Gabrielle Miller is a team player. In a 20-year career, the Vancouver native has come to be best known as lovable ditzes on two shows that ran more or less parallel on Canadian TV, Corner Gas and the darker Robson Arms.

“You know, for the first 15 or so years,” Miller declares on the phone from Toronto, “I mostly did dramas. But now people are most familiar with my comic work because of those two shows.

“When Robson Arms was cancelled,” she continues, “I was in an airport when I found out, and I burst into tears. First off, I loved the writing and the way they put that whole show together and all the wonderful directors they brought. But the cast was really like a family, and it was heartbreaking to say goodbye to them.”

Many of those cast members spilled into Corner Gas, and when that popular series came to a close, she took time off to have a child and, eventually, move from Los Angeles to Toronto, only recently starting work again. Still, Miller was asked to take a more sober turn in Sisters & Brothers, the latest group-improvisational effort from prolific director Carl Bessai, who earlier made Mothers & Daughters and Fathers & Sons.

In the new film, which opens here Friday (March 23), she’s in one sibling subset, as the concerned sister of a schizophrenic brother (played by Benjamin Ratner) who is always ready to go off the rails. The movie is played mostly for low-key laughs, but she enjoyed the chance to draw on deeper material for her part.

“I come from a very large family, and I have very close relationships with my brothers and sisters and our parents, and we’ve had a beautiful, sometimes challenging time of it. And I feel I got to use that with Carl. His stories, and his approach to the work, are so fulfilling for an artist. The acting has to come from a very grounded place; in the workshopping you do with him—and, in this case, Ben, as well as Jay Brazeau—first you dig deep and then you just let it all go. It’s scary but so satisfying.”

(Bessai here shared writing credit with his key players, who also included Amanda Crew, Camille Sullivan, and Cory Monteith.)

Next up, Gabe, as she’s known to her many friends, keeps the laughs going with Gabriel Hogan and Ladner’s own Will Sasso in The Guys Who Move Furniture, a “deeply moving” picture shot in Halifax and due later this year. Even when she does comedy, though, it’s usually the deadpan role in which she’s the only one not in on the joke.

“Unfortunately, that carries over into the real world,” Miller admits with a sigh. “I’m always trying to find out what just happened. But, seriously, humour is so important to me. I’m always trying to find the funny in life.”

Watch the trailer for Sisters & Brothers.