BURST
Long before moving to Inverness County, one of the movies Tamara Deverell worked on early in her career was filmed in Cape Breton.
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She was still in art school at the time when she was part of the costume department on the Tom Berry-directed film Something About Love, which was released in 1988.
The script supervisor noticed Deverell could draw and suggested she should be in the art department. That advice helped set her on her current path in the film industry.
“I was like, ‘what does the art department do’?” said Deverell. “And then I started paying attention to the guys in the background who were doing things. And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, this is kind of cool. I could do that. I like this stuff, painting and dressing sets.’
“I finished that film and I went back to art school, which was in Vancouver at Emily Carr (University of Art and Design) where I was studying film. But I’ve already learned so much on the job that I just was like, I’m out of here, and really started working in film.”
OSCAR WIN
Fast forward four decades and Deverell is an Oscar winner . She and Shane Vieau, originally from Dartmouth, won for production design for Frankenstein at the 98th Academy Awards on Sunday.
“It’s amazing. It was terrifying because I knew that if my name was called, I had to get up and be on stage in front of, God knows – I mean, I didn’t want to think about all the people,” said Deverall, who lives just outside of Inverness with her husband, unit stills photographer Ken Woroner.
“But it was nice because Barbra Streisand was up just before us, and there was a whole in-memoriam section, and she sang a bit of The Way We Were, and I kind of relaxed.
“I was sitting right behind our director, Guillermo del Toro, so I got to hug him and some of the other cast. Our cinematographer (Dan Laustsen), Jacob Elordi who played the creature. So that was really special. Then I had to speak with my knees knocking, but I did OK I think.”
AWARD-WINNING CAREER
Deverell has been a production designer on films like Frankenstein (2025), Priscilla (2023), Nightmare Alley (2021), and television series such as Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (2022), Star Trek: Discovery (2017-24) and The Strain (2014-17).
Along with Sunday’s Oscar nod for Frankenstein , she earned Oscar and BAFTA nominations for Nightmare Alley, while winning the Art Directors Guild Award for best period feature. She also won an Emmy award for Cabinet of Curiosities.
Deverell got her start in Montreal. She worked in the art departments of several productions alongside Canadian designer François Séguin. As art director, she collaborated with Carol Spier on David Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) and eXistenZ (1999), as well as del Toro’s Mimic (1997). She also served as art director on X-Men (2000) with Academy Award–winning designer John Myhre.
WORKING WITH DEL TORO
Deverell has worked with del Toro on a number of projects, and says the elaborate sets of many of his films are demanding, but rewarding.
“It’s definitely a challenge, but it’s also what I live for,” she said. “I mean the textures and the levels of detail and the layering of the sets that we do is pretty extraordinary.”
When it came to Frankenstein, she even pushed to have some of the movie filmed here in Cape Breton at the Fortress of Louisbourg.
“I went there for research and scouting,” she said. “We did have originally a village scene in it, but it was cut. The fortress would have been great for that because it was a scene in Europe and the whole Fortress of Louisbourg is European-French style, but it was so good for me for research for the period because it’s the same period.
“And then also the ice, I wanted to come as the ice was coming in. In February, I really wanted to ask to do the ice scenes in Cape Breton, but we shot them on Lake Nipissing just north of Toronto and it was kind of melting ice, but slushy.”
SPEAKING OUT
Following her Oscar win, Deverell used her platform to speak out about the proposed budget cuts to the arts in Nova Scotia . She’s co-chair of the board of directors for the Inverness County Council of the Arts.
She addressed the cuts during the post-Academy Awards press conference.
“I’ll keep speaking up too,” she said. “I’m going to use this Oscar because I wouldn’t be getting an Oscar if it wasn’t for government support to the arts and arts education. It’s fine for me, I’m older, but all the young people who want to get into arts-based industries, like filmmaking, like theatre, like dance, like visual arts, those funding cuts are just dreadful. They really are killing careers and economy. Part of the tourist trade in our province in Cape Breton is based on arts and culture. That’s what attracted me to the area. To see those cuts, it destroys our society. It wears us down.
“Arts and culture are not discretionary. They are essential to our well-being.”
As for what’s next for Deverell, she said she’s going to focus on some of her own artwork, maybe a graphic novel “and just live life in Cape Breton for a bit.”
BIO
Tamara Deverell
Age: 65
Grew up in: North Vancouver, B.C.
Resides: Inverness County
Family: Husband Ken Woroner and two children, Rachel and David.
Film credits: Production designer on films like Frankenstein (2025), Priscilla (2023), Nightmare Alley (2021), and television series such as Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (2022), Star Trek: Discovery (2017-24) and The Strain (2014-17).
Accolades: Won an Oscar for production design with set decorator Shane Vieau for Frankenstein. Earned Oscar and BAFTA nominations for Nightmare Alley, while winning the Art Directors Guild Award for best period feature. Won an Emmy award for Cabinet of Curiosities.