Actor Muñoz makes right move | The Province 

Nicole Muñoz doesn\'t remember a time when she wasn\'t in front of the camera.

"Honestly, when I was in elementary school there was a point when I just assumed that everyone was an actor," says the 18-year-old from White Rock. "That\'s how I grew up, doing auditions."

From her start as a cute four-year-old in a laundry detergent commercial to gazing wide-eyed at the superheroes in 2005\'s Fantastic Four, acting has been her biggest after-school activity with more than 100 roles in film, TV and commercials.

"I know all the casting directors," she says. "I\'m used to Vancouver.

"There\'s a group of 18-year-old Hispanic girls who all go out for the same things."

But three things happened last year that pushed her out of her childhood comfort zone and into the adult world: Muñoz graduated from Earl Marriott secondary, she booked her first recurring role in a TV series (the new sci-fi show Defiance), and she moved to Toronto to shoot the show for six months.

"There\'s definitely that switch of, this is becoming a career, an adult-type job," says Muñoz, now back home in Vancouver. "I was renting my own apartment and living on my own for the first time. I just threw off my cap and gown and got on a plane. It was really a shock but it helped me grow."

Muñoz had gone to Toronto that April to film the Defiance pilot then returned to school while she waited to see whether the series would go ahead.

"I was preparing to go to Simon Fraser University to do political science," she begins. "Then I got Defiance and I couldn\'t go. There\'s that wake-up call - make the right moves and this could be your career."

Defiance, produced by the U.S. Syfy network and airing in Canada on Showcase, is set in a near-future where several races of aliens have come to Earth and fought humanity to a standstill. The show is set in a rough town on the now-scarred planet where humans and aliens live in an uneasy truce.

New Zealand\'s Grant Bowler stars as the town\'s lawman with American Julie Benz as the mayor. Muñoz co-stars in a Romeo and Juliet sub-plot as a human in love with an alien (Montreal actor Jesse Rath) from a rival family.

The show airs its third episode Monday night. Iconic Canadian actor Graham Greene plays her father, a role that spilled over into their off-screen interaction.

"We would sit in the cast chairs - this was the best part for me - between scenes," she says. "I called him Dad on set. We would run our sides, talk about the script, talk about our characters. His insight was incredible and I got to share mine."

Muñoz\'s parents - her father is a salesman and her mother runs a marketing firm - knew Greene\'s past work better than she did, but Muñoz says she quickly became a fan.

"The way he acts, he\'ll do the smallest things that will have the biggest impact," she says. "In one scene in an upcoming episode, I\'m leaving him to go to my boyfriend.

"There\'s no lines for Graham, it\'s just a close-up of his face and you can just see the heartbreak. I\'d love to know what he does, what\'s his recipe for everything."

The U.S. network has said that early ratings for Defiance have been encouraging, which could put Munoz back in Toronto for work on a second season by midsummer.

Meanwhile, she has filmed a role in another U.S. pilot, the Vancouver-filmed private school drama Rita for the Bravo! network.

"I\'m just sitting in Vancouver with my fingers crossed while the bigwigs in L.A. make their decisions," she says.

Welcome to the adult world. "There\'s a lot of ifs in this industry, because who knows when I\'ll be working," she says. "I\'m saving up right now, I\'d like to one day put a down payment on an apartment. I also plan on going back to school at one point, SFU or University of Toronto, but I don\'t know when it will be."

Which doesn\'t mean there isn\'t still room to play around at this adult career. Near the end of her work on Defiance, she auditioned for and got a guest role on an episode of the new Toronto-filmed Netflix series Hemlock Grove, as a werewolf who comes to a bad end.

"It was so fun, I turned into a werewolf and they cut my head off," she says. "Episode five, it\'s the coolest thing."

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