'I had to fight for it': Megan Follows says she almost didn't get to play Anne of Green Gables

If you love Anne of Green Gables, you're probably familiar with Megan Follows. She's an American Canadian actor who's best known for playing the outspoken and imaginative Anne Shirley in the 1985 miniseries adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery's classic novels.

Now, Follows has returned to the world of Anne Shirley as the director of the new Canadian Audible Original Anne of Green Gables, starring Sandra Oh, Michela Luci, Catherine O'Hara and Victor Garber.

Though her performance in Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel won her two Gemini Awards, in an interview with Q's Tom Power, Follows says she wasn't the first choice to play Anne.

"There was someone else that was wanted, so I had to fight for it," she says. "And I had, luckily, some advocates at the CBC at the time, and someone at PBS who actually thought and believed that I was the way to go. So I will always be incredibly grateful."

Follows says her audition tape mysteriously disappeared after she spent hours in front of a camera, auditioning for the role of Anne.

"I was going back to California the next day and we got a call. Mysteriously, something was wrong with the tape. And if I wanted [the] job, I had to come back in. I had 45 minutes to get down there, do it and get on a plane. So my mum went, 'Let's go, let's do it.' So I went down again and I did [the audition]."

WATCH | Official trailer for Anne of Green Gables (1985):

Apologizing for succeeding

Even though the Anne of Green Gables miniseries was a massive success and is still loved by fans almost 40 years later, Follows says television was seen as a lesser medium than film in the 1980s.

"Television in the '80s was about to change," she recalls. "Within 10 years, the stigma around television was going to flip and it was going to have a very different power behind it. There was a snobbery and there was a division [around film]."

Follows says she felt like she almost had to apologize for succeeding in playing Anne Shirley because the character's power scared a lot of people.

"It was a newer phenomenon. I think the power of [the] character scares people. I think she's extraordinary and she scared people, certainly at the time for a system that was run by men."

The full interview with Megan Follows is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Megan Follows produced by Cora Nijhawan.

Q32:52Megan Follows: Playing Anne in Anne of Green Gables and bringing the story to a new generation