spotlight

Dwain Murphy Makes His Move

Having just graduated from Humber College’s acting program in 2005, Dwain Murphy auditioned for a small role as a dancer in the step-dance movie How She Move.

He ended up landing the male lead.

“I go for my audition in September and for the next four months I keep coming back to audition for the same role, then another role, then another role,” says the 22-year-old actor on the line from his home in Scarborough, Ontario.

“Eventually I go back and they say, ‘We want you to read for the lead male,’ and I’m like, ‘Cool, that’s no problem.’ So I did it, didn’t think anything of it and a couple of days after Christmas I get a call from [director Ian Iqbal Rashid] telling me I got the part. And I’m like, ‘You’re kidding, I don’t have any acting experience, you know that right?’ And he’s like, ‘I know, I know, I’ve seen your resume, but I think you are a great actor, I know you can do it.’”

Set in Toronto’s gritty Jane-Finch neighbourhood, the movie focuses on a young woman named Raya (Rutina Wesley), whose once prosperous family suffers a tragedy that forces her to leave her private school and enroll at her local high school. Desperate to earn the cash needed to return to her posh school, Raya hooks up with the charismatic Bishop (Murphy) and his all-male crew of dancers, who are out to win the Step Monster dance competition.

The latest teen flick to focus on the step-dance phenomenon, How She Move wowed audiences when it screened at the Sundance Film Festival last year. But unlike Stomp the Yard or You Got Served, this movie is proudly Canadian and, according to Murphy, the best of the lot.

“You see all these dance movies coming out and a lot of them either have great dancing and bad acting, or bad dancing and great acting. From what I see, this is pretty much a new type of dancing movie that has strong, strong acting and strong, strong dancing.”

For Murphy, who grew up in Scarborough with a single mom and idolizing Will Smith, the chance to tell a story about kids who will do anything to follow a dream hits close to home.

“I know what it’s like to come from nothing to feeling like you are on top of the world ’cause I’ve been there, I’ve done it, my mom’s done it. After my parents divorced my mom and I moved into an apartment that didn’t have anything. All we had was a couch to sleep on. My mom fought her way back up, went back to school to get an education and now she’s a successful woman with a job and a house. I’m proud of her and I learned a lot from her.

“That’s the biggest message of the movie, that no matter where you come from, who you are, whatever your situation is, if you find something that you love and you are passionate about and you put 100 percent of your time into it, it will pay off.”