Neve Campbell Says Her Dance Training ‘Helped Me Stay Sane’ in ‘Challenging’ Hollywood (Exclusive)

Neve Campbell is grateful for the life lessons she learned as a trained dancer before starting her Hollywood career.

Canadian actress, best known for her role as horror heroine Sidney Prescott for over five years Scream films, has roots in the world of dance, having trained at the prestigious Canadian National Ballet School from the age of 9 to 14.

Now she’s in Toronto at the city’s International Film Festival to debut a new documentary Swan A songwhich takes audiences to the 2022 National Ballet of Canada production Swan Lake. Campbell was an executive producer on the project.

“I have very few pictures of myself at the National Ballet School, but JJ [Feild]my partner said, ‘Oh, there’s this one photo of you, and you look so determined,'” Campbell, 49, tells PEOPLE as she looks back on her first dance days ahead of the festival from her home in Los Angeles.

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‘Swan Song’.

Christopher Sherman

“I take all the discipline I have from dance,” she continues. “The ability to be able to listen and follow directions, with the humility and understanding that you will never be perfect and that it takes work and desire to be good, and that no matter how hard you work, I will never fully get there – that’s the journey .”

“That’s what I learned and I’ve taken that into the acting world,” adds Campbell. “I think it definitely fed me and helped me stay sane in a challenging world.”

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Campbell says she got hooked on dance after her father took her to see a production by the National Ballet of Canada Nutcracker.

“I was 6 years old. It was my Christmas present,” she recalls, smiling. “I said, ‘I want to do it.’ ”

At the age of 9, she auditioned for the National Ballet School and enrolled. Campbell describes his schooling there as “difficult in many, many ways.”

“It’s hard for everyone,” she adds. “The technique that comes from the dancers there and the love for the world and dance that comes from that is pretty phenomenal.”

Campbell made the difficult decision to leave training at 14 despite “loving school”, she says.

“I’ve just had some mental challenges, it’s just been hard for me to find the balance between wanting my childhood and making this dream come true,” she explains. “I already had a lot of injuries. From the age of 9, at the National Ballet School, I had weekly physiotherapy.”

Just a year later, Campbell was cast in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Toronto production The Phantom of the Opera. “Suddenly I started dancing professionally,” she recalls of her early experience. “I was doing what I love. I was making friends. I was earning a living already at the age of 15.”

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One night, the agent found himself in the audience, and “the rest is history,” as Campbell describes it.

All these years later, Campbell says she can’t believe she’s experiencing the “full circle” moment of bringing a dance documentary to audiences after her success in Hollywood. (Recently, her Netflix series Attorney Lincoln has been renewed for a third season.)

She is still pinching herself that she was able to work with the legendary Canadian ballet dancer Karen Kain, one of the main stars swan song, which accompanies the ballet troupe as it mounts a new production Swan Lake which Kain directed on the eve of her retirement.

‘Swan Song’.

Christopher Sherman

“She’s one of the big reasons I became an artist,” Campbell says. “She was Canada’s prima ballerina, one of the world’s. The ultimate goal was to get to where Karen is. I still remember watching her Swan Lake when I was, I think, 9 years old. It was pure grace.”

“It was one of those moments in my life when I said, ‘Oh, this is what art can do,'” she says. “To create this project with this team and to recognize her for the work she’s done and watch her teach other dancers, pass the torch, basically, it’s been a really nice experience.”

Swan song will be released in theaters in Canada on September 22. In Canada, it will later air as a four-part limited series on CBC Gem and CBC TV, premiering on November 22.

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Source: HIS Education