Yaayaa Adams didn't choose acting — acting chose her

Rising Stars is a monthly column by Radheyan Simonpillai profiling a new generation of Canadian screen stars making their mark in front of and behind the camera.

Yaayaa Adams had no plans to be an actor. But her onscreen magic could not be suppressed. 

She made her debut in the CBC Gem web series Next Stop, dominating scenes as a young Toronto millennial with her west end sass and verbal dexterity. The casting director from that series thought Adams would be perfect for The Last Video Store, a goofy monster mash about a relic rental shop, based on Edmonton's The Lobby, where B-movie monsters — like a knockoff Jason Voorhees — magically escape their VHS tape confines.

Like her character Nyla, who's just trying to get out of a situation she feels she has no business being in, Adams wasn't really having it.

"At first I was like, 'I don't want to do anymore acting,'" she says, admitting that being a thespian was never actually part of the game plan for her — nor was appearing in a campy retro throwback to tapes and slasher movies that were phasing out before she was born. "It's all good. I did Next Stop. Is that not enough?"

Next Stop is the CBC Gem web series that began as a bunch of friends scrapping together comical anthology about millennial Black experiences in Toronto. Despite zero onscreen experience, Adams was convinced to come on board Next Stop as an actor by her friend and co-star Jordan Hayles, a TV and film editor, who was working in front and behind the scenes on the project created by his former Vice Media colleagues Jabbari Weekes, Tichaona Tapambwa and Phil Witmer. They were a crew of six or seven going out on the streets, eating cold McDonalds between takes, or nestled in their own apartments, capturing the on-the-ground 6ix vibes. 

Throughout bite-sized episodes, Adams would play different characters — all variations on her own personality — who would pop off on very localized debates, from where the best Jamaican beef patties are on the subway line to whether Toronto is deceiving itself into thinking it's a world-class city while it doesn't support its talents. "This 6ix here, 6ix that, 6ix this,'" she says in one role, Confused Yute #1, in a skit about confused yutes who randomly meet in an Uber pool and get into an argument over the city's lacking prospects. "What in the Book of Revelations is happening?"

"We were just being random," says Adams, describing on a Zoom call the low-stakes project she joined just to support friends. "I was like, 'Oh yeah yeah. I'm just with the mans dem. It's lit.'" 

"That was supposed to be that."

Now, Adams is choosing to get more serious about acting. She'll be taking classes and going for more auditions. She even adopted the stage name Yaayaa Adams for her acting career, just to distinguish from what she calls her "CEO name" Vanessa Adams, which turns up too many white women executives on Google for her liking. Yaayaa is a play on her Ghanaian name Yaa. 

After some convincing from friends, she did eventually audition for and score the co-lead role in Cody Kennedy and Tim Rutherford's The Last Video Store. "I never thought I would be a Scream Queen, but we're here now," she says, cracking up. "I'm like Brandy from I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, but less gory."

Adams stars as Nyla, a young woman who wanders into a video rental store as if it's an alien planet and is then inundated by manager Kevin Martin's spiel on the Canuxploitation-era of slasher movies like Beaver Lake Massacre (not a real thing). It's all very low-rent, tongue-in-cheek, fetishizing the whir of a cassette tape while playing to the cheeky B-movie crowds who will be in the audience when The Last Video Store closes out the Blood In The Snow festival this month.

It's also an interesting stretch for Adams. Her usual snappy commentary, which we hear so much in Next Stop, is stunned into silence in this fish-out-of-water scenario, whether she's listening to Martin go off on 80s CGI or facing Josh Lenner's parodic take on Sylvester Stallone's action hero Cobra. "It helped me have an understanding of body language," Adams says of her performance in The Last Video Store, "being able to convey what is going on without saying anything."

Adams isn't above having a laugh at her own performance here, though: "If you ask me, sometimes I'm like, 'Ooo girl, you're doing a little too much.'"

The Last Video Store and Next Stop feel worlds apart, but they share a common appeal. They're both comfort food to extremely localized communities. The former is a tribute to its star Kevin Martin, the real manager of The Lobby and a pillar for a small Edmonton community with fiendish movie taste. The latter speaks to the very specific flavours and anxieties that Toronto millennials from Malvern to Rexdale argue over.

That dynamic seeps into our interviews, where I feel like I'm having a tête-à-tête with Adams' characters on Next Stop. She's from Etobicoke, in Toronto's west end; I'm from Scarborough on the east, which is where The Weeknd, Shamier Anderson and the high school hallway sport salade comes from. The last time we talked, Adams took shots at Scarborough's inflated sense of pride — her contribution to the friendly east vs. west rivalry, which she compares to "Ghanaians and Nigerians."

This time around she's slandering our slang, and I can't fault her. "Scarborough folks, you all take it a little too far," says Adams, about how the east end jacks up the much-parodied "Toronto mans" accent to 11. "As of late, they put way too much stank on the twang. Now we sound like Jamaican Irish leprechauns. This shit is crazy."

It's convos like this that Next Stop is built from, which is why Adams was so perfect for the role even if she had no acting aspirations at the time. She grew up wanting to be a dancer — "kind of like in the 'Get Busy' video." That transitioned into dreams of being a record industry mogul after consuming a lot of Behind the Music on MuchMoreMusic. "I wanted to be Dame Dash," she says. "I loved his brash, kicking-down-doors energy."

Adams is currently working in music marketing — but as we can see, she's open to new experiences and refuses to corner herself in any specific career.  She's pursuing acting because it would obviously be a waste of raw talent if she didn't.

"I'm a multi-hyphenate creative human being," she says. "If it looks interesting, Imma do it. If I'm holding somebody down — if somebody says they need help doing something — I'll figure it out and learn something new."