A love letter to Canada’s blue collar workers, The Trades features a ‘diva’ racoon and may induce a desire to do handiwork

Who says acting is just make-believe? Anastasia Phillips was so inspired by Audrey Stool, the apprentice carpenter she plays in the new Crave comedy “The Trades,” that when her dishwasher broke she took it apart and fixed it herself.

“I found that after filming I felt irrationally inspired to do my own handiwork,” Phillips said in a Zoom interview. It’s “something I never would have done because I would call a professional. And guess what? Audrey is that professional.”

Torontonian Phillips (“Moonshine,” “Bomb Girls”) and New Brunswick-born, Nova Scotia-raised Robb Wells play the main characters in “The Trades,” a new comedy series that is something of a love letter to Canada’s blue collar workers.

Wells, best known as foul-mouthed, weed-growing Ricky in “Trailer Park Boys,” plays Todd Stool, a pipefitter at the local oil refinery who aspires to move into management. He lives with sister Audrey, who decides to stop messing around with minimum wage retail jobs and follow her brother and father into carpentry at the plant.

The cast is rounded out by a who’s who of Canadian screen names, including Tom Green, Patrick McKenna (“The Red Green Show”), Enrico Colantoni (“Flashpoint”), Dan Petronijevic (“Letterkenny”), Jesse Camacho (“Less Than Kind”), Brandon Oakes (“Diggstown”), Raoul Bhaneja (“Train 48”), Susan Kent (“Trailer Park Boys”) and Jennifer Spence (“You Me Her”).

That the eight-episode series attracted that plethora of talent could be considered something of a coup for creator Ryan J. Lindsay, whose only previous writing credits were short films.

“For a first-time creator, writer, producer, I just thought he did a wonderful job,” said Wells.

Besides his cast, Lindsay had a crack team that included long-time “Trailer Park Boys” executive producer Gary Howsam and director Warren P. Sonoda, who worked on “Trailer Park Boys,” “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” and other shows.

Whatever Lindsay lacked in TV experience he made up for with knowledge of the real-life trades. A native of Sarnia, Ont., he grew up in the so-called “Chemical Valley,” named for the area’s petroleum industry, and his two brothers are a pipefitter and carpenter, respectively.

“I chose the arts,” Lindsay said in press notes for the show. “But I loved the stories my brothers used to tell at family dinners and get-togethers — they would have us all in stitches. I knew there was a concept there, but I had to figure out how to execute it.”

Part of that process involved Lindsay interviewing more than 180 tradespeople from Sarnia.

“I sat them down, pressed record on my phone and asked them: ‘What’s the best rumour you’ve ever heard?’ ‘What’s the best nickname on the job site?’ ‘Can you share some funny workplace stories?’” Lindsay said.

(The series’ verisimilitude was enhanced by shooting at a real decommissioned refinery in Hamilton and the Akerley campus of the Nova Scotia Community College in Dartmouth, which had boiler rooms, welding shops and other infrastructure to use as sets.)

It wasn’t just Lindsay reaping the knowledge of real-life blue collar workers; Wells and Phillips also made trips to Sarnia to tap his brothers and others for tales of the trades, and got training in their characters’ skills.

“You want to look like you sort of know what you’re doing … otherwise, people would call bulls–t right away,” Wells said. “Just even how to hold the different (welding) torches properly and at different angles.

“I definitely had a new respect for the people in the industry.”

After talking to tradespeople herself, Phillips had a sense that working in a plant can be like “the law of the jungle … it runs by its own logic, its own set of rules, its own code of conduct. You have to win people’s honour. Nobody takes any bulls–t.”

The landscape of a refinery “feels like you’re on another planet and what it draws from people is such a rich humanity and sense of, like, family and connection,” Phillips said. Add to that a “corporate backdrop that really doesn’t have each individual’s best interest in mind … the camaraderie and the family bonds that grow from that are thicker than blood and really, really, really deep.”

There was camaraderie on the set as well.

“The atmosphere was set from the top down,” Phillips said. “Ryan Lindsay had been a member of a film crew in almost every position and there was a sense of equality amongst all of the levels of production … just a real no bulls–t, decent vibe on set, much like you find in the trades.”

“It was a really nice experience,” addedWells, who is also a producer of the show.

Phillips enjoyed portraying “a working class woman whose odyssey appears small, but it’s just as big to her as anyone else’s. The idea of what you do with the rest of your life. Where do you find your place? How do you finally grow up and take responsibility for yourself?

“I liked the kind of swaggering confidence that Audrey grew out of me and I felt like I reclaimed a part of my 13-year-old self who was a tomboy and thought she was invincible, and was a little cocky. And it feels fun to be in those shoes again.”

Wells said he loves the characters and the concept of “The Trades.”

“It’s a lot of grit, but it also has a lot of heart. So comedy, grit and heart mixed together is usually a pretty good recipe.”

It’s also a chance to portray the working class in a way “that it’s never really been captured properly before,” he said.

It must be noted, however, that there was one diva on set: Gabby, a trained raccoon who hangs out in the Stool siblings’ backyard.

“She had four wranglers and her own hotel room, and they fed her gummy candies and you couldn’t make eye contact with her,” Phillips said. “They wheeled her out on a little cart in, like, a fur coat. I guess she was cold, but this is the most high maintenance actress I’ve ever worked with.”

“If you didn’t play by the rules she would hiss at ya,” Wells said.

“The Trades” debuts with two episodes Friday on Crave.