It’s a big week to be talking to well-known Vancouver actor Babz Chula. She’s just received the Sam Payne Award for her humanitarian and career achievements and accepts the Women in Film’s Woman of the Year award on Saturday (March 7).

On Friday (March 6), she’s finally going to see the premiere of the Canadian-made feature The Green Chain, a hugely challenging film that finds her holding the screen in a 15-minute monologue. And she also happens to be in the middle of chemo treatments for the lymphatic cancer she’s been battling for several years.

“I think they all think I’m going to die,” she jokes about the awards, sitting in a downtown café and looking deceptively vibrant in a dramatic scarf and a funky array of rings and earrings. Hard to believe that in 2005 Chula was given months to live. Since then, she has chosen to be open with the public about her fight with the illness. “I explore that fear. You can’t live your life like you’re going to die. So this cancer thing becomes very complicated. It’s [death is] on the menu, but not necessarily.”

Chula’s strength must have been part of what drew director Mark Leiren-Young to her for the role of the granny activist she plays in The Green Chain.

The unconventional film is a series of monologues from seven players on all sides of the forestry debates, from a second-generation logger to a young tree-sitting protester. Chula says the challenge—and the attraction—was having to tell the story entirely with words, unaccompanied by pictures. It meant multiple gruelling, uncut takes of her part as an elderly woman who speaks from jail because she’s been arrested for obstructing logging.

“To make it authentic I plot it out in my mind so I can picture her arrest, her drive to the jail,” says the affable actor, who purposely didn’t base her performance on any real protester. “And the more detailed those pictures become, the easier it is to tell the story.”

The character is much older than the 62-year-old performer. She says the brutal first round of chemo she had just gone through at the time of filming helped to age her.

But there was a lot more she brought to the role too. The character speaks about missing her grandchildren, and Chula understands that connection. “My favourite people are my grandchildren. I talk to my 14-year-old grandson every day,” says Chula, herself a mother of five.

As for the character’s commitment to environmentalism, Chula drew on her own passionate cause: whales in captivity, one she’s taken from Greenpeace protests to Vancouver International Film Festival openings at the Vancouver Aquarium. “That’s the place where I found my voice: there’s no way from what we know today that we should be keeping sentient beings in captivity,” she says. “It almost makes you cry because people don’t understand.”

More than anything, you get the feeling Chula connects with her Green Chain character’s refusal to sit down and accept aging—and all the grief and illness it might bring. “I think she’s always the oldest person in the room; she’s not going to be hanging out with a bunch of people in rocking chairs.”

The non-profit  Babz Chula Lifeline for Artists Society was formed by members of the entertainment industry  to assist Chula with her medical treatment.