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Growing up on an island in New Zealand, Sophia Johnson didn’t have a TV.

“My dad was a writer and a poet and so I was really into books as a kid, Shakespeare, stuff like that,” she tells the Straight at a coffee shop in Yaletown. “He gave me all his favourite stuff and was like, ‘You’re going to love Watership Down and The Odyssey . And here’s your starter Dostoevsky,’ which was The Gambler , which is dark as fuck!”

So it was a bit of a surprise when, as a teenager, she was actually on TV, having scored a role on New Zealand’s top soap opera—the hospital drama Shortland Street— after booking a handful of commercials and modelling gigs in her youth. Johnson played the love

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