Local-famous Katie Burrell has been cracking us up with her slopeside antics on social media for years, playing the tag-along partner of an offscreen presence we never meet but can all relate to. With the open-armed reception of her first feature-length comedy, Weak Layers, the Revy local’s sights are set on Hollywood. Words :: Jayme Moye // photos :: Colleen Gentemann.
Last January, Katie Burrell was supposed to be in Nelson, BC, four hours south of her home base of Revelstoke, for a stop on her Weak Layers film tour. But Ullr decreed otherwise. Freezing rain had turned the highways into a luge run, and Nelson’s Civic Theatre had been evacuated two days prior because its aging roof couldn’t handle the weight of snow and ice. Burrell couldn’t be there, but the show would go on.
Nelsonites still packed the theatre, chance of roof collapse be damned. Burrell was local-famous throughout Western Canada for her hilarious video clips parodying mountain-town life—especially ski culture—on social media. Weak Layers, which she wrote, directed and starred in, was her first feature-length comedy. SKI magazine called it “the ski movie we need right now.” Outside dubbed Burrell “the new queen of slopeside fun.” It was such a success in Nelson that the theatre had to add two additional screenings to meet demand—that’s on par with Barbie in the small mountain town of 10,000.
Meanwhile, Burrell’s schedule had become Hollywood-style unmanageable. When I was finally able to track her down, it was well into February. The film tour was over, but not the promotion. Burrell said by phone that she was busy with the VOD—video on demand to the layperson—release. As of the day prior, Weak Layers was available to stream on Apple TV and Amazon. “My movie is showing up next to Taylor Swift’s as a top seller,” Burrell says. “I’ve peaked. I can die happy now.”
Katie Burrell grew up on Vancouver Island, in Nanaimo. Her father worked in forestry and her mom in government administration. Her parents were both transplants, from New Brunswick and Ontario respectively. They delighted in providing their only child with opportunities that they never had growing up, especially learning to ski. From the time Burrell was a toddler, her parents took her to nearby Mount Washington. “I loved it immediately,” Burrell says. “Although at first I thought the point of skiing was to ride the chairlift, like it was an amusement park ride.”
At age 15, Burrell became certified to teach skiing and landed her first job, at Mount Washington’s Kids Zone. Burrell also loved basketball, and played in a competitive league throughout high school. But her favourite activity was theatre. She acted in all the school plays, and cites her high school drama teacher as one of the most influential adults of her teenage years. But skiing was always central in her life, and after high school she applied to be an au pair in Switzerland and got the gig, spending nine months in the Alps.
When it came time to attend university, Burrell considered going to school for acting, and even toured a theatre school in Victoria with her mom. But at the time, a career as a movie star felt too far out of reach. “It seemed silly to even try,” Burrell says. “Like an exercise in futility or just self-immolation.” She opted for a more practical path and enrolled at McGill University in Montreal with a major in political science.
Check out Burrell’s ‘Don’t Love It To Death’ Short Film Project:
At McGill, Burrell discovered stand-up comedy and began performing. She also started writing for the university’s satire magazine and joined the film club to begin producing short comedies. In one of those films, DJ Caps Lock, which she co-produced with her friend Jake Heller, Burrell plays an ambiguously European DJ trying to make it in North America. They entered the film in the McGill Focus Film Festival, where it won both Best of the Festival and the Audience Choice Award.
While the film’s positive reception was fun, Burrell had an unexpected reaction to the process of creating it. “I won’t say I went crazy, but I became completely obsessed with it,” she recalls. The intensity she experienced while acting and filmmaking scared her. “You know the expression, ‘Find what you love and let it kill you’?” she asks. “It was like that.”
By the time Burrell graduated, it was clear poli-sci was not her path. At the same time, she didn’t see how following her creative passions was going to pay the bills. She returned to the mountains of BC, taking a staff job at a heli-skiing lodge in Revelstoke. Burrell got to ski during her breaks, but soon found herself sacrificing time on the mountain to create. To entertain guests, she put together comedy sketches with another theatre-kid staffer, produced a short comedic film called Employee of the Month and kept her coworkers in stitches with her constant role-playing.
Her subsequent jobs would follow a similar pattern, with Burrell doing so-called “real work” to earn a living, while indulging her creative compulsions on the side. There was the copywriting and brand development contract work she did in Revelstoke, while spending her nights performing stand-up comedy. And the nine-to-five job at a law firm in Victoria that left her evenings open to test her comedic mettle on big-city audiences. Then, in 2017, Burrell moved back to Revelstoke to take a corporate job as a marketing director. That was the year Burrell met Colleen Gentemann, a documentary filmmaker and kindred spirit, and started co-creating short videos spoofing mountain-town life for social media in her spare time. Influencer, the duo’s earliest collaboration, garnered more than 36,000 views on YouTube and put Burrell on the social media map as, well, an influencer.
The pair’s cinematic launching pad came in 2019 with Dream Job, a 14-minute ski flick produced on a shoestring budget with a $50,000 grant. Burrell plays herself, a woman tired of her desk job who goes in search of a better ski-industry career. It was viewed nearly 130,000 times on YouTube, made the rounds at the major mountain film festivals and brought big brands like Arc’teryx knocking on Burrell’s door to produce content. She left her corporate marketing job that same year.
Even during the pandemic (when Burrell moved in with Gentemann so they could continue to create), the brand work stayed steady. Their follow-up film, Coach, a 32-minute documentary following the relationship between coach Lorraine Huber and athlete Hedvig Wessel during the 2020 Freeride World Tour, was another mountain film festival award winner. It also proved Burrell and Gentemann’s chops in dealing with more nuanced subject matter while still maintaining their new company’s special brand of self-reflexive humour.
Weak Layers is their most ambitious project yet, a film three years in the making and Burrell and Gentemann’s first foray into feature-length entertainment. It is also their first film to cross over from mountain film festivals into general movie theatres, with screenings across western North America, in small towns like Nelson as well as much larger cities like Reno, Nevada.
If Burrell had any doubts about her path, Weak Layers has put them to rest. She is a performer and entertainer, with the talent and ambition to not only earn her living, but to play on an even bigger stage. Gentemann perhaps puts it best: “I’ve never seen her so lit up and on fire and her best version of herself than on Weak Layers, because she had the resources to channel this crazy creative energy she has.”
Burrell says she needs a break from the all-out effort of the past few years, but she can’t stop fanning the flames. She and Gentemann continue to create content for bigger and bigger brands. And they’ve just finished incorporating their business, formerly Katie Burrell TV, as Burrell Entertainment, in order to expand their scope. Burrell is seeking representation in Hollywood and meeting with producers to discuss a new feature-length film script she co-wrote with Evan Jonigkeit, who played Gabe on Weak Layers. The new script is a departure from the ski industry: It’s a coming-of-age story about a teenager who spends two transformative summers in France, drawing from—as much of Burrell’s work does—her personal experience.
In Weak Layers, hard-partying Cleo—Burrell’s character—is roused from her ski-bum lifestyle by the opportunity to produce a ski film and win prize money. While the character is not autobiographical, there are strong parallels. “I think the biggest thing I connected with, with Cleo, is this sense of urgency that kind of surprises you from out of nowhere,” Burrell says. “And the willingness, as a result of that urgency, to do whatever it takes, to be the architect of your life.” It’s hard to tell if she’s speaking of Cleo or herself when she says, “This has to happen.”
Check out the Live It Up with Mountain Life podcast to hear Katie talk about the transition from outdoor sports personality and director to the hallowed grounds of Hollywood and beyond.
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