the lead character, Toula.

Two decades later, the film is now a successful franchise with a sequel and a third installment, which she directed and released in September last year. Vardalos says she tries to write female storylines and characters so that women in the audience will think, “‘Well, it’s about time I’d like to see the mom getting married in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2.’” She notes that, “I did that because [actress] Lainie [Kazan, in her mid-70s at the time] had told me that roles had dried up for her and I thought, ‘Well, I’m gonna make her the lead.’”

Vardalos, meanwhile, offers simple and straightforward advice for anyone writing female characters – have compassion and care for the characters, give women last names and “employment opportunities other than mom and to make sure that we have agency in the script so that we aren’t just an appendage of the male characters.”

She is also tired of older women just playing mom roles. 

“I think when we see a male who is in his 70s, almost immediately that person is described by their profession,” Vardalos says. “So they’ve made a bucket list. It’s a professor and a teacher and this and that and they’re going off to have sex with a bunch of women in Egypt. Right? And that is the reverse for women. It’s always a bunch of moms and that story is boring because we don’t want to see that anymore. We want to see we want wish fulfillment. Like moms watch Emily in Paris. I was on the peloton watching Netflix’s One Day and I was eating it up.”

And Vardalos’ feelings about women and age carry over into her off-screen life too. When she walks into a meeting, for example, she immediately wants to know where you’re from and where you were raised. She feels that that’s what defines a person – not their age or marital status.

“I don’t care what decade they grew up in because it will always depend on where they grew up,” Vardalos says. “Because someone who grew up in Bangladesh in the ‘70s and someone who grew up in Winnipeg in the ‘70s has a largely diverse and different experience.”

Vardalos believes that the question of age is usually reserved for women, noting that “if Robert De Niro won an award today, we wouldn’t say, ‘At 80, how do you feel about your career so far?’ People would say, ‘How did you feel about working with Scorsese again?’  

“I’d rather hear a woman come into the meeting and say, ‘I just came through traffic and I found a back alley and I got here in 10 minutes. I’m triumphant.’ That’s who I want to meet.”

Today, Vardalos says she’s in a largely transitory phase because her creative instincts took over during the pandemic. And then, with the SAG-AFTRA and Hollywood writers strikes last year, she “wrote like crazy.” She even created an audible series about motivational speakers called Motivated! and recorded 10 episodes “because I was going to go crazy during that pandemic.”

It’s at this point that she reveals that she cannot be idle. To that end, she has three screenplays and two TV shows that she’s now shopping. As well, the actress, known for her comedic edge, wants to do a drama. So, just as she did when penning My Big Fat Greek Wedding, she simply wrote one for herself that’s in the works.

Vardalos is, at the end of the day, a storyteller who writes stories in which she can see herself. And her mantra is simple: 

“There will be so many naysayers, but you just do your thing. Make your movies. Open your barbecue shop. Do what you want to do because no one’s going to give you permission or no one’s going to invite you to do it. We have to keep doing it ourselves.”

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