Pickle Barrel
A CROWD OF rowdy, screaming
teenagers sit crammed inside the
small MuchMusic studio in the
CHUM building on Queen Street
West.
The cameras are on standby, the overhead lights burn hot, and set directors scramble to finish up last minute prep for the show.
Leah Miller, the illustrious MuchMusic VJ and co-host of Much on Demand, stands calmly at the centre of the storm. She works the room like an expert politician, chatting with adoring fans and smiling warmly for their cameras.
Just before they go to air, the bubbly 25 year old, who’s sporting a little grey dress and four-inch black stilettos, applies a fresh coat of shiny red lip gloss and pushes her bangs from her face.
“It doesn’t even feel like television any more,” says Miller, who recently celebrated her second anniversary with the station.
In a moment, she’ll be ad libbing an interview with the hip pop-punk band Panic! At The Disco. Though she’s armed with questions and anecdotes, when the cameras turn on, she’ll be live without a net — MuchMusic has no teleprompters.
“To do this job, you have to be really comfortable with yourself,” Miller says. But the Leah we see on television is quite different from the laid-back hipster who makes her home in the Bayview area.
Born in Etobicoke, Miller was obsessed with The Wizard of Oz as a kid, and as a teenager attended Cardinal Carter Academy for the Arts at Yonge and Sheppard.
When we meet for an interview, she’s not yet done up for the camera, and she’s dressed comfortably in jeans, a fitted plaid shirt and a pair of black UGGs.
“The first thing I do after a show is take off my makeup and change out of my heels,” says Miller, who’s perched comfortably in a desk chair, her legs hanging over the arm. Though she’s a self-proclaimed homebody, Miller works the camera with ease.
“No matter how crazy things get, you have to take a deep breath and keep yourself leveled,” she says. “I’ve learned how to tune a lot of the noise out.”
Cradling the mic closely, Miller interviews her guests over the earpiercing screams of swooning fans.
On the air, she’s met with the likes of Coldplay’s Chris Martin, the guys from My Chemical Romance, celebrity socialite Paris Hilton and pop megastar Hilary Duff (who has since become Miller’s close friend).
“Chris Martin is a total sweetheart,” says Miller recalling the time when Martin sought her out in the makeup room before an interview to introduce himself and his band.
“It’s really nice to meet people who are superfamous and are still just normal,” she says. “So many of these stars get too caught up in their own hype.”
As long as Miller thinks of her interview subjects as pals she has no problem grilling them for personal details. She schmoozes with these musicians and rock stars like a pro, cracking jokes and making them feel totally comfortable on camera.
When Miller encounters gawking fans lining up to take her photo, she can’t help but laugh.
“I’m just a goofy girl on TV,” she says. “I’m really no different than anyone else.”
Besides, even with all of her television success, Miller has had her share of mishaps, too.
“I once fell on live TV,” she says recalling a Live at Much interview she hosted with the popular rock band All-American Rejects.
“I’m a huge klutz, and as I was walking the band outside to meet their fans, I tripped over a mic stand that had been knocked over during the interview,” she says. “I flew into the air in my dress and landed on my bum!”
But instead of freaking out, Miller says she started to laugh, got herself up and continued with the show.
“It’s live TV — there’s not much else you can do in those situations.” It’s that ability to laugh at herself that Miller’s boss, John Kampilis, says makes her an indispensable TV personality.
“It’s just so rare that you find someone who can stand in front of the camera and be naturally articulate and have such good energy,” says the MuchMusic senior supervising producer. “Leah really keeps it real, and people like to see real people on TV.”
Kampilis picked Miller’s demo tape out of a huge pile of applicants a year before she landed the gig.
“Although we had no openings at the time, I remembered her and called her in for a few auditions. As soon as a spot opened up we offered her the job.”
But this job wasn’t Miller’s first time in front of the camera. Her initial crack at showbiz came right after high school when she moved from Toronto to Los Angeles to pursue a career as an actor — a dream she’d had since memorizing Judy Garland’s lines from The Wizard of Oz.
“My mom came to L.A. with me,” says Miller, “because I was young, and she knew it was a crazy city.”
She appeared in such films as Down to Earth with Chris Rock, and was a guest on Ashton Kutcher’s show Punk’d. But after a few years of beaches and sunshine, Miller says she missed her family and felt drawn back to Toronto.
“L.A. is a really hard place to live,” she says. “It can be very superficial and a lot of people get caught up in it. It’s all about what cars you drive and how many millions of dollars your house is worth, but at the end of the day that stuff doesn’t really matter to me.”
So upon her return to the Big Smoke, Miller decided that, instead of following other artists and media folk downtown, she would buy a condo in the Bayview area where most of her family now lives.
“Every day I work in the craziness of downtown, and we have guests and screaming teens, and sometimes it’s just mental,” says Miller with a laugh.
“It’s nice to go up north to my home at the end of the day.”
In the area, Miller can often be found at Piazzetta Trattoria.
“It’s the best Italian ever,” she says. “They have the best penne with rose sauce and breaded veal!”
If you were to drop by Miller’s home unannounced, you’d likely find her baking while watching cooking shows on the Food Network.
Though she doesn’t have as much time to spend in the kitchen as she once did, she always finds time to cook up tasty new concoctions, usually with her sister and mom.
In fact, her latest obsession is making crunchy oatmeal coconut cookies, a recipe handed down from her grandmother.
“My boyfriend freaks out over these things,” she says. “They’re crunchy because you don’t put a lot of dough on the pan.”
Miller is coy about releasing the name of her rock star boyfriend though she does mention he’s in two of the country’s hottest bands, Alexisonfire and City and Colour.
But Miller doesn’t plan on settling down anytime soon. Though she wants to start a family someday, there’s still exciting new career goals to achieve.
“I want to be the next Martha Stewart,” she says, laughing. (That is, minus the time behind bars).
Miller would also love to host her own morning talk show, something along the lines of Regis and Kelly, but for a younger, hipper audience, she says. Of course, it would have to include cooking segments and celebrity guests.
“Now that I’m in television I think
this is where I’m supposed to be,”
she says. “It feels like I’m home.” 
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