What a glamorous job Leah Renee has.
“The other day, you should have seen me, I was completely covered in garbage,” Renee said.
Um … that was part of your new show Satisfaction, right?
“Yes, I probably should have said that first,” Renee said. “This was part of the show, just to be clear.”
So what part of Satisfaction – a new Canadian sitcom that debuts Monday, June 24 on CTV – had Renee sifting through trash?
“We had a scene where I was rolling around in a garbage dumpster,” she explained. “I had garbage and eggshells and lettuce in my hair. I was covered in mustard. As I was walking by people on set, you would hear guys going, ‘What is that smell?’ And then it would be like, ‘Oh … it’s Leah.’ ”
It gets worse.
“Then at the end of that day, we had to get all that stuff out of my hair,” Renee added. “So I went to the hair and makeup ladies, and they have one of those sinks that you see in hair salons, where you lie back. What ended up happening was, there was so much junk and garbage in my hair that it ended up clogging the sink. And the sink started to eat my hair.
“They had to dump conditioner down, get my hair untangled, it took three people three hours to untangle my hair. I sat there for three hours, and they were really freaking out. There was sheer panic on the hair stylist’s face. I’ll bet she was thinking, ‘We’re going to have to shave Leah’s head and get her a wig.’ ”
Renee admitted that while this was occurring, she had time to reflect on whether she was getting paid enough.
“But it was worth it,” she said. “Because I keep hearing from everybody that it was the funniest scene and it turned out really well.”
Satisfaction stars Renee as Maggie (pictured above centre), Luke Macfarlane as Maggie’s boyfriend Jason (above right) and Ryan Belleville as Mark (above left). Maggie, Jason and Mark all live together.
Renee is happy to be doing a comedy following her role on the short-lived drama The Playboy Club, which was cancelled by NBC after only three episodes in 2011.
“There was a lot of hype for that show and people were really hard on it,” Renee recalled. “It was a lot tamer than people had built it up to be in their heads. There wasn’t any nudity, there weren’t a lot of crazy sexy things happening.
“There actually are way more crazy things happening on Satisfaction than there ever would have been on The Playboy Club. But I guess those (bunny) costumes really set people off.”
Of course, Renee’s character in Satisfaction is a waitress in a Hooters-type restaurant.
“Yeah, I like to keep things classy, apparently, in my career,” Renee said.
“Comedy is so much about people’s tastes, but Satisfaction happens to be my taste in comedy, exactly. In this business you read a lot of scripts for various shows, and a lot of them are pretty bad, actually. But when I first read the script for Satisfaction, it made me laugh, and that’s what drew me to it.
“I just hope people find it as funny as I do.”
And that’s not just trash-talking from Leah Renee.
bill.harris@sunmedia.ca
@billharris_tv
