Oscar makes home in county
April 21, 2026
Deverell wins Academy Award for Frankenstein
Inverness County has a new resident, and his name is Oscar.
Tamara Deverell, who lives with her husband Ken Woroner in Chimney Corner, came away from last month’s Academy Awards with the Oscar for best production design for the hit Netflix movie Frankenstein, sharing the stage during her acceptance speech with Shane Vieau, the Dartmouth, Nova Scotia native who won for best set decoration.
Deverell, who was recently named co-chair of the Inverness County Centre for the Arts (ICCA), says she plans to use her new gold-plated friend to help raise the profile of the ICCA and to raise funds for its continued operation.
In light of recent provincial funding cuts to the arts sector, she says the ICCA has recently joined forces with other arts and culture groups across Cape Breton, such as the Cabot Trail Writers’ Festival, to help raise funds and to lobby government support.
“I’m going to use this glory,” Deverell says.
And while it appears Oscar has found a job, he’s already had the opportunity to spread a great deal of joy on what was a rather circuitous journey to his new home.
Deverell and Woroner, who served as stills photographer on the set of Frankenstein, left Los Angeles the day after the awards ceremony, but when their connecting flight from Toronto to Halifax was delayed, they were forced to spend that night in a Toronto hotel.
It gave them the opportunity to bring the award to the downtown restaurant where their son David recently started working, but the resulting party was just the start for Oscar, as he was once again pressed into service the following day when a storm in Halifax prevented their flight from landing.
“We flew all the way to Halifax, and they couldn’t land, so we turned around and flew back,” she recalls. “Landing back in Toronto, everybody was just so despondent. So, I said to myself, ‘now’s the time to pull out the Oscar.’ So, we passed it around, passed it up to the pilots for landing us safely. Passengers got their pictures taken with it. It was great.”
The second night in Toronto gave Deverell the opportunity to celebrate with much of the production crew who worked on Frankenstein there.
They were finally able to touch down in Halifax on day three of their journey and were once again greeted by fans and fellow passengers who revelled in the opportunity to meet Oscar.
Deverell’s first-ever Oscar win came a few weeks after she and Vieau won awards in the same categories at the BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) Awards in the United Kingdom.
“Awards are nice little baubles, but they’re not why I do what I do,” Deverell says. “I started working in film because I thought it was a fantastic process, working with a group of like-minded people, collaborating and having a shared vision. Awards are great and I love the attention, don’t get me wrong. But it’s not why I do what I do.”
Growing up in Vancouver, Deverell was always interested in art, so she began taking classes at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
“I didn’t really know what an art department was when I was a kid growing up,” she recalls. “I loved movies. I was the kid who would sit and watch the Oscars and go, ‘wow, that’s so cool. I wish that could be me one day.’”
“My father saw me sort of doing a bit of everything in art school, and he was the one who suggested that I work in film.”
Her father is award-winning novelist William Deverrell, who is still writing at 89. Among numerous other titles, he wrote Street Legal, which became a CBC legal drama that ran for eight seasons in the 1980s and 90s.
“He knew these producers who ended up shooting this movie in Meat Cove and Glace Bay and he introduced me to them and that’s how I got into the industry,” she says.
That movie was Something About Love, which starred Sydney-born actor Stefan Wodoslawsky, who also directed it.
“It was his personal story of coming back from the big city to the small town of Glace Bay when his father (played by Jan Rubes) got Alzheimer’s,” Deverell explains, noting that one scene was shot in Meat Cove because “it was the only place the producers could get permission to drive a limo off a cliff in this dramatic end-of-life scene for the father.”
“That was the first time I ever set foot on Cape Breton. I just remember Meat Cove being what I remember about BC, but very different and very beautiful, never thinking at that time that I’d want to live here.”
Deverell was costume designer on the movie, but her love of art changed the course of her budding career.
“I was always drawing and people noticed that, and a woman on the production said, ‘you should meet this production designer, Francois Seguin, in Montreal.’”
She started working with Seguin, but she realized that if she wanted to stay in the art department, she’d have to learn to draft.
“A lot of people who do what I do study architecture and interior design. I was already working so I was taking night classes in drafting for engineering. Between that and being self-taught, I learned to draft by hand. I was learning on the job.”
Frankenstein reunited Deverell with legendary Mexican director Guillermo del Toro. The two worked together for the first time on Mimic, a 1997 movie starring Josh Brolin and Mira Sorvino. They later worked together on a TV series called The Strain, before again collaborating on the 2022 film Nightmare Alley, starring Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett, for which Deverell received her first Oscar nomination.
She says much of the work she does on a movie can be done anywhere.
“If it’s something with a lot of sets that are built, which Frankenstein was, it’s a lot of research,” she explains. “We had to build a ship. That ship that you see in the movie is entirely built. The Franklin Expedition was a major source of research; I’ve spent time in the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic talking to the curators there.”
“There’s a lot of design work I can do remotely, and since COVID people are so used to working remotely.”
Deverell says the move to Inverness County came after she and her husband visited some friends. Their son was also going to school in Halifax at the time.
“We ended up falling in love with Cape Breton and totally got why our friends were coming here. We met some very interesting people. People had a lot to do with it, for sure, and then the landscape and the ocean.”
She says she’s been reading some scripts but hasn’t chosen her next project.
“I’ve moved to Cape Breton not to retire but to alter my life’s course and do my own artwork. So, I’m not dying to work. I’m being very picky. I’d rather do movies that I believe in, that really engage me visually, and after doing Frankenstein that’s a really hard bill to fit.”
“That was such a strong visual movie that it’s hard to get beyond that.”
(Top photo) Thanks to weather diverting her flight to Halifax, Deverell got the opportunity to share in her Oscar glory with members of her Toronto production team. Shown, from
left, are Soux Ellis, Thomas Inwood, Jon Chan, Dusty Reeves (holding Oscar), Deverell, April Fox and Etienne Gravrand. (Middle photo) Deverell is shown working in the lab on the set of Frankenstein. (Bottom photo) Her unscheduled layover in Toronto provided Deverell the chance to celebrate with her son, David, at the downtown restaurant where he works.
(Photos, from top to bottom: Ace Hotel, Ken Woroner/Netflix, Ken Woroner)