Club Friday Q&A: Actor Supinder Wraich on Making a Cop Show in 2024
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: Courtesy of CBC
Actor Supinder Wraich stars in CBC’s newest police procedural, Allegiance, about Sabrina Sohal, a high-achieving rookie cop whose dad, the Minister of Public Safety, is arrested for treason at her graduation ceremony. Wraich is best known for playing independent, badass big sister Aqsa on Sort Of, so Sabrina is a very different kind of role—and Allegiance is a different type of cop show. Created by author and screenwriter Anar Ali, the show explores themes of identity, class, power, privilege and restorative justice—none of which traditionally show up in your typical police procedural. Wraich chats with Friday Things about how she discovered acting, what makes Allegiance different from other examples of this genre, and balancing what viewers might expect with what’s right for the story.
How did you get into acting?
Well, I'll start with by saying that I am a second child. A middle child—usually the more disregarded child. I say this as a joke, but I do think that, in terms of theories about why we do the things that we do, there was an element of wanting attention. The other thing I'll say is, I come from the Sikh Punjabi community, which is a patriarchal community. I can’t speak for other families, but for me, it never felt like a community where we could be honest with one another about our feelings, or what was happening inside with us. I think it's particular to being a child of people who have immigrated. In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, first you have to secure housing and take care of so many other things before you can get to your emotional needs being taken care of, right? I’m so grateful to my parents for putting a roof over our heads, working [so hard] so we could go to school, have food, but I remember taking an acting class in university—I was given this monologue, and I started to say the words, and all of this emotion just poured out of me. The character’s lived experience was nothing like mine, but her heart was. She hadn't been allowed to talk about her feelings, either. In that moment, I didn't really even know what acting was, but I got a positive response from people watching, so I was congratulated for doing something well. But I also remember thinking, ‘Whatever this thing is that allows my insides to be outside, I’ve got to do it.’ So, it started there. And it was addictive, in a sense, to get to be somebody else, but still express my own feelings, my own heart. That's really what what made me go to acting classes and sit there and watch other people do the same thing for hours. I just love this art form. It's beautiful.
How did Allegiance come about for you?
I met Anar Ali, who's the creator of the show, years and years ago. We were both at film school together at the Canadian Film Centre. We did a short film together, and she’s a brown, South Asian woman, and so am I, so there was a kinship between us. We were always like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to work on something together again.’ But she went and wrote a book and was doing was a bunch of writing, I went and did some things in another direction, and our paths just didn't cross.
When they were casting Allegiance, I was under contract for Sort Of, so it was on my radar, but I couldn’t audition. Then, when I found out season three of Sort Of was going to be our last season—which was a little surprising and heartbreaking, because I loved that character and that cast, and in terms of groundbreaking series, Sort Of is so special—my agent approached me. I knew it was Anar’s show, but I didn’t think they're looking for me, because I had been playing these characters that were quite different than Sabrina. But my contract had ended and I was looking for a new job, and they asked me to come in for what ended up being more like a chemistry test with Enrico Colantoni, who plays Vince. I remember going into the room with Rico and honestly, something just came alive. I remember thinking, “If I get to play this part, I get to work with Rico and I know that I'll be a better actor for it,” because he takes you out of your head and brings you into the scene, and into the world—and then I thought, “Oh, shit, I need to be better right now so I can get this part!”
A friend of mine was auditioning with me and she texted and told me she didn’t get it, so I thought I probably didn’t get it either. And then I got the call that night at around 8 p.m.
What you’re saying about your chemistry test reminds me of the concept of flow—when you're in that state where things are coming together so easily that you don't even have to think about it, you don’t have to fight for it to work. That is definitely what I strive for when I'm writing, so it’s interesting to hear about it in a different context.
At the beginning of my career, I fought so hard. For a long time, it felt like every part that I got, I fought tooth and nail for. I’d stay up until two, three in the morning, just working for hours and hours on an audition that would maybe be five minutes, max. And then my dad passed away and I had a baby and I was like, “You know what? I think there are things that are more important than just getting the lines right.” My dad passed from a heart attack. We were watching a show the night before, he was gone the next morning. It really changed view of the world. I realized it's really pretty temporary. We really don't know what tomorrow is gonna bring. And then having my son, bringing life into this world, did a similar thing. So I was in the flow in the scene that day, but since this death and this birth, I’ve been in a flow in my life, and I think that that has helped carry me here.
That makes a lot of sense. And I'm so sorry that you lost your dad. That is a huge loss‚ and so of course it has changed the way that you move through and experience the world.
I think that there was also something in this show around Sabrina’s relationship with her father that I really loved. I was like, it'd be it'd be nice to go back to a place where I have a dad. And Stephen Lobo, who plays Ajeet, [is amazing]. I don't want to say that we got lucky with the cast that we got, because I don't think it was luck. I think that the writers and the producers were very particular with who they hired and why.
There’s a scene in the pilot where that relationship really comes through—the very last scene where Sabrina is celebrating with her colleagues and steps outside to listen to the voicemail from her dad, who’s in prison. It's so interesting, because some parts of the show really look and feel like a traditional police procedural. It has the scenes where your character is interviewing witnesses—
Or there's a child and the rest of us save the child.
Yeah, exactly. Even the interplay between Sabrina, who’s in the field and the team back at headquarters, which has all the technology and they’re speaking in her ear. A lot of that feels familiar. But then there are these other things that don't feel familiar at all, including how the show treats allegations of treason against Ajeet. I’m really curious about that dichotomy, and the wider attempt to make a different kind of cop show. Where do you think that comes from?
I think it's because our show was created by a brown woman. One of the things that Anar was really focused on was the idea of restorative justice, and bringing in the ideology that the system is broken. After George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, there was a lot of recognition that the criminal justice system has its faults and it doesn't work for all of us, but it is a system that has to serve all of us. I've heard [showrunners and executive producers] Mark Ellis and Stephanie Morgenstern, who created Flashpoint, say in this day and age, you couldn't make that show. I don't want to put words in their mouths, but I think the difference here is, Flashpoint was about hearing how these people were heroes at the end of the day, and each episode wrapped with a bow on the end. The way Allegiance works is these are people with their own struggles working within a broken system. And we really do try to come at it from multiple viewpoints.
Sabrina is somebody who believes in the system, right? In the beginning, she's not coming at it from a place of skepticism; she thoroughly believes in what it represents. Her family has a legacy of service. It's not even this police force. It's her great-great grandfather's history of serving the Crown in World War Two in India, then the family moved here. This is a family that believes in service, that believes in the system—she's attached to that idea, but then, on the day of her graduation, and the day before she enters the force, the system fails the one person she's seen rise within it, which is her father. I’ll come back around to your question, but the thing that I was fascinated by was this idea that, as somebody who's a child of immigrants and has immigrated, and is a person of colour and is othered, you have this sneaking suspicion that you don't always fit in, that people are talking about you, that there is some racism in the way somebody looks at you, the service you receive… It's a sneaky suspicion that's not always verified, right?
Then her father is charged with treason and all of a sudden, those things—hiding your lunch at school, or the way your coat smells, the shame of who you are and where you come from—[bubble up], and she has to walk in with all of that on her first day of work.
I find quite interesting that the show toes that line, too. Her boss literally says, “I didn't want you here, but now I have you here,” and then she does a good job on her first case and gets this powerful moment of acceptance, which maybe helps uphold her belief in the system. But I feel like I can see the trajectory she's going to go on; I can see that she’s going to have to unlearn that idealism.
She's going to have to adopt her own beliefs. Before, there was—I don’t wanna say brainwashing, but there was a sense that this is the way that we do things. And in a way, she’s been in her father's shadow her entire life. So it's kind of beautiful that she gets to step in on her own, learn her own lessons and become her own person. But there's going to be a lot of growth, a lot of heartbreak and a lot of questioning. Going back to this idea of how we make a police procedural right now, I think viewpoints are really important. Whose perspective are we seeing the world from? And we haven't seen it from somebody like Sabrina's perspective.
In the first episode, we’re talking about terrorism, and we see it in two very different ways. You have this man who's wearing a turban, and he's accused of being a terrorist, but then you have this far-right terror group.
That reminds me of the moment in the pilot where Sabrina’s aunt says Ajeet is “just another brown man being being accused of organizing against the state.” The show is clearly comparing Ajeet to the man who tells Sabrina “we're gonna come for you,” hinting at a larger domestic terrorist plot—and making a point about those two different perspectives on what a terrorist looks like and does.
When Anar first wrote the show, her references were Homeland and The Good Wife. I loved both those shows, and when I heard those references, I was like, “Okay, I can see where we're going with this. I can see the world that we're building, I can see the doubt that we're trying to seed into certain places to make it fun for the audience to watch.”
Police procedurals are a beloved type of TV show. I have so many friends who are obsessed with rewatching Law & Order, and in general, I think the trope and the easy morality can be really comforting. So when you're making a show that is trying to take a different approach, how do you balance giving audiences what they want and expect, and doing the things that are right for the story you're trying to tell?
This is my first procedural that I'm going into, but I know that we have the hallmarks of a traditional police procedural in every episode—there’s a standalone story where there's an incident that's raised and by the end of the that particular episode, it's been addressed. There's a beginning, middle and end to that story, so somebody could jump into episode five and not feel completely lost.
But we haven't seen a Sikh Punjabi family portrayed in a police procedural, so that's different. And the experiences that family is going to have, particularly those that are influenced by racism and sexism, are perhaps different than what you're going to get in another police procedural, and I think that's a brave decision that the writers have made to address those issues. For people who like police procedurals, but haven't traditionally seen themselves on screen, it feels like a moment; it feels like finally, we're recognized. But at the same time, it's not that much different, right? At the end of the day, this family still has interpersonal issues with each other. Sabrina still sometimes doesn't listen to her dad, or she gets upset with her brother. All of those things are the same mechanics, and I think that's a nice thing to have when you're portraying a family that hasn't been portrayed on screen in this way—and hopefully people will see that this family’s not that much different from their own families, really.
I think that that was something that Anar recognized because she came from working on Transplant. She was like, a procedural could be a great vehicle to accomplish some of these bigger, loftier goals. I haven't seen any of the episodes yet, but I've seen tidbits and I've been in the ADR room, and I think she's done that, which is really cool.
Allegiance premieres on Wednesday, February 7 on CBC Gem and CBC TV. New episodes air every Wednesday night at 9 p.m. and will be available to watch on CBC Gem.
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