As stages go, the platform inside the gym at Iqaluit’s Inuksuk High School shouldn’t be imposing. Recessed into a back wall and framed by bright blue paint, it’s a standard-issue institutional space. The lighting is bright and hard, not flattering but functional. Today—June 23, graduation day for the class of 2025—the people on its boards include Anna Lambe. She’s sitting up straight in a chair to the left of a podium as she waits for her turn to speak to the students. And she’s terrified.
You’d think Lambe would be used to public speaking by now. In the seven years since she celebrated her own high school graduation in this very room, she’s emerged as one of Canada’s leading stars in film and television. Now 25, her credits include critically acclaimed roles in the 2018 movie The Grizzlies, CBC’s 2020 supernatural thriller Trickster, HBO’s True Detective: Night Country starring Jodie Foster and, this year, North of North, which landed on Rolling Stone’s top 10 list of the best shows of 2025. She’s walked red carpets, given dozens of thoughtful interviews and fielded questions from film festival audiences. And now, she’s on home turf.
“I was really shaking,” Lambe says, looking back on that day during a September interview from London, England, where she was on a small vacation. “I was like, ‘I want to say something meaningful. I want to say something I wanted to hear when I was 17 years old.’”
She’d written a draft of a speech a couple of days before, thrown it away, then tried again. Next, she called her dad and, taking a deep breath, read him the text. “It was just silence for a few seconds and then, ‘Wow. Yeah. That’s what a 17-year-old wants to hear,’” Lambe says, recalling her father’s reaction. Her fear had been she’d burden the students with an overstated sense they were fulfilling the dreams of past generations or paving the way for the next. “We’re kind of setting these really high expectations that youth continue to be bigger and better and stronger and more resilient, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for making mistakes and learning and growing,” she says. “The feeling of having to be perfect, right from the get-go, is terrifying.”
Lambe knows that feeling. She wrestled with her sense of self-worth and identity as a young Inuk growing up in Iqaluit and, as a possible acting career beckoned, confidence in her abilities. Her hometown, after all, was definitely not Hollywood. Those doubts didn’t fall away easily, but they let go over time. Lambe’s voice grew along with her confidence, and she’s emerged not only as an artist but also as one of the most eloquent and empathetic voices representing the culture, identity and experience of young Inuit today.
“She’s such a natural leader,” says Miranda de Pencier, the director of The Grizzlies who cast Lambe in her first professional role. “I’ve seen her come into her own… Even when people are challenging her on social media or wherever, she’s able to turn it back to people, even in conflict, and have conversations that are really honest in a way that preserves this openness about her.”
That talent—the ability to share ideas and stories—is important. The North occupies a mythic place in the Canadian imagination. But what most people know about it comes from the clipped voice of news coverage, at best. They may understand issues in abstract, intellectual ways, but they don’t relate on a gut level. Lambe’s presence changes that. She delivers more than something to think about. She communicates northern realities that have been too easily overlooked for too long. You feel them—the good and the bad, the messy and the funny.
ANNA LAMBE'S first onscreen appearance happens about five minutes into The Grizzlies. She’s sitting among a cluster of teenagers outside the co-op in their small community—the story is set in Kugluktuk, but the movie was mostly shot in Iqaluit—as the new history teacher at their high school drives past after being picked up at the airport.
The teacher, a wide-eyed young man from southern Canada, is catching his first glimpse of the grittier features of modern Arctic life: the community freezer where hunters store harvests, the arena that can’t make ice, shabby and crowded housing, road dust and the occasional loose dog.
The kids outside the co-op, who lost another friend to suicide in the movie’s opening moments, size up the teacher as he rolls by. Their expressions mix a bitter indifference—they’ve seen this teacher’s type too many times before—and inarticulate grief over the forces that drove a friend to become the latest statistic in Nunavut’s suicide crisis. Lambe’s character, Spring, doesn’t even look up.
The Grizzlies goes on to tell the story, based on true events, of how the teacher and the students eventually find common ground, as well as shared empathy and purpose, by playing, of all things, lacrosse. Along the way, the movie explores the challenges of modern Inuit life—food insecurity, mental health, family violence, substance abuse—as well as the joys of deep relationships and the power of finding identity and place in a world that too often shows only passing concern, if any at all.
The movie’s achievement is that it presents these themes without resorting to clichés, tropes, stereotypes or what Variety described in its enthusiastic review as “gooey, overly saccharine manipulation.” Instead, The Grizzlies gives audiences authentic, heartfelt storytelling.
Lambe brings life to such stories, although it’s wrong to burden her with “the voice of a generation” label. She belongs to a cohort of Inuit artists and creators sharing their experiences and ideas—people such as songwriter, author and visual artist Tanya Tagaq, fashion designer Victoria Kakuktinniq and filmmakers Alethea Arnaquq-Baril and Stacey Aglok MacDonald, the creators of North of North and the producers for The Grizzlies.
But as an actor, Lambe has a larger platform to share her insights. And she does it with courage and clarity. Those traits developed early, something she credits in large part, though not exclusively, to her father, an RCMP officer. “My dad has always been a great writer and a great speaker, which I think he got from his dad,” she says, adding he was not shy about reading her essays and public-speaking assignments for school and giving notes. It irritated her at times, she admits, but “then you get older and it really, really makes a difference.”
In high school, Lambe was a typical kid. She liked drama class and the boy band One Direction. She played sports, joining Nunavut’s junior women’s volleyball team (a sport her mother also played) at the 2018 Arctic Winter Games in Hay River. She also competed in badminton at the 2017 North American Indigenous Games in Toronto, where she won a bronze medal in under-19 girls doubles.
Despite coming from a strong family, a sense of shame about her identity shadowed Lambe’s early years. “As young Inuit, and even Indigenous people as a whole… we are often fed really negative stereotypes about our own people in media and on television,” she told Gordon Spence on the Roots and Hoots podcast in 2021. “You see it and you hear it so many times that you start to internalize it.”
That self-doubt intertwines with a young person’s world view in damaging ways. As a girl, she told her mother she wanted to bleach her hair so she would be pretty. “I wanted to have blue eyes and all these different things,” she said on the podcast. “It wasn’t until high school that I began to critically analyze all of these feelings I was having about my identity, my culture and how I grew up.”
A turning point materialized in early 2016, when an unusual notice circulated in schools and community centres around Nunavut and the NWT. The production team behind The Grizzlies was looking for teens to participate in week-long workshops as a first low-key step in the casting process. de Pencier and the casting director travelled to several communities to meet young people. Hundreds more submitted videos, using any available camera, in what amounted to a work-from-home version of an open casting call. One submission even arrived on a 1990s-era videocassette.
In Iqaluit, Lambe’s drama teacher at Inuksuk encouraged her to audition. Lambe was nervous and uncertain, questioning why she thought she could even be an actor. But she summoned her courage and projected all the fake confidence she could muster during her first meeting with the filmmakers.
Whatever she projected resonated with de Pencier and The Grizzlies team. They invited Lambe, then in Grade 10, to join one of the workshops in Iqaluit, which featured activities ranging from acting and camera work to hip-hop dancing, Greenlandic mask work and throat singing. At the end, every student was invited to formally audition for the movie, if they wanted to. Lambe took her chance and de Pencier, seeing “something going on behind the eye” in the hardworking, intelligent but introverted teenager’s demeanour, brought her into the cast.
The Grizzlies premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2018 and went into theatrical release the following spring, earning glowing notices from influential publications. The Los Angeles Times delivered raves, saying the movie “shines a revealing light on a historically marginalized community.” The Hollywood Reporter praised it as “bracingly unsentimental and transcendently moving.”
Lambe also earned a Canadian Screen Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. But she had ideas beyond acting and, after graduating high school, enrolled in the international development program at the University of Ottawa. By this time, she was starting to see herself as an activist, publicly challenging a Nunavut MLA over insensitive remarks about two-spirited Inuit. Similarly, her decision to study international development came from the same place, a desire to help the territory find solutions to its issues, especially the housing crisis. “International development seemed like the best fit, being able to study how development is in other places in the world and how that could apply to the North.”
LAMBE IS STILL a couple of semesters shy of completing her degree thanks to an acting career that’s taken off, especially after True Detective and North of North. She recently completed work on an independent movie called The Heart of the South, a psychological thriller about a young Inuk artist far from her home community, directed and co-written by Nyla Innuksuk. Lambe also shares the screen with Brad Pitt and J.K. Simmons in the upcoming Heart of the Beast.
When she began her studies, Lambe considered herself someone who had acted but not an actor. Nevertheless, something still tugged. At home from school, she noticed a casting call on Facebook for the six-part CBC series Trickster, but she resisted the temptation to audition.
She gave in after a week, made a last-minute video and then almost missed the submission deadline due to Nunavut’s notoriously unreliable internet service. But she got the part and discovered something about herself. “It was like, ‘I really enjoy acting. This is somewhere where I feel like my voice and my background and my story is heard,’” she told Roots and Hoots. “From that point on, I just decided to pursue acting.”
Lambe signed with an agent and started going to auditions, with a view that her acting work could be another expression of the ideas that led her to international development. “The artistry and the advocacy, they go hand in hand,” she says, noting that the Inuit story has historically been told inaccurately, if at all, and that her identity and career are inherently political. “It’s so important to reclaim our story and to make sure we rewrite it so that it’s truly what we are.”
That perspective is evident in all of Lambe’s work, perhaps most influentially in North of North. The series, a co-production of CBC, Netflix and APTN, is a warm and approachable comedy. But it has a unique impact—it makes the Arctic relatable to audiences that might otherwise see only decades-old stereotypes or dismiss it entirely as a remote and alien place.
The series offers a light-hearted take on modern community life, centring on Siaja, a young mother. A photo negative of Lambe’s dark role in True Detective, the character feels a loss of purpose in her life as her daughter starts school (“Her world is getting bigger. And I’m jealous of a child!” Siaja exclaims in the opening episode).
Her husband, the community’s self-absorbed golden boy, is no help, treating Siaja like arm candy in public and a domestic helper at home. She decides to leave and finds a job, a tenuous one, as the executive assistant to the manager of the community centre, and she sets off to rebuild her sense of self and long-overlooked connections in the community.
Mishaps and misadventures follow as she navigates her new path and seeks to repair the damage to relationships brought on by her old one. The setting of treeless landscapes and subsistence hunting may be new to viewers unfamiliar with the Arctic, but the emotional honesty will be familiar to all. “There needs to be an understanding that our lives look slightly different from yours,” Lambe says, “but we live and we exist so similar to you. We’re still human beings who have families and lives and care about things. We’re so much like the rest of the world, just colder.”
This is an important message today as the Arctic takes on a new role in national economic and security policy. Canada is on the cusp of making massive investments in the North. To get it right, it’s important to understand the place not only as a frontier for sovereignty, but equally as a homeland to the people and cultures who’ve always lived there.
When de Pencier made her first trip to Kugluktuk to start work on The Grizzlies, she discovered the risk of misunderstanding. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, that’s Canada. That’s my country. Whoa.’ That’s not my experience growing up.”
But it was Lambe’s. Like the graduating students at Inuksuk High School in June, she’s wrestled with expectations on all sides and fear of the unknown. Knowing you’re respected can ease those unsettling feelings. And even without that knowledge, self-confidence can still give people the opportunity to find their way, which is a good thing to say to a 17-year-old. “I think you almost make yourself stuck by wondering, ‘Is this the best thing for my community? Is this the best thing to do?’” Lambe says. “Just do the damn thing.”
