Article content

Cardinal has been a dream gig for Karine Vanasse.

We talked almost exactly a year ago, just before the première of the first season of the gritty CTV crime series, based on the bestselling novels by Giles Blunt. At the time, the francophone Montreal actress was pumped to finally be starring in her first English-Canadian series, and was happy that audiences in the rest of Canada would be able to see her in a homegrown drama. Prior to that, she was most famous outside Quebec for two high-profile American network series, Pan Am and Revenge.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Karine Vanasse relishes her return to CTV's 'real and raw' Cardinal Back to video

In the year since that interview, Cardinal has taken off. It was the top-rated Canadian drama of the past TV season and has been sold in more than 100 countries. It has done well in many of those territories, including on BBC Four in the U.K., Canal Plus in France and Telekom in Germany. That success prompted CTV to give the green light to two more six-episode seasons, both of which have already been shot. Season 2 of Cardinal premières on CTV on Thursday, Jan. 4, and makes its bow in its dubbed French version on Super Écran at the same time.

In a phone interview this week, while driving back from a holiday break in the country near Chicoutimi, Vanasse said she is enjoying playing Lise Delorme, a detective in the fictional northern Ontario town of Algonquin Bay. This season, Delorme and her colleague John Cardinal (Billy Campbell) are involved in a strange case: a young red-haired woman (Alex Paxton-Beesley) has been shot in the head and has no recollection of what happened. The case leads them to discover a series of ritualized killings that may or may not be connected to the woman suffering from amnesia.