Earlier this summer, Anna Lambe was invited to a fashion show for the first time. It was a presentation of Louis Vuitton’s resort collection in New York City, and being a guest of the brand was a dream come true for the Inuk actor. But unadulterated excitement wasn’t her immediate reaction. “I was like, ‘So, there are two things that could have happened here: Either this is a scam or it’s a wrong-person type of situation,’” says the soon to be 26-year-old, her eyes wide and bright with laughter. “I kept checking with my team, like, ‘Is this for real?’”

Attending a runway event is just one of many pinch-me moments Lambe has had as her career has blown up over the past few years. Although she’s had a number of supporting roles in Canadian productions, the star got a big international break in 2024’s True Detective: Night Country, the fourth season of the HBO juggernaut in which she played a supporting role opposite Jodie Foster. The following year brought North of North, the critically acclaimed comedy from CBC, APTN and Netflix that’s filmed in her hometown of Iqaluit. Lambe received raves for her performance as protagonist Siaja, a single mom rebuilding her life on her own terms, and she earned a nomination at the Independent Spirit Awards and won two Canadian Screen Awards this past spring. (The show’s first season racked up a field-leading 20 nods and nine wins, including Best Comedy Series and Best Ensemble Performance, Comedy. Season 2 is streaming now on CBC Gem and APTN+ and will debut globally on Netflix later this fall.) Then there’s a flurry of Hollywood roles. (We’ll get to those later.) It’s a good time to be Anna Lambe.

She’s tucked into a corner booth at a trendy—but not too trendy—Toronto restaurant, sitting with pin-straight posture yet still totally at ease, when she admits that even in the face of all this hard-earned success, her gut reaction to the LV invite is not out of the norm. “In this industry, things can change so quickly—I’ve had huge, life-changing heartbreaks that [have made me realize] that even when somebody says yes, it can easily become a no,” she says. “You have to manage your expectations, always have a backup plan and be willing to be told no and to pivot. I still keep myself incredibly open to experiencing new things, but it’s always with the thought in mind that it can go wrong or be taken away. That doesn’t stop me from experiencing joy; it just means that I protect myself. How big do you [let yourself] dream?”

Lambe was born in Newfoundland but grew up in Nunavut’s capital city, where she had a typical adolescence. She played competitive badminton and volleyball, was a self-described “angsty Tumblr kid” (the social-media platform, she says, was a key tool in radicalizing and empowering her) and loved bands like Arctic Monkeys and One Direction (“I loved Zayn, but in my heart, I was a Harry girl”). She and her family would occasionally travel to Toronto, which was how she realized that people viewed the North and Inuit communities differently. “People would kind of scratch their heads and go, ‘Is that in Canada?’” she recalls. “So many people had no inkling about life in the Arctic. When you’re a teenager, that really sits with you—this idea that people don’t know who you are or where you come from because they don’t really care to know. They treat you more like you’re an interesting character versus a real person. It makes you question your own importance, identity and belonging.”

Still, Lambe knew such ignorance was not “a failure” on the part of her people. “It’s not like we did anything wrong—we just exist,” she says. “We’re not confined by what the outside thinks of us.” And her home is a place she loves with her whole heart because of what it means to belong to such a tight-knit remote community. “You can’t just do things and run away— there is a level of being held accountable for your actions, knowing how to apologize and knowing how to speak to others and hold them accountable,” she says. “So much of what I hope to have—compassion, empathy, patience and a real sense of what is important—is from growing up in Iqaluit. When you grow up somewhere where the weather conditions are so harsh, you see such extremes in everything. That grounds you in what’s real.”

Acting wasn’t on a teenage Lambe’s radar, which is not surprising considering that at the time, there weren’t many onscreen depictions of Indigenous people—unless they were in stories defined by darkness and trauma. But when she was 15, the production team for a Nunavut-set sports movie was looking for local talent; Lambe was encouraged by a teacher to participate in the production’s acting workshop, which led to an audition and then a role in 2018’s The Grizzlies, for which she was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award. The time between the film’s creation and its release was long, and Lambe thought the role would be a one-off. But the movie’s press run, including a premiere at TIFF, sparked something in her. While attending university in Ottawa, where she’s currently based, she saw the casting call for the 2020 CBC supernatural drama Trickster. She took a shot and landed that role too. She’s been acting consistently ever since.

It was on The Grizzlies that Lambe met Alethea Arnaquq-Baril and Stacey Aglok MacDonald, the creators and executive producers of North of North, as well as Miranda de Pencier, the film’s director, who now serves as a producer on the sitcom. When her former colleagues told her about the ambitious new series they were working on, Lambe knew she had to audition. And when she did, the creative duo knew they had found their lead. “We’ve watched Anna grow as a woman and as an actor in front of our eyes,” Arnaquq-Baril and Aglok MacDonald share via email. “Being the lead of any show is hard, but leading a comedy is really, really hard—especially when you’ve never done comedy. You have to be fearless and shameless and be prepared to make a fool of yourself in front of 100 people who are quietly standing around watching your every move. Anna’s natural state is very intelligent, thoughtful, controlled and poised—she had to jump in with both feet to play a messy, impulsive character who is such a far stretch from her real-life personality. The girl can carry a comedy, 100 percent.”

As Siaja, Lambe is endlessly watchable. You would never know that North of North marks a) her first time doing comedy and b) her first leading role. She’s vibrant, assured and fully committed—she will do anything to get the laugh but brings a grounded gravitas to more dramatic scenes too. She easily wins viewers over the second she steps onscreen, and they stay with her through every decision, whether scarily bold (asking her husband for a divorce at a public event) or chaotic (impulsively making out with an out-of-towner whom she soon discovers is her long-lost father).

The second season of North of North follows in the same vein as the first but feels even more confident now that the team has figured out the show’s tone and how to produce the series in the harsh Iqaluit climate. Having established more independence for herself, Siaja is still feeling stuck—like, as she notes in the premiere, she should be “further along” in her glow-up. She’s also determined to track down her long-lost sister since her mom, Neevee (Maika Harper), revealed at the end of season one that she’d had a daughter who was taken from her. Lambe observes that Siaja has never let herself dream, which is why she struggles to pinpoint the reason she still feels unsettled after achieving so much of what she thought she wanted. “You have to keep creating your dreams; you have to keep dreaming bigger,” says Lambe. “Once you achieve the thing, you can’t just stay there—you could, but it won’t keep fulfilling you.”

While Siaja may be stagnant (for now), the team behind North of North certainly isn’t. Whenever she talks about the show, Lambe emphasizes how hard every person in the cast and crew works to bring it to life. For this season, they shot in Iqaluit for five weeks—all outdoors. If making season one was a feat, making season two was a downright triumph, especially on days when the wind chill made it feel like -50°C. “I love that the approach this time was like: ‘Okay, we’ve done it, and we learned a lot. Now we’re going to build on it and go bigger and harder,’” says Lambe. “For the team, it was like: ‘We know how to do it comfortably, but that’s not what we want. We want to keep pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.’”

Something that drives Lambe is shaping a world in which Inuk people are seen as the modern and connected people they are, not the contextless figures the strangers she met in the South as a kid assumed they were. She wants her people to be seen how they see themselves. Thanks to North of North, young Inuit girls will experience just that. “There’s a real sense of joy around the show,” says Lambe. “It’s been the most beautiful thing to go into, like, the grocery store and you have little girls who see me— or Maika or Zorga [Qaunaq, who plays Millie]— and their hearts start flowing. Then my heart starts flowing. They’ll always know Inuit on the big screen represented in very joyful, empowering, strong ways. Of course, they’ll still have to navigate misrepresentation and stereotypes—I don’t think we’ll ever put that to bed—but they’ll always have this representation of their community as they know it. I don’t know that any of us can really grasp the magnitude of this show.”

When Lambe decided to pursue acting after The Grizzlies, part of the reason was the platform it would give her to advocate for her people and the causes that matter to her. Doing so has often been scary, but she will always speak her mind and give back to her community no matter where her work takes her. Indigenous film and television will also always be a huge part of what she does, but she’s now thinking about what her career may look like in addition to it too.

It’s just the beginning of this next phase for Lambe. This fall, she can be seen alongside her North of North co-star Qaunaq in In the Heart of the South, which premiered at TIFF and is described by the festival as “what Single White Female would be if it were set in Toronto, with an Inuk protagonist and a dash of supernatural elements.” She also stars opposite Brad Pitt in Heart of the Beast, a survival thriller set in the Alaskan wilderness from American filmmaker David Ayer (End of Watch, Fury). “The first thing that struck me about Anna was her authenticity. She has a very natural presence and an incredible ability to convey emotion without ever pushing for it,” Ayer says over email. “What makes Anna special is her ability to make every moment feel truthful. She’s the kind of actor who doesn’t demand attention but effortlessly commands it because everything she does feels honest and lived-in. She creates a character that feels complete and memorable, which is a rare and valuable gift for any actor to have.”

And last year, Lambe was cast in The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s highly anticipated follow-up to The Social Network—starring Jeremy Strong, Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison—which is landing in theatres this October. It’s the first time she’s ever booked an open-ethnicity role, meaning her background and culture had nothing to do with the part. The experience, Lambe explains, helped her recognize that even when a character is not explicitly written as Indigenous, she can bring that lived experience to her process. “So much of my character study was rooted in understanding how this relates to community and history,” she says. “It was an ‘aha’ moment of learning that it’s my choice whether I do or don’t want to add that context. Even if it’s an open-ethnicity casting, my Indigeneity will always inform [my performances].” The approach clearly works. “I loved working with Anna, and she’s great in the film,” Sorkin writes in an email. “She has a quiet reserve of strength and mystery that pays off in her final scene when she finally lets you in.”

If there’s a ceiling to what Lambe can accomplish as an actor, she hasn’t found it yet. And when cameras aren’t rolling, she leads by example, works hard, is always prepared and is gracefully ready to roll with the punches when things don’t go according to plan, the North of North creators note. Ultimately, she wants to be recognized for her talent and who she is as a person and be given the chance to stretch her abilities. “As a creative, I can weave drama and comedy,” says Lambe. “I can exist in a romantic world that isn’t related to trauma. I can play angsty and do the things that other actors do. I’m up for a challenge. I don’t want to be one thing. Nobody wants to be seen as limited when you see yourself as a whole, capable human being.”

What is most in Lambe’s control, however, is doing exactly what she hopes Siaja finds a way to do in North of North: seizing the moment and dreaming bigger. What that might actually look like, though? She’s taking it day by day. “You never know when your last job is, so I just want to be grateful for the work I have and keep grinding toward the next thing,” she says. “The big question is ‘What do I want? What do I want out of my career? Who am I outside of this? What’s possible for me?’ I’m realizing that the limitations aren’t there. My dream is bigger today than it was yesterday. And it’s going to be bigger tomorrow.”