Meaghan Rath Wants to Connect

An AI-generated summary, created at my request, describes Meaghan Rath as a “down-to-earth and people-focused” Canadian actress born in Montréal. In a succinct bulleted list, it outlines the history of her career, which began at the age of fifteen, and her multiple Canadian Screen Award nominations. Her current role as Anushka in Jonathan Glatzer’s The Audacity, the buzzy new satirical critique of the tech world, is described as a “notable pivot toward prestige-drama ensemble work, following a career that’s mostly lived in genre TV and comedy.” When I ask if it can tell me what she’s like, it says: “Overall the picture is someone fairly normal and grounded for someone who’s been working since she was a teenager—friendly with fans and castmates, candid about insecurities and anxiety rather than performing confidence, and protective of her private life with her husband and kids.”

“Can you really always tell when something is written by AI?” the actor asks me over Zoom. I’d like to think so, I say. But maybe some people are just starting to write like AI now. Humans trained AI, now AI is training humans. Rath laughs. She seems to be sitting on the floor of her living room; I’m at my kitchen table, my cat jumps onto my lap—“Oh, is that a cat? Cuuuuute!” she says. “I’m thinking a lot about AI, as are you, I’m sure,” Rath had said earlier. “Seeing the ways it’s slowly taking over our lives and our jobs. I’m scared of it, disturbed by it…I also see how in some ways we can use it to our advantage.”

I don’t typically use AI for research purposes; I have never used it to summarize a person’s character. After our conversation, I was curious. And while AI might have its own motives and interpretations, in this case at least, it’s summarizing whatever data it has access to—quite a bit—telling me what it believes people on the internet are telling it. AI relies on the information of lived human experience; some of those people might have some genuine idea of what Meaghan Rath is like. I spent just an hour with her, but I wouldn’t have minded spending more. She was an exceptionally lovely human to talk to, even through a screen. “There is something so specific about human interactions, the human experience that cannot be replicated, in terms of art,” Rath says. “It doesn’t have the soul.” In the end, I feel bad for Claude, who never actually gets to meet her.

Rath lives in Los Angeles’s Hollywood Hills with her husband, the actor Jack Cutmore-Scott, and their two young sons. She’ll be spending the next several months, however, in Vancouver filming The Audacity’s second season. The AMC show, which Rath describes as a “drama with tons of levity,” has been compared to Succession, which Glatzer also wrote on. It revolves around the life of a tech CEO, Duncan Park, and his psychologist (perhaps a Sopranos recall). Rath plays the company’s Chief Ethics Officer, who happens to be Duncan’s former mistress, Anushka Bhattachera-Phister. “I love the show, I’m such a fan of it, everyone’s so insanely talented,” she says. “I’ve never done a character like her. It was such a challenge for me, and I’m so grateful they believed in me.” As for the real-life subject matter, “I would say I was pretty naïve to all of it before going into it,” she says. “On the show, we deal with privacy and data—what you’re giving over to people while you browse the internet and live your life. When you realize what you’re accepting [on most sites and apps], it’s pretty disturbing.”

As a kid growing up in downtown Montréal, Rath says her academic parents enrolled her in a children’s Shakespeare company at a young age. Her participation in plays and workshops for the next few years would put her in the right place at the right time: a casting director attending one workshop asked her to audition for an independent film she was casting; Rath got the part. Schooling very much mattered to her parents, so she finished high school and began auditioning. “I found out I got a TV show the night of my prom,” she recalls. “It was very lucky. I ended up taking a very different path from all my classmates.”

In what she describes as her first serious television role, as the ghost Sally in Being Human, which ran for four seasons, Rath says it was “one of the purest, happiest times of my life. I couldn’t believe I was able to do this thing I’ve always wanted to do, and people were paying me for it.” Things sped up from there. “I feel like everything has sort of led me to where I am,“ she continues. “I’ve learned things from that. There’s nothing I regret, and I’ve been very lucky, because I’ve been able to do tons of different kinds of things.” Rath recalls growing up with classic sitcoms like Parks & Rec, Friends, Seinfeld, and Frasier, and series like Lost, and notes that the current television landscape is significantly different. “Those are the things people still love and crave to this day. But it’s hard for them just to go on the air now. It’s such a different world,” she says. “It’s hard to foresee what’s going to take, what’s going to stick.”

Acting, to Rath, is something of a release. “I’ve just always loved getting it out of my body,” she says. Now, as a mom, she says being able to do the work she loves—although it hasn’t always been easy to adjust back to—helps her come home happy and be fully present with her boys. Did having kids affect her creativity? I ask. She tells me how, in their backyard, her oldest son found a baby hummingbird that had fallen from its nest. Together, they made it a new nest in a shoebox and helped keep it safe while its mom kept coming back to feed it, until it learned to fly. Rath says the experience impacted her in a deeper way than it might have if she didn’t have kids of her own. “In the sense of your access to feelings and your understanding of your capacity to love something, it really does completely change you.”

The Audacity is now streaming on AMC+.