Remember the pretty little girl in the Supernatural episode, “Lily Sunder Has Some Regrets?” The one that was apparently a nephilim, but actually wasn’t? May Sunder was played by Ava Sleeth, whose interest in being an actress lies deep … hopefully, we’ll see her again in a future episode!
How did you get into acting, and how were you cast as May?
My siblings and I are in a Fine Arts program at school, and we have drama/art/music/dance classes there. My older sister decided to sign up with an agent, and I went with her to the appointment….our agent asked, “what about you, are you interested in trying out some auditions?” So I said I would give it a try! I booked my second audition for a commercial, and it just went from there.
The audition for the role of May was a director/producer session….the director asked me if I liked acting and I said, “yes, I LOVE acting!” Then he asked me to run from the corner of the room and say “Mommy, I’m scared” in a very frightened and out of breath sort of way….he asked me to do that about 6 times, and then he said “thank you, , it” and I left.
I found out that night that they were interested in me for the role, and the very next day I booked it!
Photos: Courtesy of Ava SleethWhat was the funniest thing to happen while filming for Supernatural?
There was a couple things…. when we were rehearsing the scene just before shooting, Alicia Witt was kind of like whispering her lines and I didn’t really understand why she was doing that and my mom could tell by looking at me that I was confused, wondering if that’s the way she was going to talk when we were actually filming the scene. My Mom had overheard someone say that Alicia had a bit of a sore throat, so when we stopped rehearsing my mom explained to me that the reason Alicia was whispering her lines during her rehearsal is that she was probably trying to save her voice for the big scream that she had to do when I was ‘killed’, and that when they started filming, Alicia was going to go full out and I needed to go full out too! I asked Ian Tracey, how loud should I scream? And he said “as loud as you want!” So I did!
My favourite part of filming that scene was getting to scream!
Another funny thing was on the day that I came to set to do the photo shoot for the old time ph; it was raining quite a bit. When my Mom and I were looking for the A.D. trailer to check out, this guy in a trench coat and set make up and a BIG umbrella came up to us and asked us what we were looking for and was super nice and walked us over to the A.D. trailer….I didn’t really talk much to him, and my Mom was making small talk like “what a big umbrella you have, and thanks for walking us over….”, we hadn’t watched ‘supernatural’ at home because it’s a pretty scary show for someone my age, so then the next day when we were at the production office, we saw this BIG poster with all the main characters of the show….and my Mom was like “there’s the guy who walked us over to the A.D. trailer with his BIG umbrella” and of course it was Misha Collins!! We were like darn! He was SO nice!! We should’ve talked more to him and asked him for a picture!!
Tell us about your character, May.
May is the daughter of Lily Sunder. She is calm and kind and loves her Mom very much and playing with her favourite doll that she got from her Dad. May doesn’t know why Ishim has come to the door and why Ackobel was killed outside, so it’s all very scary and confusing for her. You don’t see May a whole lot in the episode, but she is an important part of the story. It’s very sad that she dies and it was pretty amazing being in that scene with Alicia Witt because she’s an amazing actress and I’m sure I learned a lot from watching her.
What do you enjoy most about acting?
I like how you get to use different expressions in different ways, I like how you can use loud voices in some scenes, I like meeting other actors, having my own trailer sometimes, and the food!!
Do you have any upcoming projects/roles that you’d like to share?
Not at the moment, the new season of auditioning has just started, and I’m excited to see where it might go. I did win a Joey Award recently for my Guest Starring Role in ‘Dead of Summer’ so that was pretty exciting – I hope I get nominated again this year!