On the phone from Banff, a day away from speaking at the ShowCanada Conference alongside Canadian film icons Paul Gross and Don McKellar, Christine Horne is thinking about her feature film debut in The Stone Angel, adapted and directed by Kari Skogland. More to the point, she’s thinking about having to think about her debut, about having to provide answers to a publicity machine whose gears are already grinding.

An active member of Toronto’s theatre community, the 27-year-old Horne is the co-artistic director of The Thistle Project, and an actor with a variety of independent local companies. Aside from isolated parts in small, independent films (the kind “that shoot over two days and… with a crew of eight”), however, her role as the protagonist’s younger incarnation in the adaptation of Margaret Laurence’s novel is her first experience as a bona fide film star.

If her experience as a theatrical actor prepared her for her first major film role, the role of “star” provided another challenge entirely. CTV’s eTalk Daily, for example, ran a feature that had Horne trying on various vintage outfits based on her love of second-hand clothes, and presumably the period setting of the film. Just how relevant is a fashion show to a performance?

“I find it totally ridiculous,” says Horne, “though it’s good to do that kind of thing once to realize I don’t enjoy it. It’s weird. It’s weird that that stuff is part of the job, because it’s not. Being a personality is separate from being an actor, and I just want to be an actor. The publicity stuff is so foreign to me that it all feels a bit strange. I just like learning the lines and being an actor, but to speak as me is completely different.”

In a film that casts Horne as the younger version of Hagar Shipley, played as a 90-year-old woman in the present by Ellen Burstyn, it seems appropriate that Horne’s initial bouts with publicity have split her into two distinct characters. Where Hagar looks back on a lifetime of family conflict and bitter division, symbolized by a hard-won cemetery monument, Horne is looking back on a pair of imposing icons of her own — publicity and film. Even more appropriately, she’s found that, like the recollections that form much of the novel, her own experience is becoming more a story than a real memory.

“People ask me things and I actually don’t know — I can’t remember,” she says. “It’s been nearly two years [since the production], and a lot of it just becomes more anecdotal than an actual experience because I’ve figured out how to articulate things people want to know. It becomes a story.”

The novel itself is, for many Canadians, a part of their junior high and high school experience. An iconic piece of Canadian literature, the novel’s cross-generational story of Hagar’s struggles with her father, husband and children have been required reading for decades. Still, equally iconic Canadian institution the Globe and Mail labelled the book a particularly egregious example of poorly written sex (“Stallions and rising sap” by Sandra Martin), to say nothing of the dense prose and weighty subject matter — it’s a chapter in Canadian youth that’s rarely idealized.

For Horne, however, a lack of personal history and an adult reading of the novel offered a different perspective. On the Globe’s condemning a sex scene that she has since dramatized, she suggests that Laurence’s work simply doesn’t translate easily into our conceptions of cinematic gloss.

“There’s nothing romantic about the sex scene that’s written in the novel, and it’s absolutely from a female perspective,” Horne notes. “It hasn’t been painted as this beautiful loving thing, so I could see somebody reading that saying it doesn’t sound very exciting, just that it sounds like it hurts. It’s not sexy and not erotic, I can see that, but I don’t think that makes it a poorly written sex scene. I think it’s just unfortunately accurate, too close for comfort.”

Regardless of whether the film and novel gel with the occasionally uncomfortable real world, just asking the question goes beyond Horne’s role and into the slippery territory of rationalizing a film’s minutiae. Instead of speaking as a character locked in a 90-year-old woman’s memory, Horne has to confront the kinds of questions that fill newspaper articles, rather than the ones that flesh out of a role. While they’re all part of the machine, Horne isn’t letting those questions grind her down.

“I’m having to dwell on [The Stone Angel] now because of the nature of publicity,” says Horne. “I think it would drive me insane, worrying about the things I can’t fix. It would be completely maddening.”