The Sticky: Margo Martindale accesses her rage in maple syrup heist caper

The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist sounds like a joke. In fact, Margo Martindale thought it was.

“It didn’t think it was real but when I found out it was, it made it even more delicious,” she told The Nightly. The pun was unintended but it’s apt.

From 2011, almost 10,000 barrels of maple syrup were stolen from a facility in Quebec, and no one noticed for months. The thieves stole the barrels, siphoned off the syrup, refilled them with water and returned them to the storage warehouse.

No one noticed for months. By then, they had made off with 20 million Canadian dollars’ worth of liquid gold from the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, which controls almost four-fifths of the world’s supply.

The Sticky, a six-episode crime caper starring Martindale as a would-be thief, is not a faithful dramatisation of the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist but uses it as a jumping-off point to craft a Fargo-esque story about unlikely criminals, dastardly rivals and ineptitude from all sides.

No wonder Martindale didn’t believe it at first – it sounds too ridiculous to be true.

Martindale’s prolific filmography and ability to disappear into any role has seen her dubbed as one of the great character actors of our time.

She’s had stand-out performances in the likes of The Americans, Sneaky Pete and The Good Wife but you’ve seen her pop up in everything from the Hannah Montana movie to August: Osage County.

“I like to play characters, I think any actor who’s playing a part that’s not them is a character actor. Meryl Streep is a character actor,” she said.

For someone who has played what seemed to be every type of character, The Sticky presented a new opportunity for Martindale.

“It was someone I hadn’t played before, someone who had hit the wall, who was raging and furious and desperate to keep her (sick) husband at home, and for him to not go to the hospital. She was sure he would die if he did, and she would do anything for him, and what she needed was money because she had run out,” she explained.

The character is Ruth, a fictional maple syrup producer who has been screwed over by the small man who ruled over the industry association as his own corrupt fiefdom.

Faced with roadblocks, injustice and a villain with no ethics or compassion, only self-serving greed, Ruth decides to team up with a bumbling security guard (Guillaume Cyr) and a third-string enforcer for the Boston mob (Chris Diamantopoulos), the three hatch a plan to rob the association.

Ruth might be stubborn, hot-tempered and doing something very illegal, but she has righteousness in her corner.

“(The association boss) pushes every button that would make me rage,” Martindale said. “I get it. Me, as Margo, rages, and Ruth is a great character, she’s multilayered, she’s in pain and she has guilt.”

There’s an amazing scene in an early episode when Ruth, fed up as all hell, smashes a maple tree through the door of the association’s building. The stunt involved Martindale driving a truck around a carpark at night, with a full tree tethered to the back.

She recalled it was three or four takes and that it was a very real tree. “Real driver, real tree!” she said. “It was so satisfying.”

With more than 50 movies and 60 TV shows to her name, it’s minor miracle that Martindale found a role she found fresh, which she credited to The Sticky’s writers, Brian Donovan and Ed Herro.

“I’ve done that and I’ve done that, but I had never done this,” she explained. “That’s what really intrigued me. I’ve been offered a lot of bad guys in the South, I’ve done that. I did it on a great, great show, and I won’t say I don’t need to do I again, because who knows, there could be a beautiful script that comes along.

“I look for something different. I don’t think I’ve played an alcoholic, which I would be happy to do, and drink while I was doing it. Just kidding!”

The Sticky is on Prime Video on December 6.