To play a woman embroiled in a cut-throat custody battle, Jennifer Finnigan relied on her own experience of loss in "Playing for Keeps."

Inspired by a true story, the two-hour Canadian production follows Vancouver sports groupie Nicole Alpern (Finnigan), who gets pregnant after an affair with a married black professional basketball player.

After Nicole keeps the baby, the athlete decides he wants to raise the child as his own, and they become engaged in a fight for the boy which reaches the highest courts in Canada.

During an interview with CTV.ca, the 29-year-old Finnigan explains that despite not having children of her own, she turned to her own experiences of heartbreak for inspiration.

"Aside from the legal history of this story, it all comes down to growth and maturity and what happens when something powerful happens to a person. I suffered a great loss when I lost my father a couple years ago and I was able to draw on that traumatic experience to understand how it makes someone shift their priorities," says Finnigan.

"With this character, Nicole, she starts off with no real aspirations other than hanging on the coattails of these athletes, and when she has this baby, something unexpected happens. She falls madly in love with her child and identifies with a whole new set of priorities. In the end she was fights to keep him."

Audiences best know Finnigan for her roles in "The Bold in the Beautiful" (which earned her three consecutive Daytime Emmy Awards), "Crossing Jordan" and "Close to Home." She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, actor Jonathan Silverman.

"Playing for Keeps" also features performances from two very recognizable television stars; "24" actor Roger Cross, who plays Nicole's lover Ty Rivers and "Desperate Housewives" lead Doug Savant, who plays the ambitious lawyer Peter Marcheson.

"Roger is really sweet and goofy and we worked hard on our chemistry and our complicated on-screen relationship," Finnigan recalls. "And with Doug, we had the same sense of humour, which was really dry and hysterical. Both of them were so much fun to work with."

Originally from Montreal, Finnigan says she relished her time back in Canada, shooting on location in Vancouver.

"It was so great. I basically got a month and a half in one of my favourite cities in the world. On weekends we would go to the Okanogan and do wine tasting, hiking, bike riding in Stanley Park," says the actress. "It doesn't matter if it's Vancouver or Banff or my hometown Montreal, I just feel at home in Canada."

Inside the box

Finnigan is now hard at work on a new television pilot, "Inside the Box" (working title), for "Grey's Anatomy" creator Sondra Rhimes. The ensemble show goes inside the world of television news, and Finnigan plays the president's press secretary.

"Let's just say my character is having an affair with someone she shouldn't be having an affair with, and it's a conflict of interest! There are a lot of great parts in the show, and I have a very juicy one."