Aeryn Twidle

Filmmaker Reginald Harkema, and his filmmaking pals were downing beers in Subeez, a chic bar in Vancouver's artsy Yaletown district, when Twidle, a cultured ex-model, floated in. They gawped, she rattled off some acerbic remarks: they were mesmerized.

The filmmaker sent his female casting agent over to discuss the film “A Girl Is A Girl”, and to ask her to audition. It took the disbelieving Twidle, who fretted that they might be making a porno flick, a week to acquiesce to the idea and call back. She auditioned a week after that and unsurprisingly won the part.

Twidle modelled from the age of nineteen to just before her 21st birthday. So although she had never acted before A Girl Is A Girl, she understood her character Lisa, who was an anorexic. But unlike Lisa, Aeryn is not a modelling victim.

"I like to think that I was using it for my own benefit, that I was playing the system rather than it playing me. I did learn a lot from taking advantage of what was being offered to me. But I also had the clarity of mind to recognize the dark side of the life that is all too prevalent behind the thin veneer of glamour.

"The dark side is that it's a predatory industry and it's an industry that can take young girls, as young as 13 or 14, and just chew them up and spit them out for breakfast. There are a lot of drugs and there are a lot of predatory older men.

"It's lonely. It's lonely as hell. You live out of a suitcase when you're at a really vulnerable part of your life, and you're expected to be like an adult and function like one in relationships as well. And you're constantly being physically assessed."

Twidle says she is a creative person and she sees the drama in a lot of situations. She had been putting that into her poetry writing, but she thinks she's 'not done a bad job of carrying that over into acting'.

She hopes to continue to do both in the future.