The 2026 Winter Olympics and the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) prove that women’s hockey is growing. Whether it be the gold medal game between Canada and the US, or the PWHL exhibitions that had Halifax fans fighting for a team of their own, the sport has been on a positive upswing.
However, opportunities for women are still scarce, and the new adaptation of Youngblood understands this.
While the 2026 hockey film adapts characters and a few dynamics of the 1986 original, the 40-year-old film is a coming-of-age story about achievement through unrelenting masculinity. This new version teaches passionate restraint. Pursuing your dreams without compromise, but not allowing yourself to spoil them in your chase. Not every problem can be solved with fists or ruminating anger. Most require words.
Directed by Hubert Davis (Black Ice), Youngblood focuses on the story of Dean Youngblood (Ashton James), a Black hockey player who gets a once-in-a-lifetime chance to play for the Hamilton Mustangs. Tempered by a father who encourages aggression, Youngblood quickly gets himself in trouble with his new coach and is constantly on the verge of letting his one opportunity slip.
Mirroring Youngblood’s narrative is that of the coach’s daughter, Jessie. A goalie who is deciding whether or not to play for a university team, she also contends with a parent who is trying to lead her in one direction over another. Like Youngblood, she feels marginalized in the hockey world. She feels she has a single opportunity to act upon—one that may not lead to any future opportunities.
What viewers might not know about Jessie’s story is how it ties to the life experience of her actress, Alexandra McDonald.
Two loves
Growing up in Kensington, P.E.I., McDonald says she was given two choices by her father: “Hockey, or hockey.
“I think he put a lot of sports expectations onto me that I happily abided,” McDonald tells The Coast. “I started playing when I was five. I started with boys… that was, like, 2003, and then eventually a couple of years into hockey, we had enough girls interested.”
As interest grew amongst girls and women in the community, so too did opportunities for McDonald. They had enough players for AAA teams, which she played on until she was 18, even joining Team PEI. For a while, she wanted to become an Olympic hockey player.
Then she caught the acting bug.
McDonald also comes from an artistic family. Her grandfather was an arts teacher, three of her uncles are artists, and her sister is a well-known pottery maker.
“My dad was a sports guy, and my mom was the artsy one.”
Encouraging her passion for acting and theatre, her mom helped her get involved in programming in Charlottetown. McDonald took drama classes in high school, got involved in community theatre, and also performed Shakespeare in the Park. The only college she applied to was Humber College so she could take their film and television acting program.
“My life on P.E.I. and my sports life kind of came to an end,” she says. “I moved to Toronto and I started acting. Everybody in my class grew up a theatre kid. In Ontario, they had these arts high schools that pretty much focused on everything I dreamed of doing. I didn’t have that.”
For a long time, McDonald felt like she could’ve done more as a youth to give herself chances in the acting world—to improve her craft on stage rather than her play on the ice.
It’s funny, then, that the part that landed her a place in the national actors’ union would be a hockey commercial for ESSO.
“I can’t believe my two loves came together and started my career,” says McDonald. “I never thought there was going to be another chance, even bigger at doing both of these things, both of the loves in my life.”
Then, the Youngblood audition came around.
“I read the description, and it was kind of surreal,” explains McDonald. “This is like reading a character description of myself at 18. Right away, I became so competitive. There is no way anyone else is getting this role.”
One of the requirements for the role of Jessie was that if you play hockey, you send some footage along of yourself on the ice. Playing with a competitive women’s league in Halifax, McDonald did just that.
“I just made sure my footage was amazing, that they couldn’t say no, like they couldn’t deny that I was the character.”
While McDonald doesn’t play a goalie in real life, she managed to get the part.
The evolution of women’s hockey
McDonald connected with Jessie in many ways. Her struggle to decide whether to keep going down the path of hockey, knowing she will have to distinguish herself for a chance at any future opportunities, any of which are incredibly rare for women in the sport.
Speaking on what it felt like to experience that herself as a teenage hockey player, McDonald teared up.
“I had in my brain all throughout childhood that I would go to university for hockey. But, I kind of thought, OK, I spend even more time playing this sport with no outcome,” says McDonald.
“It was such a heartbreak. I can vividly remember the last buzzer going in my playoff series when I was in Grade 12. I was the captain of my team, and there felt like a lot of weight on my shoulders. The buzzer went, and I remember just falling to my knees, being like, this is the end of my sport.
“My parents spent so much money, and I spent so much time trying to get really good at the sport, and then at that time when I was 18, I was just like, oh, that’s it. Men in my grade who are good at hockey, it’s like they take that for granted, like, they can actually go far with this sport. They can make millions of dollars with the effort they put in. It’s just not the same for women.”
McDonald had a chance to attend the two PWHL exhibition games in Halifax this winter, and while doing so, she did a little bit of research.
“They were all around my age,” she says. “I was just like, oh, that’s amazing… they got to strive for a career.”
Yet, as McDonald herself admits, PWHL salaries are far lower than those of their NHL counterparts—the minimum salary is $35,000, with some of the highest-paid players earning over $100,000. The salary cap for the 2025-26 season is about $1.3 million per team.
“I don’t know how they would survive with that salary,” says McDonald regarding some of the lowest-paid players. “They would have to have another job, so all the while that women are striving so hard to be great at this sport, it’s like, they still have to find another job, this other career alongside of it, or they have to work harder to get sponsorships or whatever. I think it’s still at the beginning of where women’s sports can go, and I really feel like this time around, with the Olympics, you know, Marie-Philip (Poulin) is such an icon, and she’s been an icon for a while now, kind of like the Sidney Crosby of women’s sports.
“It is happening. I’m excited to see it, and hopefully, girls are going to watch Youngblood and see Jessie and are just as excited to see a female in the story who has her own hockey storyline. I would have loved that as a kid.”
McDonald still plays hockey in a co-ed league in Halifax. She still tries new moves, gets butterflies before a game, and feels the thrill of gliding across the ice.
“I don’t think sports have to end. They still live inside you. You should honour that.”
Youngblood will be coming to theatres on March 6.
