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Not long after graduating from McGill University, Praneet Akilla lost her iron ring.
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These are awarded to engineering graduates in Canada and are worn on the little finger. It was 2016 and Akilla had traveled to India to celebrate her graduation when the ring was lost forever.
“Honestly, it’s somewhere near the Taj Mahal,” says the actor, in an interview with Postmedia.
So Akilla had an intense bonding moment with the character he plays on the CBC series SkyMed. First Officer Jay Chopra is a pilot and engineer. So, to keep things authentic, the costume department provided the actor with an iron ring.
“I had a completely out-of-body experience,” he says. “I was like, ‘Oh my God! You found it?’ They were like ‘No, no, no, your character is an engineer, remember?’ I was finally reunited with this iron ring that was meant to be on my finger. It was this confluence of my world of engineering before becoming an actor and now being an actor playing an engineer. It was this weird experience I had on set.”
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Akilla spent a few years working as a chemical engineer after graduating from McGill, including a stint at Suncor. But by 2018, he decided to turn his attention to acting full time. Over the next two years, he began booking increasingly meaty roles. He played a high school jock on the Netflix horror comedy October Faction in 2020. In 2021, he landed a recurring role as Gil, a beefed-up version of one of the Bobbsey Twins in the CW’s dark reimagining of Nancy Drew. .
But her most recent role on SkyMed, which airs July 10 on CBC and CBC Gem, is not only her meatiest to date, but also one she feels is more like who she is in real life.
“Compared to any other character I’ve played, this one fits like a glove,” says Akilla. “I say this jokingly, of course, but I actually had to act on the others. For this character, from the audition process to the last day on set, I was never in any doubt who this character was. I got it backwards and forwards. I like to say that the universe dropped this paper in my lap. For the first time, I got to be myself. Not only is he an engineer, but this is also my first time playing an Indian on screen.”
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At first, this may sound a bit cocky. Who wouldn’t want to be first officer Jay Chopra? He is a kind-hearted, selfless and heroic pilot who risks life and limb flying first responders to remote communities in northern Canada for rescue operations. He has plans to be an astronaut. His nickname from Top Gun-ish is “Chopper”. But Akilla says that he also relates to the sillier qualities of his character. One of his character arcs in season 1 involves his unrequited love for nurse Hayley Roberts (Natasha Calis).
“Chopper, to me, felt like a socially inept, awkward person,” he says. “There’s a lot of comedy that comes out of that over three episodes. Then I talked to (showrunner Julie Puckrin) and she ended up saying, “He’s incredibly confident and competent, he’s just out of practice.” But yes, there are several romantic entanglements on the show.”
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This may be why the unofficial but helpful tagline attached to SkyMed is “Top Gun meets Grey’s Anatomy.” Chopper is part of a dedicated team flying in from Thompson, Man., including Hayley Roberts, a delivery nurse on the run from a “painful secret” in Toronto; nurse Crystal Highway (Morgan Holmstrom), a “mama bear” caretaker who has her own romantic entanglements to sort out; and Captain Austen Bodie (Ace Aason Nadjiwan), a top pilot who is romantically involved with Hayley.
Everyone has their reasons for wanting to be up north. But this character development is often interrupted by high-octane action sequences. For Chopper, that includes piloting a Super King Air 200 in remote areas. For Akilla, who was a fan of flight simulator video games growing up, the action sequences often had him “crazy,” especially since many of the effects were practical rather than a green screen, he says.
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“There were scenes where I’m in a plane in the air and when the plane was about to land in the water I had to change seats with the main pilot,” he says. “For a scene where I had to stick my head out the window and greet a character on the ground, they pretty much did all of that. When I read the script, I thought we were going to do that on a green screen, but we weren’t. We were up in the air a lot.”
With its geeky, eager-to-please undertones, Chopper is a far cry from Akilla’s previous high-profile role in Nancy Drew, in which Bobbsey Twins siblings Gil and Amanda were transformed into street criminals from the wrong side of the world. Akilla said she found inspiration for Gil watching Matt Dillon play teenage bully Dallas Winston in the 1983 film The Outsiders.
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Akilla’s theatrical roots are actually in musical theater, a passion since high school. In 2023, he is scheduled to head out on a world tour as part of the all-South Asian cast of Shaw Festival’s Indian epic Mahabharata.
The actor, who was born in Mumbai before moving to Calgary as a child, says this is the first time he has played a character written as an Indian.
“It was funny because the story was never about my ethnicity,” he says. “It was never about the trauma of my ethnicity. The story was never about Chopper being brown. None of the members of the South Asian diaspora have a problem playing themselves on screen. That is never the problem. The problem is when the role is reduced to becoming one-dimensional, where you’re essentially playing a stereotype of what people think a South Asian character is. In this case, it wasn’t because Chopper is a three-dimensional character with feelings, wants and needs that were outside of him being an Indian.”
SkyMed airs July 10 on CBC and CBC Gem.
