Reid

With shooting for the second season of the CVM Television comedy Me And Mi Kru scheduled to start in January, actress Audrey Reid, who plays Beatrice, is looking forward to a spicing up of her role.

"It's great playing someone like her. She's independent and all that but there's definitely room for improvement," Reid told The Gleaner recently.

Reid, 39, is one of the principal cast members along with deejay Benzly Hype, who plays Hype, leader of the Innocent Kru dancehall group; old school deejay Professor Nuts plays Grabsy while England-born Vas Blackwood is the snooty Mr Wedderburn, Beatrice's neighbour and nemesis.

Discrimination

Reid's character is a ghetto girl who made good and moves to an upscale St Andrew neighbourhood where she encounters class prejudice head-on in the form of Wedderburn, who repeatedly calls the police to harass her.

Having spent her formative years in the Franklyn Town area of east Kingston, Reid can empathise with Beatrice's predicament. She believes the social landscape in Jamaica has transformed to a point where people like Mr Wedderburn are fast becoming a thing of the past.

"I look at the (prep) school where my kids go as an example, many of the parents are informal commercial importers. That was not the case years ago when it was exclusively uptown," Reid reasoned.

Saucy characters

Early in her career, Reid played saucy characters in popular roots plays of the late 1980s and early 1990s. She appeared in Obeah Wedding, Con Man, Boy Blue, Scandal, Boops and Higglers before snaring her breakthrough role as Marcia in the 1997 low-budget movie, Dancehall Queen, which was directed by Me And Mi Kru creator Rick Elgood.

Her turn as a struggling ghetto mother working the dancehall circuit earned strong reviews. But Reid said while Dancehall Queen opened doors, she was not willing to walk through every entrance.

"I got so many offers for similar roles in movies and music videos, I wondered if it was a curse," she said. "I turned them down. I didn't want

to be typecast." Reid had a minor role in Third World Cop, another low-budget movie filmed in Jamaica.

Me And Mi Kru debuted in early 2009 and was filmed in Rose Town and Cherry Gardens. Written by Paul O Beale, the first season had 13 half-hour episodes.