Cara Gee

The Mud of Ontario

Cara Gee was born in Calgary in 1983 and belongs to the Ojibwe Nation. Long before anyone knew her name in the global industry, she spent years working in Toronto's independent theater scene. There, she learned to use her body as a precision tool.

In 2013, she landed her first major film role in Empire of Dirt. The movie was shot on a tight budget but made it into the Toronto International Film Festival. Gee played a single mother who returns to her Indigenous reserve.

And the gamble paid off.

That role earned her a Canadian Screen Awards nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role. But recognition in her home country did not guarantee direct access to major American science fiction productions.

The Captain Who Didn't Ask for Permission

The casting call for the second season of The Expanse in 2017 changed the course of her career. Producers were looking for someone to play Camina Drummer. In the books, the character was different, but Gee gave her a commanding physical presence.

Because Gee understood that Drummer needed inner armor before metal armor. She created a specific accent for the Belters that ended up defining the tone of the series. She worked with a linguistics specialist so that every syllable sounded authentic and harsh.

Her screen presence grew organically until her character went from supporting to leading the main storylines. During filming of the fifth season in 2021, the actress was pregnant. The production had to adapt the costumes and fight choreography to hide her condition without slowing the pace of the story.

No stunt doubles were used for the intense dialogue scenes.

In 2019, she appeared in Sweetness in the Belly alongside Dakota Fanning. The project was shot between Dublin and Ethiopia and explored exile and identity. Gee sought projects that moved away from star vehicles so she would not be typecast in the sci-fi genre.

The Leap to Big-Budget Productions

In 2020 the industry put her to the test in a 125 million dollar blockbuster. It was The Call of the Wild, where she shared the marquee with Harrison Ford. She played Françoise, one of the dog sledders in the Yukon.

So she went from filming on styrofoam spaceship sets to facing the most advanced motion-capture technology. The film grossed just over 111 million at the global box office and did not meet the studio's initial financial expectations.

But her name was already on the casting directors' lists in Los Angeles.

In 2023, she appeared in the anthology series Extrapolations on Apple TV. The plot focused on the effects of climate change, and Gee was part of a cast with top-tier names. Her episode was shot under strict environmental sustainability protocols.

In 2025, she joined the cast of In the Lost Lands, a fantasy film directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. The production relied on a visual effects team spread across three different countries to handle the digital image processing.