Canada’s Emmanuelle Vaugier has signed on to play a leading role in the sequel to Saw. The film begins production in Toronto on May 5 and is scheduled for release by Lions Gate this fall. Vaugier joins returning actors in the cast Shawnee Smith and Tobin Bell. Donnie Walhlberg and Glen Plummer will also star.

Emmanuelle Vaugier is considered one of this country's most promising young performers.She is the new female superhero for the television adaptation of the comic Painkiller Jane for the Sci Fi Channel. The two-hour pilot has her in the role of a young marine officer who gains super heroic healing powers when she is accidentally exposed to biochemical weaponry. "She's a strong female superhero paradigm, not simply someone in spandex fighting crime," Sci Fi executive Mark Stern told the Daily Variety when the project was initially announced. "It's really the drama of a normal person who finds themselves with powers that they don't know what to do with or how to handle."

Based on the Event Comics series, Painkiller Jane is a super-heroine for the new millennium. When Jane Browning (Vaugier) is exposed to a biochemical weapon that alters her genes, she becomes endowed with incredible self-healing powers and extraordinary physical and mental abilities. Now, on the run from a sinister organization determined to replicate her powers – or destroy them – Jane joins forces with some unlikely allies to become an ultra-covert crime-fighting agent. The character originated in the pages of Joe Quesada and Jim Palmiotti's Event Comic title. Richard Roundtree (Shaft, Desperate Housewives) and Tate Donovan (The O.C.) also star.

The Vancouver native is known as much for her turns on shows like Smallville and One Tree Hill as her appearances on the covers of magazines. Emmanuelle is back as Nikki in the television series One Tree Hill on The WB. She recently completed production on the lead role in House of the Dead 2: Dead Aim due out from Lions Gate next year. Last fall, she played Lindsey Kellogg who is the ex fiancée to Jay Kenneth Johnson’s character on the Fox Television series North Shore. On UPN’s new hit series Veronica Mars, Emmanuelle is Monica Hadwin a ‘trophy wife’ to a successful Hollywood agent and meets up with Harry Hamlin's character Aaron Echolls on the show.

She also played Princess Jasmine, the daughter of an Arabian sultan in New Line Cinema’s Secondhand Lions opposite Michael Caine, Robert Duvall and Haley Joel Osment, now on DVD. Emmanuelle plays Lauren in Call Me, The Rise and Fall of Heidi Fleiss; for the USA Network. She also portrays Dr. Helen Bryce; Lex Luthor’s wife on the WB’s hit drama Smallville.

She starred in the WB comedy My Guide to Becoming a Rock Star and in the film 40 Days and 40 Nights, opposite Josh Hartnett. She has also completed starring roles in three independent films ,including Suddenly Naked, in which she plays a Latin pop sensation; Mindstorm, a sci-fi thriller; and Ripper, a psychological thriller about students that mysteriously disappear after enrolling in a class about serial killers.

On the small screen, she has held several guest-starring roles, including The Handler, Outer Limits, Higher Ground opposite Hayden Christensen and in the WB’s Charmed. Emmanuelle also appeared in the Emmy Award nominated miniseries The Beach Boys: An American Family where she portrayed Mike Love’s wife Suzanne.

Vaugier was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and grew up in a French-speaking household. She currently resides in Los Angeles and has a home in Vancouver.

Credit: emmanuellevaugier.com