Director and creator Megan Park attends Prime Video’s ‘Sterling Point’ World Premiere at Regal Union Square in New York.Michael Loccisano/Getty Images
Sterling Point, the Prime series that Megan Park created, wrote and directed, about a group of teenagers in Ontario cottage country sharing an indelible coming-of-age summer, had only been streaming for a week when Park and I got on a video call together. But the internet was already in raptures about it; the Closet Scene in particular had been dubbed “iconic.”
If you’ve watched the show, you know the moment: Ellis (Jacob Whiteduck-Lavoie), a local who works as a pilot and mechanic at his father’s marina, and Annie (Ella Rubin), the privileged New Yorker who’s uncovering a family secret in Lake Muskoka, are sitting opposite one another in her cottage’s woodsy, wainscoted storage closet, when Ellis reaches out – left hand behind Annie’s right knee, right hand on her waist, their eyes locked – and pulls her across the floor into him. They’ve been quietly crazy about each other for seven episodes, but this is the first time either has made a move. The swooniest part is, it ends not with a kiss, but a hug. You can practically hear a collective “ohhh” echoing around the Earth, followed by the click of a million rewind buttons being pressed to watch it again.
Left to right, Ella Rubin, Mabel Strachan, Bo Bragason, and Amélie Hoeferle in Sterling Point.Sabrina Lantos/Prime/The Canadian Press
It’s the kind of authentic-feeling interaction that viewers love to call “improvised,” when in fact it and everything people are loving about the series are a direct result of Park’s work ethic, powers of observation and commitment to collaboration. She dreamed up the scenario, in which Annie and her twin brother Connor (Keen Ruffalo, son of actor Mark Ruffalo) are bequeathed an island by an estranged grandfather. She created those characters, as well as Ramona (Amélie Hoeferle), a guarded but deep-feeling local raised by her grandfather who turns out to be the half-sister Annie didn’t know she had; Rory (Daniel Quinn-Toye), one of Muskoka’s nouveau riche, but kind; Oona (Bo Bragason), a British free spirit with a lax mother; and Maple (Mabel Strachan), Oona’s precocious younger sister. Park crafted the series’ premise – that growing up and feeling out of control can be freaky, but also exciting – and developed its layered relationships, both straight and queer. She wrote the funny, naturalistic dialog that gives the characters real snap. She cast a winning group of young actors and then she – gasp – asked for their input.
“I’m shocked that more directors don’t collaborate that way,” Park, who was born in Lindsay, Ont., and turned 40 in July, says on our call. The sun is streaming into her home office outside Toronto; she’s wearing a white tank top and has her blonde hair loose; and she’s limping slightly because she broke her big toe at her series’ premiere in New York, then turned her ankle a week later picking up one of her two children. “Maybe I’ll limp forever, but at least it will evoke fond Sterling Point memories,” she cracks. (She and her children’s father, actor and musician Tyler Hilton, divorced this past January.)
Hoeferle, Rubin and Park attend the ‘Sterling Point’ World Premiere in New York.Michael Loccisano/Getty Images
Back when Park was a young actor, in films and series including Charlie Bartlett and The Secret Life of the American Teenager, “no one would ever ask me, ‘Now Megan, how would you sit in this scene?’” she says. “It was just, ‘Sit here, wear this, say that.’” But on Sterling Point and in the two films she wrote and directed, The Fallout (2021) and My Old Ass (2024), “the actors and I discuss a scene, I film the scripted take, and then I ask what they’d do. It’s the only way to get the authenticity I want to capture.”
So when her producers offered Park and on-screen half-sisters Rubin and Hoeferle two hours of rehearsal time in a conference room, Park instead held a bonfire where the three shared stories from their childhoods. When her cast created music playlists for their characters, Park listened to them, to help her get inside their heads. She’d observe how Rubin and Hoeferle would snuggle before a take, braiding each other’s hair, and then incorporate that into the scene. And when Rubin asked how she should get across that closet floor into Whiteduck-Lavoie’s arms, Park and her director of photography, Kristen Correll, huddled in the space with them and figured it out.
Park had never written television before, but her co-showrunners, Stephanie Savage and Josh Schwartz, had created two Young Adult classics, The O.C. and Gossip Girl. “The structure of those series, or Dawson’s Creek or One Tree Hill, they’re similar in the way they draw you in, with love triangles and mysteries,” Park says. “These active characters in search of answers. At first I was scared. How do I put those tropes through the voice I want this show to have?”
Her answer lay in her characters. “They come into my mind fully formed, and then it’s about reverse engineering situations to fit them,” Park says. “Maple is 14, so smart, a voracious reader, so what would throw her? Getting her period. Annie, turning 18, has never defined herself as the girl with the dead mom – but what if she did?” Annie’s late mother’s two loves, played by Jay Duplass and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, are also coming of age – middle age – facing up to decisions they made when younger.
Hoeferle and Rubin play half-sisters in Sterling Point.Sabrina Lantos/Prime/The Canadian Press
Park filmed exteriors on Lakes Joseph and Rosseau, and interiors on a Toronto sound stage. “I love showcasing Canada for Canada,” she says. “Why can’t this be happening all the time?” As a director, she understands how to convey the honeyed afternoons and lavender dusks of a summer by the lake, the August shiver of days shortening, the teenage ache of being nostalgic for a moment even as you’re living it, and that gutted feeling when you realize that you’re maybe not who you thought you were, just as you’re about to enter a vast, unknown adulthood. She knows how to shoot teenagers watching fireworks over the water, piled atop one another like puppies; she understands the plume of a boat’s wake and the romantic slap of an old screen door.
I’ve written before that, for me, the truest drama comes from people who are struggling to behave well, and Park loves that, too; she finds straight-up villains dull and instead gives every character their colours. But mainly, she knows that teenagers are people, and treats them with respect.
“I’m a Millennial, and honestly, my teenage years were a lot like Mean Girls,” Park says. “I think Gen Z see the world through a different lens. They’ve experienced more upheavals and uncertainty than I ever felt, and come out the other side kinder, but also craving being off the grid. The state of the world, social media, economic uncertainty – they’re dealing with all of that as they’re trying to leave the nest. They are so much more resilient, smarter, and more aware of how their behaviour affects the people around them than my generation was. It drives me crazy when I watch shows that don’t take them seriously. My goal is to give them the elevated stories, characters and content they deserve.”
Rubin and Daniel Quinn-Toye, who plays Rory, in Sterling Point.Courtesy of Prime/The Canadian Press
Park’s next project as writer/director, Die Alive, a romantic comedy feature starring Zoë Kravitz, will be her first centred on adults. “It’s about parenthood, aging parents, female friendship and the comedy that comes from that,” she says. “Of all the things I’ve written, it’s the closest to where I am in my actual life.”
She’s also imagining scenarios for Sterling Point season two, though that’s yet to be announced. “We knew we wanted Annie and Ramona to trade places, so if we get a season two we’ll see how that’s affected them,” she says. There’s a lot she wants to dig into – Connor looking for his and Annie’s biological parents, maybe an ex of Ellis’s turns up. “The characters are special to me. And the actors are already BFF’s.”
She stops herself. “See, I’m dating myself,” she says. “My cast would let me know: ‘Megan, nobody says BFF’s anymore.’” And Park would listen.