Vancouver drama school creates success stories on screen

“We are proud to be Canadian, and that comes through our welcoming approach,” says acting coach Julien Leblanc.

If you scroll through your favorite streaming services these days, Netflix’s “Bridgerton,” “Stranger Things,” and “Riverdale.” Many share the same alma mater, the Leblanc School of Drama. The Vancouver-based school uniquely offers students everything from successfully auditioning via Zoom to strategically navigating the nerve-wracking waiting room before an in-person audition. . His CEO of the school and his Moncton-raised actor Julian LeBlanc tells us how he got into the industry and the exciting careers his students are embarking on on his path. sharing.

I was raised in Foster Care from the ages of 3 to 18 in Moncton, New Brunswick. I sensed very early on that something was different about me. I kept meeting picture-perfect families when I went to my friends’ houses, and I knew I had raised myself differently. My father has never been in my life.I still don’t know who he is.Bless her, she’s fine now.

It wasn’t until I discovered dance that I became able to express myself creatively.I was able to let my emotions come through and start processing some of the trauma I was going through.By the age of 15, I was playing Prince nutcracker.

When I was 18, my foster parents, Heather and Paul, did something truly amazing. They paid for my post-secondary education at the Canadian College of Performing Arts, a prestigious performing arts school in Victoria, British Columbia. It was there that I discovered my love for acting.

I was starting to feel more comfortable revealing different parts of myself. Could be a shapeshifter. Julian may be a chameleon.

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When I was in my mid-twenties, I met Catherine Falcon, a successful casting director who was an amazing person for production companies like Hallmark, Lifetime, and Paramount. She saw me teaching a workshop and wanted her daughter to train with me. It was a big deal. She’s an industry tycoon.

Katherine took me to her studio, Studio 3 Media, and promised me that when the day came, I could take over and run everything myself. Sure enough, she kept her promise and the LeBlanc School of Acting was born a few years later.

A lot of high stakes started happening to us recently. A student at LeBlanc, Skywalker Hughes is currently performing in one of Alberta’s biggest shows. Spectrum’s “Joe Pickett played Sheridan Pickett. One of my other dear students, Sebastian Billingsley Rodriguez, flew to Newfoundland to play Nibs. from now on Disney Plus”peter pan and wendy” Co-starred with Jude Law as Captain Hook. LeBlanc student Emily Mitchell played lead roles in ‘Ordinary Angels’ starring Hilary Swank and Disney+’s film version of ‘Out of My Mind’. There are five of her in “Riverdale”.five The actors on the show were LeBlanc students trained in iconic roles. It’s not a coincidence, it’s what I call the ‘Leblanc identity’. I don’t want to keep dropping names, but I want to highlight the volume of our success.

I teach my students real-world tools, techniques, confidence-building, public speaking, teamwork skills, emotional intelligence and other life skills not found in a typical acting school.

Before the pandemic, we had grown to over 100 direct students who traveled from all over the world to attend summer programs in Vancouver. We were one of the first schools to actually start the program online during the COVID-19 outbreak. I pedaled in April. I had heard from many parents that their children were bored and scared, so I wanted to give them hope so that they would be ready to scream when the film and television industry revived.

We had over 100 students in our first online semester. He now has a sizable online presence in Montreal and already has over 100 online students in Ontario alone. Even the UK sector, which started at the start of COVID-19, started with 10 students and now he has over 100.

Parents of working actors send their kids to LeBlanc because they can level up even if they’re the lead in the show. NBC’s “This is Us” trained with us for an online technique workshop. Others include Ayush Irvine in her Netflix’s Waffles + Mochi starring Michelle Obama, Bentley Williams in Netflix’s Stranger Things, and Bryson John Steele in ABC’s Station 19. A student came