Katie Cassidy Is a Real Person
This story originally appeared in our April 2013 issue.
Here’s How It Works: some writer talks to a woman — a beautiful, talented, possibly even famous woman — for a controlled amount of time. Then the writer returns to the shadows and, illuminated by the glow of his laptop, dissects the conversation like a code breaker, looking for something surprising, insightful, a kernel of meaning, some lozenge of truth about the Beautiful Woman in question.
It’s all incredibly unfair, of course: an impossible game. How would you like to have your personal and professional life limned based entirely on a single conversation that was shorter than a phone call to your cable company? It requires the kind of pseudo-psychology practiced by college freshmen. And, as everyone knows, college freshmen rarely stumble on anything that resembles Truth.
But, praise the publicity gods, that isn’t always the case. Sometimes that writer talks to someone who is disarmingly unguarded. And it makes the writer’s job harder, actually.
“Well, thank you for realizing I’m a person,” Katie Cassidy says. She’s in Vancouver. I’m in Toronto. We’re talking over the phone. Because I’m a real journalist, looking for whatever Truth I can in any given situation, I did my research going into this interview. And what I saw annoyed me.
Maybe it’s because Cassidy is in Arrow, a hit television series based on the DC Comics character Green Arrow, and so, therefore, much of her media time is taken up by fan boys and girls looking for the next spoiler to feed to their Tumblr followers, but one can’t help but notice she mostly answers questions about Laurel, her character, Green Arrow’s love interest, who also happens to be a whip-smart pro-bono lawyer (who, if her character holds true to the comics will put on some fishnets one of these days, and fight crime as the Black Canary). It sounds a bit like a parent/teacher conference, where Cassidy has to explain the actions of her child, who happens to look just like her, only with a different name. “I’m used to talking about my character,” she says. “but I’m pretty open. People just don’t ask.”
Here’s some Truth: I don’t care about Laurel. Not like the others, anyway. Arrow’s a good pulpy, fun show. But, I kind of do care about Katie Cassidy. Talking to her, it’s hard not to. After all, she laughs at jokes, but not in a way that Famous Women usually laugh at jokes, like it’s part of their job. This sounds just like a girl laughing, no capitalized letters necessary. And so, I start at the obvious place one would start when one starts digging into another person’s life to find their essence, to discover the truth about who they are: I ask her about cheerleading.
“I’m used to talking about my character, but I’m pretty open. People just don’t ask.”
“Really? That’s where you want to go?” she asks, disappointed. That’s telling: it’s as though after she’s been given permission to be real, a joke question is almost an insult. “That’s where you want to start?”
It’s possible that Katie Cassidy assumed I’d start somewhere else: her father is David Cassidy, former pop idol and lead singer of the Partridge Family. She wasn’t raised by him, but he’s in her story. Also, she once dated former pop idol Jesse McCartney, who was a going concern back in the early aughts. She’s been in several canceled shows—symbols of modern day adversity written across her IMDb page; a handful of scary movies; and in Taken, she played the personification of that movie’s icky, paternalistic morals. She wasn’t a virgin, so, of course, she died.
There’s not much to say about her cheerleading days it turns out. She grew up doing competitive gymnastics, and when that ended, cheerleading was the expected outlet for her back handspring abilities. Theatre was more her thing. “Learning about different characters, the psychology behind them, and the brain. It was just more my style,” she says. “You get to take on the persona of somebody else. Going through scripts, you analyze why people behave in certain ways, and then I create their back stories.”
And this is why it’s hard not to care for Katie Cassidy. Not this, but what she said next: “I’ve seen a psychologist since I was 13. It’s very similar because I actually use her sometimes when it comes to creating characters. I often ask, why would this person behave this way, and she makes suggestions. I get to create.”
It’s not exactly a cheerleading anecdote. Now, is this groundbreaking? No. She’s a young woman, raised in California, with a famous father, but raised by her mother and a stepfather. Seeing a psychologist, that’s really not newsworthy. This isn’t the ’70s. Talking about your analyst isn’t edgy. If anything, it’s a sign that she’s probably more well-adjusted than many young women with showbusiness in their blood.
No, what’s winning about this—and it isn’t the first time she mentions her psychologist; she will do it again, touchingly, reverently—is that she claimed at the start that she was open, and it turned out, damn it, she is.
And maybe it’s just the untrained psychology (yes, psychology!) performed by writers in their shadows, or maybe it’s just the willingness of any writer to find humanity in simple sentences and the spaces between them, but suddenly, Katie Cassidy is fragile. And with that fragility comes this credibility, this weight of reality. This person—this woman who fights off bad guys on television and falls in love with
a superhero who, frankly, has a depressingly fit body—is a person.
She left home when she was 18. Her parents told her that if she wasn’t going to college, she’d have to pay her own way. She saved up $7,000 and got a one-bedroom apartment. She took acting jobs she didn’t care for, bad girls mostly, slasher stuff, until she could buy a house. She has a famous dad, but it hasn’t helped her career. When I get off the phone, she’s going to work on her lines. She’ll go to bed early. There’s truth in all that, isn’t there? She tells me I sound nice. Then, it’s over.
But, wait. One more thing: because who cares to read 1,000 words about the tiniest flash of tenderness from an actress, here’s something else she said, free of context: “I want to marry a Canadian, and get duel citizenship and live in Canada for the rest of my life.”
There’s probably some Truth in that, too.
Photography: Kourosh Keshiri
