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schmericaIf You Got 'Em, Smoke 'Em
Toronto Sun - May, 26, 1996
Actor Callum Rennie can explain why normally sane, logical people go wild when attending the Cannes Film Fest - and it has everything to do with the sultry, smoky Mediterranean air.
"It's the freedom to smoke anywhere. It creates this general naughtiness," claims Rennie, a sweeter, not-so-psychotic-looking version of John Malkovich.
In Cannes for his performance in Bruce MacDonald's Hardcore Logo, Rennie vows he quit smoking a few months ago. But like a drinker who's giddily fallen off the wagon, he's been imbibing everywhere in France - doing it in elevators, restaurants ("Every section is a smoking section!"), theatre lobbies and restrooms.
In Hardcore Logo, chain-smoking was par for his character as a guitar-slapping punk rocker. For research, director MacDonald sent Rennie on tour with the Ontario-based rock band Headstones, where he got a taste of life on the road. Thinkin' it'd be like Jim Morrison in his wild '60s heyday, Rennie was a tad disappointed with the healthier '90s version of touring.
"You'd think in a band you'd get lots of sex and cocaine," he jokes, "but it was mostly down time. Just like acting - except there's this gang mentality."
Born in England, but reared in Edmonton and Vancouver, where he still lives, Rennie's been a regular on the Canadian TV series My Life As A Dog and in the CBC-TV movie For Those Who Hunt The Wounded Down. His rebel roles are close to home for the 30ish actor, who, as a teen, shaved his head and thrived on the Sex Pistols. "I wasn't a rebel, I was a 'Revel,' and people used to lick me ..."
In Cannes for the first time, Rennie brought along his brother - a philosopher living in Belgium - for moral support. "But he got really nervous when he saw me on screen," says Rennie. "He was worried I was going to do something to really embarrass myself."
Not to worry. Rennie's already received rave reviews from fellow thespian Leonardo Di Caprio, who predicted to our Canadian boy's face that he'll be "the next James Dean."
What with all the smoke and compliments, how did Rennie keep his head from spinning?
"I wore my Roots shoes," says the Armani-clad actor. "I figure if I at least have on my Canadian footwear, it will keep me grounded."
******
From Hellion to Hot Property
Maclean's - October 13, 1997
Callum Keith Rennie makes up for lost time
by Brian D. Johnson
Outside the industrial ruins that house the Due South studios in mid-town Toronto, Callum Keith Rennie can be found in his trailer, assiduously stuffing carrots into an electronic juicer. He used to prefer a stronger kind of juice, and spent so much time under its influence that there are several years of his life that he cannot quite account for. But Rennie has not had a drink since catching a shard of glass in his eye during a barroom fight four years ago back home in Vancouver. The eye survived, and the story has become a signature scar in the career of an actor who like to deal in sharp edges.
On CTV's Due South, Rennie is the new guy. Replacing David Marciano as the sidekick, he plays Chicago detective Stanley Raymond Kowalski, the street-smart foil to Paul Gross's Mountie-with-a-heart-of-gold. "The basic dynamics remains intact," says Gross. "I'm naive and from the wilderness, and he's cynical and from the street. But I think our relationship is more combustible. David had an easier charm. Callum is spikier."
As he sips his carrot juice, a picture of studied casualness in a v-neck pullover, navy sweatpants and tan biker boots, the 37-year-old Rennie does have a rugged intensity about him. And he seems as cagey as Gross is forthwright. Bit by bit, he offers up threads of his past. Born in England, raised in Alberta. Did not start acting until he was 25. His parents are middle-class, separated. Wanted to be a mountaineer and supported his climbing habit with "crummy jobs - cooking, laying railroad track, digging ditches" - before discovering theatre in Edmonton.
Relocating to Vancouver, Rennie burned through a variety of TV roles, criminals mostly, in The X-Files, The Commish, The Highlander and Lonesome Dove. But he began to attract serious notice with a volley of small Canadian features - as a nerdy boyfriend in Double Happiness (1994), as a recovering junkie in Curtis's Charm (1995) and, most notably, as a charasmatic punk guitarist in Bruce McDonald's mock rockumentary, Hard Core Logo (1996). He also stars in McDonald's offbeat CBC series Twitch City, set to debut next January. And as a cocaine-addled nut in Kari Skogland's recent Men with Guns, he steals the movie. "Everything has happened pretty quickly," says the soft-spoken actor. "I've had a great run the last little while."
With his film career heating up, Rennie had qualms about locking into the weekly grind of Due South. "I'm by nature better suited to flashing quickly on roles and getting out of them without having to expose myself too much," he says. Gross, meanwhile, had reservations about hiring him. "Paul was worried I wouldn't have the endurance or the ability to take direction," says Rennie. "He thought I was really raw and didn't have any technique - it actually just looked like I had none, which is maybe a good thing." Finally, the two actors went to a bar (beer for Gross, soda water for Rennie) and ended up flipping a coin. When it turned up tails, they made it best out of three.
"It was the most potentially disastrous decision I had to make," says Gross, who doubles as the show's executive producer. "It's like a marriage. I spend more time with Callum than I do with my wife." But the partnership has clicked. "It has, on balance, been a riot," says Gross. "Callum's also very daring, physically, and that really benefits the show. David didn't like to do stunts, which becomes very limiting. Whereas if you chucked Callum out of a plane, it would be fine."
Replacing a character on "an established show that has a huge fan base," says Rennie, "means you're gonna be judged as ,'Well-you're-not-the-other-guy'." And it took him a few episodes to feel secure in the role. But there was instant chemistry with Gross. "I understand him as a good ol' Alberta boy," Rennie explains. "I know how whacked he is. People go, 'Jeez, you guys are so different.' But we're so much the same. We both have that outside-looking-in-at-the-rediculousness-of-things. We keep a cool exterior and underneath, it's sort of a lot of other stuff."
Still, Rennie does not expect to stick around. He insisted on a rare one-year contract - and it is doubtful that Gross would want to risk type-casting himself as a Mountie for another season. When thi on ends, Rennie plans to head straight for Los Angeles. "I just want to up the ante," he says. "In this country, I seem to work with a lot of first-time directors. And at this point, I can't risk being fucked with by people who are too neurotic with their material to allow me to do what I want." And like Gross, Rennie is unhappy with the kinds of roles available in Canada. "Things have to change in the way we make movies," he says. "We don't write for heroic characters." Rennie seems to have his mind set on leaving the Canadian archetype in the dust. In Vancouver, he owns what he calls a "racing truck - a 1964 Mercury shortbox with a 390 El Camino engine." And he looking forward to a long drive - due south.
*******
Getting Under Callum Keith Rennie's Skin
Vines - April/May 1999
Searching for the Calm in Callum Keith Rennie
By Cynthia Amsden
"I am the thinking man's David Hasselhoff." This is how Callum Keith Rennie described himself three years ago. He prided himself, then, as being an objective bon vivant. In his opinion, none of this should have happened to him and yet, all of this should have happened to him.
Callum Circa 1996: Sitting in Bar Italia on College Street in Toronto, the 5'11" actor appears much taller than his measure -- a unique turnabout in the acting world. Wearing jeans and a t-shirt, with heavy silver rings on his fingers, Callum (no one calls him Rennie) is taking time off from shooting the Kari Skogland film, Men With Guns. His role, a drug-addled dervish who whirls to an early demise, is a character piece which steals the film.
Our interview started out politely, like all Canadian celebs interviews do, nothing more than earnest bilge. As I began to dig, he pulled back and began to perform. Parry. Thrust. Parry. Thrust. Smile. Later on, I learn he has done the same thing the day before with an interviewer from another publication. A very middle-of-the-road publication. The journalist asked him to describe his ideal date. "Well, she's blonde and has blue eyes... and she has really big tits," he responded. To date, that interview has never seen the light of press.
The attitude was a carry-over from Callum's youth. He was born in Sunderland, England and raised in Edmonton. At 18, he had his first epiphany that he was someone apart from the mainstream world. "The challenging started... the music changed... the Sex Pistols, the Ramones. I was hanging out with Bruce McCulloch (Kids in the Hall) at high school. People I'd grown up with were offended by my choice of a new friend and my choice of social commentary which had an anti-conservative message rage to it."
The next 15 years involved a long personal struggle. His desire to be in the arts was complicated by the feeling that dramatic schooling, which he lacked, was a prerequisite. That was the high road excuse which covered a low road personality dodge. "I had my own idea of what an actor was which was a loud, verbose, outwardly-extended person and I wasn't that." Instead he worked at jobs which required no emotional committment: a cook, a bartender, a construction worker and he edged up to the periphery of acting by moving furniture on movie sets. It culminated in what is now regared as CKR-lore about barrooms and brawls and bodily injury, all adding up to Epiphany No. 2 -- he needed to act. Instead of just acting out.
Perhaps a decade and a half of teeth-gnashing had greater value than mere procrastination. His unusually high level of articulation suggests he was thinking, or at the very least, positioning himself for the psychological leap. One of the first roles he landed was an ideal mixocological blend of cinema and high anarchy -- the multi-screen psychodrama short, Frank's Cock, directed by fringe cinema icon, Mike Hoolboom. Few audiences outside of film-fest circuits have seen this cinematic bon-bon, although it won Best Canadian Short at the 1994 Toronto International Film Festival. Two years later, he revisted the scene of his first success and starred in Hoolboom's Letters From Home, which again took the prize for best short at the 1996 festival. Next came his lead in Mina Shum's acclaimed cross-cultural romance, Double Happiness, which lead to a 1994 Genie nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and critical praise for John L'Ecuyer's gritty film, Curtis's Charm.
Confident of his talent, the burgeoning star developed a taste for life on the fun side of the velvet rope and wanted more. But reluctant to band on unadorned ability, he tinkered with a bad-boy image because of its built-in "I'm good, but if I screw up, then at least I still have my integrity" voucher. This swagger was a tidy, if philosophically empty, approach but Callum was fully aware of the ramifications. "The more you work, the more you become a caricature of your own personality traits," he admits.
The 1996 half hour interview turned into an hour, then two, then three. The bottom line was apparent: he wanted to be an actor/storyteller. No lusting after directorship, no visions of having writing credits, no wet dreams of producerhood -- he just wants to be an actor.
Three years click by. This time the interview is at Callum's Toronto residence. The decor is understated, except for the couches. Very big, very nap-oriented. The t-shirt and jeans are still there, ditto the rings, which evidently are more a talismanic statement than a fashion accessory. But the attitude has evolved from latter-day James Dean rebel-with-a-contract into a more introspective understanding of his own creative mortality.
Another thing that hasn't changed are his goals. He still invokes the word "storyteller" when he discusses his acting. If it was just a handy phrase, he'd have changed his script. No one continues to use old material if their objective is to entertain the press. Too big a risk.
Callum has used the time profitably. His role in Last Night as Craig Zwiller, the man with the check list of sexual proclivities to accomplish, earned him a 1999 Genie for Best Supporting Actor. This award sits next to his 1997 Genie for Best Actor, Youth Series for My Life as a Dog. In addition to this, he appeared alongside Alicia Silverstone in Excess Baggage, in the Patrick Stewart non-Star Trek thriller, Masterminds, and in Don McKellar's cult hit TV mini-series, Twitch City. Hard Core Logo, another star turn, was picked up by Quentin Tarantino for U.S. release. And then there is Due South, in which Callum plays Stanley Kowalski, the American cop/doppelganger to Paul Gross' Mountie. The inherent humour and bonhomie in this role brought Callum front and center in the public mind, giving him official "Yeah, I know that guy" accreditation he considers valid.
While listing past and upcoming projects is considered standard operational reportage when profiling an actor, with Callum, it likens itself to seeing which color combination a painter chooses to use in his self-portrait. Next up are a variety of screen gems which greatly exceed the lable of simple filmography: Ken Finkleman's television series, Foolish Heart, a reprise of his role as Newbie in the second Twitch City series, Life Before This, with Sarah Polley, and David Cronenberg's much heralded new film, eXistenZ. No frivolous committments here.
What has not evolved much in the elapsed time is his personal life. He has been Mr. Suitcase for the last five years. Bedouin Boy. While freedom isn't the motivation for being an actor, it is one of the perks. "Freedom to travel, to see the world in a way that's not conventional, to grow. But it's an assumed freedom -- it can all go away." In Callum's case, freedom also means never staying in one place long enough to have to mow a lawn. Domesticated, he is not.
While many people create their comfort zones in a household environment, Callum's idea of a safe harbour can be found on set. There is a distinct and sustaining intimacy between himself and the camera lens. That quantum space expands and allows for a direct connection to where he is at one with himself. "Almost everything I've done is an accomplishment of desire over circumstance."
Translated into real life terms, Sunday nights are an anathema, while Monday mornings bring welcome relief as the working world kicks back into gear. "Getting up early to go to work feels blue collar. My life and thoughts haven't caught up with me yet. Working on Due South was the happiest I've been because it felt like family. So you work for a year in close proximity with a great amount of creative freedom and it's a lot of fun."
Fun, indeed. Series television is the pearl in the oyster that is acting. Easy living. Callum discovered both sides of this truth on Due South. "You forget a lot of the fear, a lot of the 'where's my next gig coming from,' the money issues, even that someone's gonna feed you at a certain time. Once that's done, you're back into the regular mode which is the hustle. Now I realize I have to get over that comfort that I found."
Once of the reasons the security afforded by Due South had a magnetic appeal is because Callum is, in down home, everyday terms, shy. Legitimate shyness is definitely not an attribute people volunteer as an explanation. Rather, it's the symptoms that give it away. Ordinary shy people decline party invitations and live in cyber space. Successful actors don't have that option. They learn how to hide in plain sight. Callum's compensating technique is not unique, but it defines him: he prefers meeting people individually and he seems to want others to get to know him as a person rather than a personality. "Seeing who a person is with you is very different that seeing them in a group," he explains.
Still, he eyes other people who have groups of friends with a curious envy. Not a motivating envy, mind you, because Callum is known for testing the tensile strength of a friendship, stretching it out over time and distance. Down times between telephone calls can last upwards of four weeks. It's the Callum Keith Rennie version of the Sting song: set a friendship free. If it's true, it will be there when you come back to it. If it isn't, it will slap you upside the head.
There was a period in mid-1998 where Callum extracted himself from acting to allow himself simple pleasures. He took his first holiday in five years. Using his earnings to purchase a black 1998 Ford Expedition (it replaced his 1964 truck, both of which close friends say he drives like a stolen vehicle), he drove down to Mexico to fish, a hobby he had as a youth. In Puerto Vallarta, he attempted his first Hemingway thing. "This was no Old Man and the Sea behind us. A 300-pound swordfish jumped out of the water behind us. It was surreal. The rod completely bend like I'd just snagged a cow. My arm was numb and my eyes were bugging out of head but I brought it in myself." The catch, no dubbed Marlin Brando, is destined to hang as a trophy in the Vancouver office of his close friend and manager, Elizabeth Hodgson.
In the study of psychology of fame, living in the spotlight causes people to become self-conscious. Callum corrects this perception. "Not self-conscious -- self-aware. The effects of it can wear on you, wondering why people want to talk to you or what people want. It's easier to stay home than go out. Whatever private moment you may be having suddenly get broken up by a stranger. Then you feel like you were watched or you are going to be watched and it becomes something other than the experience you were having."
Celebrity, he has learned, is a far cry from the geniune distinction he seeks. Two incidents, which should be funny, but never amount to more than moronic, highlight this. One occurred early in his career when he finally merited the attention of CBC. He saw the interviewer enter the bar where they were meeting and watched her wait for 30 minutes. She had no idea who he was. The second took place two years ago on a flight from Toronto. A flight attendant wanted his autograph even though she admitted she has never seen any of his work. He was astounded, he says, that not even knowing who he was, this person still played the sycophant.
But how does he explain his flirtatious reputation? Laughter is his first reaction. Boyish, evasive laughter. Then he settles down and justifies himself. "After you've been living in L.A. where you're just another actor, high points like film festivals, where there's all these people around, is fun. You're empowered by the status. There's potential in that moment; it's easy to get sucked in, dangerous but ti's resistible and no, it's not real. The repercussions of that mindset are vanity and shallowness."
Orson Wells said "the greates enemy of art is the absence for the lingering which may well account for the lingering dalliance with the underdog status." "I've always preferred the 'behind the 8-ball' sensibility," he confesses. Freedom, he thinks, is not all it's cracked up to be. Limitations can be our friend. The trick, he is convinced, is "to recognize that it's part of your nature and when that can be effective and when it cannot be effective."
While other actors abide by the philosophy of go big or stay in bed, Callum is happy perfecting the small stuff right now. He is working towards achieving the "beginner's mind Zen reference for unfettered thought. "Today, it's all personal, today's it's all seeking clarity and grace." At the podium, accepting his Genie for Last Night, in February, he explained how accepting compliments is very difficult, but the award he could accept as a geniuine compliment.
From there, Callum would be happy to reside in a calm place. Not a geographical location, he explains when asked where his ideal spot in the world would be. "Eventually, it will be in my own skin."
******
Due South's Mountie Paul Gross takes off his Tunic
Elm Street - October 1997
Due South's Mountie Bares All (and a writer contemplates a musical ride)
by Veronica Cusack
Amsterdam Natural Blonde, Marlboro, faded jeans, absolutely. You did want to know. What he drinks, what he smokes, what he wears, is he really that gorgeous? Now, enough. This is a serious article. The man has a substantial brain even though, to steal from one of his movies, he looks as if he belongs on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But that habit of running a flat moist tongue along his lower lip is most disconcerting. I may have to confiscate it if this continues.
A soft summer morning, only the faintest whisper of gathering city swelter. Leprous grasses struggle though the cloven asphalt of an industrial midden. In an amiable white trailer, a guitar on the bed, an overflowing desk, Angela's Ashes open on a side table, jostled by RCMP boots, jodhpurs and sweats all tattooed "Fraser" as if he is going off to camp, Paul Gross ponders, carefully, visibly working out an understanding of his own youthful actions, of how he arrived in this life. He is embarassed, briefly runs neat lace-maker fingers through his cropped hair, didn't expect to justify the rejection of his first love, probably thought I'd ask about his hobbies. Later, when relaxed, he will tap or cross or stretch his long legs, snap his fingers to a burst of music, bring his enery to surface. but he has not yet taken the measure of me, is nervous, self-conscious. He is still.
"In this country, committed people end up in the theatre because there is no interesting alternative. The crap that's on TV and in Canadian movies, well, I'd rather vomit than write like that." Perhaps it's not fair to remind Gross of that statement. He uttered it 15 years ago, when he was only 23 and enjoying the first flush of success as a dramatist. But why would a man whom, in late 1984, writer and editor Alberto Manguel called "one of the most interesting writers of the new generation," in 1986 abandon the field in which he showed so much promise?
The third and penultimate season of Due South is playing on CTV, and Gross again stars as the recondite RCMP constable, Benton Fraser. This year he also acts as executive producer and senior writer for the series, earning a rumoured $1.5 million. One hundred and ten countries follow the mountie's droll adventures; fan letters arrive from Norway, Israel and Zimbabwe. To millions of people, Gross is Fraser. They know him no other way. And even most Canadians don't recognize the respected actor, the celebrated dramatist.
A langourous evening, heat still clenches in Toronto's metal heart. Gross, framed against the twilight dawdling in the coloured glass window, is saved from matinee-idol cliche by the monkeyshine in his eyes. Mellow best describes his mood, engaged, delighting in what he obviously considers a triumph: an interrogation recast into argument, wordplay, laughter. I will allow him this vanity. (I would allow him just about anything.) Hours of conversation, undisguised opinions - American protectionism, lapsed Catholics, The Englishman's Boy, Gross's profanity reaches psychedelic hues; we exhume succulent tales, giggle like sophomores over references to PVC and golden showers. But he always knows I am a writer and retreats behind a fire screen if I reach too close.
In 1982, Gross's The Dead of Winter won the Alberta Culture Playwriting Competition. It went on to production at Toronto's Free Theatre (where its run was extended) and a Chalmers Award nomination. Gross had started to write while a drama student at the University of Alberta. "I was acting in a show I thought was really badly conceived and my job was simply to execute mistakes day after day. I thought, this is going to happen a lot, so I must have something I can do to alleviate things." Set in a farmhouse in the Alberta Badlands, his play weaves a parent's guilt-ridden nightmare through a Christmas Eve. The father uses cadences of the King James Bible to reveal his sin. The mother relates her life in lyric simplicity. The critics loved it: "its honesty and its unforced theatricality," praised one; Gross's "unique slant on the world," encored another. Director Guy Sprung described him as "the Canadian Sam Shepard: he writes big; he write thematically; he's got guts; he writes poetry."
"My ambitions in The Dead of Winter were pretty modest," recalls Gross. "But you get sort of fat-headed, you think you've got to write a great play, or at least a bigger play." In the fall of 1986, Toronto Free mounted Gross's drama Buchanan. It explored a surgeon's arrogance and power, and had begun life two years earlier as Sprung Rhythm, produced at Ottawa's National Arts Centre. Gross was invited to be playwright-in-residence at the Stratford Festival, and there he revised and workshopped the text, though never to his complete satisfaction. "I made the mistake of concentrating on the arias when in fact you need the mundance stuff, the connecting tissue. You've got to earn the right to the poetry." The Toronto production was considered to be seriously flawed. "It was really beaten up by the critics," Gross says quietly. "They had a lot to do with making me wonder what the point of it all was." What the young man failed to register were the positive aspects of those reviews. The Toronto Star's Robert Crew noted his "willingness to use language to the full," and called him a "literate writer who doesn't talk down to his audience - there are echoes of Shakespeare as well as Greek drama."
Ten years earlier, in 1976, Robin Phillips was into his second lambent year as artistic director of the Stratford Festival: empty theatrics were swept away, replaced by provocative and superb performance. Gross was 17, working in the theatre box office for the summer. The boy took certain exception to certain matters of staging in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Antony and Cleopatra. He ploughed in Phillips's office brandishing a list of complaints. "I remember it vividly," says Phillips. "He came in sort of cocky and smart, but it was very quickly dropped down to an interesting conversation when he realized I was going to listen. To a certain extent, the early writing is the same thing. He had to make sure that people paid attention, like boxing his work in a purple-and-gold envelope so it will be noticed in the mail. But he's a very good writer and I believe he will go back to the stage. It is too much a part of him."
Gross moved to television. "I was writing for the CBC and knew at the very least they would pay me real money. I abandoned the play I was developing; I didn't have the drive to actually get through it." He showed no fear of the new medium. Working with director Atom Egoyan, he limned two portraits of angry men clutching at the edges of society. In This Corner dismembers terrorism's nationale; and Gross Misconduct uses mundane title cards to herald the approach of death, a boy with the face of an angel to unravel the fears of his adult self. Gross stares into the deepening night. "If I was faced with the prospect of having everything - writing, directing, producing, acting - stripped away from me but for one thing, then I would hang on to writing. It's the most frustrating thing, but it's the most rewarding thing I do."
"Will I return to writing for the stage? You have to think about what your life expectancy is. There are stories I would like to tell in film." He is currently writing a tale inspired by a controversial First World War sculpture depicting a Calgary sergeant crucified against a barn door. Rumours of the atrocity swept through the lines at the Third Battle of Ypres, and Paul Gross's screenplay demands the recreation of the foul, fatal, infinite mud of Passchendaele of 1917.
Robert Lantos, head of Due South's parent, Alliance Communications, and of its film arm, Alliance Pictures, is interested. "But it's very expensive," Gross explains, "so he is yelling at me." Hands splay across his temples, eyes roll back, voice thickens into a cursing Count Chocula: "Paul, vy can't you just fuking make a filum for five mill-i-yon dollars?" In person - fine linen, diplomatic machismo, one leg perpetually pulsing like a randy borzoi - it is obvious that he adores him: "strong minded...without conceit...Due South in an unprecented state of harmony..." This despite Gross's mimicry: "You mayke me sound like a Russian. I yam not a Rrrussian. I yam a Hungarian, you fuk!"
Testimonials to Gross's charms are plentiful. New co-star, mercurial Vancouver actor Callum Keith Rennie, argent power, fierce fingers, a man not prone to flattery: "Here is a person I consider noble." Wife, mother of his two children, actor Martha Burns: "He is a very fast typist." (She said more, but that's quite enough from significant femails.) Friend David Keeley, Cominius in the Stratford Festival's Coriolanus, Clarence in Richard III, long legs and leather: "Paul is a kid who refuses to grow up, and everything and everybody is a new experience. Wonder is what he always has in his eyes and in his work, and he never shuts down that wonder for life and how life works and how it goes around."
"The greatest prize that doing film and TV gives me," muses Gross, "is that I am afforded a sniff of being inside someone else's life. When we were making Buried on Sunday in Herring Cove [Nova Scotia], I would go out with the guys in the morning and help pull in their mackerel nets and they would drop me off at the dock. I'd work fo the day, then we'd sit around in the boat shed at night drinking hot rum and they'd tell stories about wrecks and great storms. Making Tales of the City in L.A., it was a privilege to meet [author] Armistead Maupin. In Nashville [shooting a vaporized CBS pilot], I wandered around the dressing rooms at the Grand Old Opry, talked with brilliant musicians sporting incredible architectural hair; whole colonies lived up there." The visit to Nashville generated an album, written and recorded with David Keeley, of songs redolent of John Hiatt and John Mellencamp, defying easy classification, songs that illustrate experience: "These are the memories I have you; no, these are the gifts I took from you."
"When I started out as an actor, there were three roles I wanted to do: Romeo, Brick and Lear." In the summer of 1985, Gross created a Romeo of careless athleticism within Toronto's High Park. He hung from the branches of surrounding trees to touch Juliet's outstretched hand, shinnied up vines to gain her lips, and received a Dora nominations for his efforts. Tennessee Williams's tormented drunk from Cat on a Hot Tin Rood appeared at the Manitoba Theatre Center in 1989. The Winnipeg Free Press gushed: "His gradual animation an unpeeling of [Brick] is something that should be videotaped for drama classes."
Richard III is now added to the list of desired parts, "a guy I would love to have a beer with"; Prince Hal piques his interest and still he retains a desire to one day suffer the role of Lear. "I know the guy. I know him."
His Canadian Stage portrayal of the arrogant and frightened Kenneth Pyper in Frank McGuinness's examination of a nation's terrible sacrifice, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, garnered Gross the 1988 Dora for best actor. In his final speech, Pyper prays fro strength, for mercy, for the glory of his land, for the lives of himself and seven comrades as they go into battle only he will survive. "I have to look up at the guys and say, 'Observer the sons of Ulster marching towards the Somme,'" Gross remembers. "On the very last night, I look up and tears are pouring down everyone's faces. It was just a tremendous feeling, crushing that when was over."
"So," I ask, "explain Aspen Extreme," a 1993 Disney tale of hunks-go-skiing. Gross drops his head into his hands. "Fuck, fuck, fuck." Mock sobbing. "I was summoned to a breakfast meeting they are all so fond of in Los Angeles, on the Disney lot, to this oxymoron of a building, vaguely like the Parthenon: the columns are giant dwarfs holding the fucking roof up. I meet this guy who is running Hollywood Pictures and he says 'Paul, the film, we love it, we just love it,' and I know there is not a cut of it, and I say 'Have you seen a cut?' and he says, 'No, but we can sell the shit out of it.' and I realize that I have just taken part in something that was made into a movie based on some pre-existing ad campaign."
In Canada, the average budget for prints and advertising is minuscule. Here, we make films to do well at festivals, in the hope that they will attract a certain buzz and in turn succeed at the box office. Perhaps this is why, in the world of feature films, only small Canadian movies reveal Gross the actor: Cold Comfort, Buried on Sunday. No prodigious publicity campaigns or giant dwarfs. Just a detachment of actors and a director who searches for their best.
Watching from across a plastic tabletop, I try to decided of this particular thespian is feigning elaborate innocence. There sits a graceful, perfectly symmetrical, bomb-blast example of manhood who describes himself simply as "not ugly." Film directors, a candid breed, framed his assets: Buffalo Jump - biceps and triceps; Aspen Extreme - glutei maximi; Tales of the City - deltoids and pecs. In contrast, Due South exploits the power of tease. His body is most often encased from toe to throat in serge and cow hide. Benton Fraser open a top button or rolls us a shirt sleeve, and women across the world, plus not a few men, retreat in turgid fantasy. Fan fiction zines and Websites swell. And slash fiction, the porno sub-genre of fan, goes wild.
Slash, so-called because of the "/" between protragonists' names, is written predominantly by women for women. It explores in graphic detail a monogamous sexual relationship between strongly paired male characters in television or film - from Spock/Kirk to Fox Mulder/Walter Skinner. The stories circumvent TV's dead-girlfriend-of-the-week syndrome and instead portray the men as equal partners sharing mountains of angst plus prolonged foreplay, frottage and copulation - romantic or rough.
Gross turns out to be entirely ignorant of the world of slash. I explain, and his eyes "as blue as dusk on a winter afternoon," widen in the "heartbreaking, passion-glazed" face. (You are reading a serious article. Due South is quite well presented amoung prizewinners in the Slash Talent In Fandom writing and artwork awards, the STIFies. Could I make this up?) I bring out a Due South zine. Gross begins to read. Note: we are sitting in a crowded blue-collar pub. He chuckles. In the background, the Mills Brothers swing. Now, he laughs. Then again - a long, strong laugh ending only when his lungs give out. Tears appear at the corners of his eyes and he reads out loud from the page, louder than the "glow, little glowworn, glow and glimmer" issuing from the speakers.
He splutters, draws breath in a high-pitched wheeze. Large men with bad teeth begin looking our way. I am convinced that one of us is going to get punched. But Gross is having too much fun to care. His voice gets louder as incredulity rises.
"Shhhh, you'll get us bounced."
"What do they do," he asks, "masturbate to this stuff? I tell you, slash fiction is going to go crazy when they see the new guy. He is really good-looing and sexy, the dangerous side of Fraser. It will be totally homoerotic. How can I see this stuff? Where do I go in on the Internet?"
"...glow for the female of the species; turn on the AC and the DC..."
Moonshine and patio lanterns. The city preparing to sleep. The mood has shifted. We talk of the Holocaust, Christian symbolism in Gross's writings and the suicide of a close friend more than 20 years ago. Midway through his teens, Gross began a study of the world's major religions, searching for an understanding of how a life should be lived, of how to make sense of what he found hanging from that tree in West Virginia. "I think there is larger design; there is such a thing as sin. It is better to be generous than to be miserly; easier to be nice than to be deliberately nasty. And the idea of suicide... I can't understand how a person wouldn't find something to enjoy within their day." His constant wonder for life and how life works and how it goes around.
*******
Amazing Gross
Maclean's -- October 13, 1997
Amazing Gross
By Brian D. Johnson
"So have you ever been arrested?"
It seems as good a place as any to begin an interview with Paul Gross, the actor who plays the impeccably polite and upright Mountie on CTV's Due South. He sits on a bar stool in the kitchen of the Toronto home smoking Winstons and sipping coffee, a little bleary after a night of too much wine -- not the kind of behavior that his alter ego, RCMP Const. Benton Fraser, would get up to. But this morning, Gross is out of uniform and out of character, barefoot in a T-shirt and jeans. Some stubble darkens his chin, a dusting of grit on the smooth, square-jawed features.
"Arrested? Yeah, for drunk driving," he says, fielding the question without a flicker of hesitation. It was the mid-1980s in Stratford, Ontario. Gross was playing darts over drinks with an actor friend, Benedict Campbell. "I was worried that the car was going to get towed," recalls Gross, "so I put it in this church parking lot. I was trying to park it, but while I was trying, I thought I'd just spin a 180 in the gravel. And then they appeared out of nowhere, all these guys with flashlights -- 'You're under arrest.' That was a year's suspension. It's very effective legislation."
Drunk parking. It is, come to think of it, a Benton Fraser kind of crime. And although Gross likes to make it clear that, in real life, he is no Benton Fraser, there is enough Mountie in him to appreciate the beauty of an effective bit of law enforcement. Gross may lack Fraser's punctilious reserve, but he does elicit the same sort of adjectives: charming, witty, smart, honest, articulate, athletic, generous, dedicated and drop-dead handsome -- in other words, like Fraser, he sems infuriatingly perfect.
At 38, Paul Gross is the Renaissance dude of Canadian television. This year, Due South enters its third season as the country's most popular homegrown TV drama, averaging 1.5 million viewers per episode on CTV (Sundays at 7 p.m.). And for the first time, Gross is not just the star but the boss as well. He has streamlined the production and cast a new sidekick, the smouldering Callum Keith Rennie, to replace the nonchalant David Marciano. Now as actor, executive producer and head writer, Gross earns combined fees estimated at between $2 million and $3 million for the season, making him the highest-paid performer in the history of Canadian television. "I hate to say this because he's got enough going for him already," says Robert Lantos, chairman and CEO of Alliance Communications, the company behind Due South. "But he's turned out to be a first-class producer. This show was always problematic. There were always budget overruns. It was behind schedule. There was always panic on the set. Since Paul's been running the show, I don't hear anything. It's completely calm and smooth. It's even below budget. It's astonishing."
As if that were not enough, Gross is an award-winning playwright. He composes songs, and sings with remarkable assurance for someone who does not make a living at it -- he has just released his first CD, Two Houses, a country album recorded with fellow actor David Keeley. He can ride a horse and play guitar. He is an expert skier. His friends report, with palpable envy, that he can party into the night without visible damage, rise at dawn the next day, knock off The Globe and Mail crossword puzzle in 10 minutes while being driven to the set, then work for 18 hours without losing his sense of humor or flubbing his lines. And somehow, despite his punishing schedule, he has managed to hold together a nine-year marriage to stage actress Martha Burns, and be a father to their two children, Hanna, 7, and Jack, 3. Dudley Do-Right, eat your heart out.
Gross, an army brat who was born in Calgary and schooled in England, Germany, Canada and Washington, just seems to have talent for whatever he puts his hand to. "He's not just smart for a good-looking television star," says Toronto writer Paul Quarrington, who has scripted some Due South episodes and wrote the 1994 movie Whale Music, in which Gross appeared. "He's just really, really smart. Plus he's very honest. He's one of those guys who will say things that people are thinking but wouldn't have the gumption to say out loud. When we were doing Whale Music, he managed to get us kicked out of perhaps the sleaziest bar in Vancouver, just by his forthrightness. It had something to do with dissing the local sports franchise. He's a bit of a cowboy, but an intellectual cowboy." Adds Quarrington: "It's not that he misbehaves in any standard way. He doesn't go out womanizing or doing heroin or anything."
In fact, a sense of innate virtue seems a big part of Gross's appeal. Then there's the Hunk Factor, which cuts both ways. "It's something that's dogged me all my life," he sighs. "There's an assumption that if you're pretty, you can't be smart." And in a film culture of Atom Egoyans and David Cronenbergs, where the weird is a more valued currency than the heroic, Gross sometimes feels out of place as a classic leading man.
Egoyan, in fact, considered Gross for his movie, The Sweet Hereafter, for the role of the simmering father, Billy Ansell, but hesitated because of his looks. "Paul is a very fine actor and I was really close to casting him," says Egoyan, who cast Bruce Greenwood instead. "The problem is that he is really good-looking. Paul is very pretty; Bruce looked rougher." Gross, who views his own image with sanguine detachment, is under no illusions. "I'm not going to get to play Ratso Rizzo," he says. "But Canadian film and television does not celebrate beauty. In Canada, you can't be serious if you're also attractive. My face is more organized for the American system somehow."
But Gross has also had his frustrations with Hollywood. He keeps getting asked to play male bimbos in U.S. movies-of-the-week that he considers an insult to his intelligence. He winces at the mention of his one starring role in a Hollywood feature, the cheesy Aspen Extreme (1993), in which he was cast a a babe-magnet ski instructor. And he audtioned for a role opposite Jack Nicholson in the upcoming comedy As Good As It Gets, only to be told he was "too fine-featured" for the part.
Still, what Gross has accomplished with Due South cannot be underestimated. He has created a complex character who is heroic, campy, sensitive and utterly uncynical. That is all the more remarkable considering that the show, concocted in a 1992 meeting between Lantos and then-CBS president, Jeff Sagansky, was born as a act of co-production opportunism: a Crocodile Dundee comedy-adventure about a Mountie from the Canadian North who ends up working with the Chicago police. Shot in Toronto, Due South became the first Canadian series to crack American prime time. It is now seen in some 60 countries. It is a top ten hit in both Germany and Britain, and has a large following of hard-core fans who swap Due South trivia on the Internet. As the Mountie peacekeeper, Gross had turned a rusty Canuck cliche into a sublimely ironic international icon.
Neither a sitcom nor a TV police drama, Due South corresponds to no existing TV formula. Swinging unpredictably between farce and drama, it is urban fable with a surreal edge and can be wildly uneven. "CBS had no idea where to slot it or how to sell it," says Gross. Buoyed by a fiercely loyal fan base, the show weathered a rollercoaster ride of network cancellations and renewals. Then, after last season, the U.S. network pulled the plug once and for all, and Due South was presumed dead. But Lantos marshalled support from CTV, the BC and other foreign broadcasters to resurrect it for a third season.
Now, the show's success hinges substantially on Gross. He does the hiring, approves all major decisions, puts the final polish on all scripts, and writes about half a dozen episodes himself. On the set, meanwhile, he commands loyalty. "Paul's very poised," says Gordon Pinsent, who plays the ghost of Fraser's Mountie father. "He's not pushy. And he's very respectful of the other actors." Gross is also the self-appointed life of the party. "He's on all the time," says one crew member. "He's constantly kibitzingand doing stand-up routines and pratfalls. He's like a kid -- he has to be the center of attention. But he's very well liked; it's a giant love-in."
And a laugh-in. Gross's quirky sense of humour is all over the show. An episode last season called "All the Queen's Horses," which Gross wrote, featured a flatulent Leslie Nielsen (Naked Gun) in a deliriously absurd sequence involving a trainload of singing Mounties from the Musical Ride. Gross says he cast Nielsen over lunch after a chance encounter on the street in Manhattan: "I said, 'OK, the Musical Ride is on a train and they're all gassed by terrorists except for you, and I see you going to the bathroom so I crawl underneath the train and we have a conversation through the hole in the toilet.' And he says, 'I'm sold.' "
Gross brings a sense of physical as well as comic bravado to the show, performing a number of his own stunts -- he did a fight scene without a safety harness on top of a moving train in "All the Queen's Horses." And he displays a giddy sense of adventure as a writer-producer. This season, his pride and joy ia a two-part episode titled "Mountie on the Bounty," which airs next February. Costing $4.2 million, it features a naval battle filmed in the middle of Lake Ontario between a freighter and a squad of Mounties on a three-masted frigate -- the same one used by Marlon Brando in Mutiny on the Bounty.
Even on a normal day, commanding a TV series that costs an average of $1.5 million an episode and employs a crew of 200 is like a military operation. In fact, Rennie's nickname for his co-star is "Tank Commander." And Gross's interest in things military runs deep: his dream is to make an epic movie that he has written based on the unsubstantiated story of a Canadian soldier being crucified on a barn door in France during the First World War.
______________________________
Gross, the older of two brothers, grew up with the military. There are snampshots of him as a small child sitting on the barrel of a tank in Germany. His father, Bob Gross, was a career soldier, a colonel with a Canadian tank regiment. (Now retired, he lives in southern Alberta with Paul's mother, Renie, who is now completing a book about dinosaurs and the Badlands. They have a spread with a few horses at the edge of Dinosaur Provincial Park.) During his iterant childhood, Paul spent three years in Germany. "One of my favorite pastimes," he recalls, "was to sneak into the German army base through this hole in the fence and find old gas masks and spent shells. Or go into the cemetery with a screwdriver and take the iron crosses of the graves. That was fun."
In Paul's early teen years, the family moved to Washington, where a drama teacher inspired him to become an actor. "We did huge plays," he recalls, "Cantebury Tales and Faustus." And at age 14, he acted in his first commercial, a public-service ad about shoplifting. Yet another move took Gross to Toronto, where he finished high school at Earl Haig Secondary School. There, faced with a drama program offering such chestnuts as My Fair Lady, he looked elsewhere for excitement. "I spent my time downtown playing pinball or pool," he says. "I did the requisite amount of delinquency. I was in this little group and we'd break and enter houses. But I never stole anything. I would look at their record collections and see what kinds of books they had on the shelves."
Meanwhile, Gross continued acting in commercials, paying his way to study drama at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where he began writing for the stage. His model was the black-humoured angst of American playwright Sam Shepard. "That's how I started writing," he says. "I fell in love with Shepard's stuff." Shortly after completing his studies, he saw his first two works produced. Mounted in Edmonton, The Deer and the Antelope Play - about a fractured family at a Prairie gas station - won the 1982 Alberta Cultural Playwriting Award. But a review of the play, in an Edmonton paper, is forever seared into his brain. "The headline said, 'Gross is an insult to theatre,' " he recalls. "It took me months to recover."
But the critics loved his second play, The Dead of Winter, a gothic drama set on Christmas Eve in a farmhouse in the Alberta Badlands. Featuring actress, Jackie Bourroughs, it enjoyed a sellout run at the Toronto Free Theatre. It's director, Guy Sprung, says the writing was rich with "big, powerful images, none of this kitchen-sink shit. It had poetry in it; it had ideas; it had huge emotions and colors." Taking Gross under his wing, Sprung went on to direct him in several plays, including an athletic production of Romeo and Juliet in Toronto's High Park. Gross was a rock-star Romeo with shoulder-length hair who would swing from tree branches and shinny up vines. "As you could imagine, he had lots of young groupies coming to see him," says Sprung. "After the 'Is it a lark? Is it a nightingale?' scene, he would jump from the wall onto a horse and ride off into the park - with much swooning from the teenage girls."
The new golden boy of Canadian theatre, Gross also served as playwright in residence at the Stratford Festival. There, he wrote his third play, Sprung Rhythm, a psychodrama about a megalomaniacal doctor, that included a grisly reenactment of open-heart surgery. The experience left its author dissatisfied. Though it was well received at Ottawa's National Arts Center in 1984, a revamped Toronto production two years later, retitled Buchanan, was less successful. Meanwhile, Gross's fourth play, Thunder, Perfect Mind, an overwrought science-fiction musical extravaganza staged at Toronto's planetarium, was "a mess," admits Gross. "It made me realize how difficult it is to get up plays of any size in this country. And the doctor play was so badly reviewed, I just thought, 'I can't take this anymore.' There's no money. It takes three years to write one of these things. And you just get beat up."
Gross found an exit in TV and film. And he now holds the unlikely status of having scripted the only two Atom Egoyan films that the director has not written himself, both CBC dramas: In this Corner, about an Irish boxer mixed up in terrorism, and Gross Misconduct, about the death of hockey player Brian Spencer. He was disappointed with the spin that Egoyan put on his scripts, especially the strangely caricatural Gross Misconduct. "It was an odd pairing," conceded Egoyan. "We have really different sensibilities. But I hugely admired him. He really was our Sam Shepard, writing these magic, realist, very cool riffs on this mythic Alberta."
With his writing career on hold, Gross concentrated on acting, which proved no less frustrating. He starred as a First World War veteran in the mammoth CBC mini-series Chasing Rainbows (1988), and the chaotic 18-month shoot, he recalls, "was like a prison sentence." But it fuelled the actor's fascination with trench warfare, and led to his Dora-Award winning stage role as another First World War soldier in Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme at Toronto's St. Lawrence Center.
In the early 1990s, Gross starred in two offbeat Canadian movies - as a terrorized saleman in Cold Comfort, and as a Maritime mayor in Buried on Sunday. Then Hollywood came calling with the regrettable Aspen Extreme. He tried to turn it down. "I said, 'It's a terrible script, it's stupid.' But Sandy Bresler, who was Jack Nicholson's agent, got on the phone and said, 'What the fuck is wrong with you? You came down here, you want to star in studio pictures, it's a studio picture. Jack Nicholson did 27 crappy pictures before Easy Rider.' "
But actors today are not allowed so many false starts. And Aspen Extreme offers up what is perhaps the most nightmarish metaphor for Gross's career. He plays an aspiring writer who get rejected by Esquire and ends up as a Powder magazine cover boy, a star ski instructor with a drooling clientele of wealthy women. The ski school boss tells him that he has to "have a certain look - part of the job is fulfilling the fantasy." Gross is actually very impressive in Aspen Extreme. With his flashing white smile and easy charm, he comes across as a more natural Tom Cruise. But in the cutting room, Disney destroyed whatever integrity and continuity the movie had, says Gross. "They gutted it until it corresponded to Disney's original ad campaign: that Aspen is money, tits and skiing."
Aspen Extreme never took off at the box office, and Gross's first shot at Hollywood stardom was squandered. Since then, his U.S. offers have been limited to uninspired movies and mini-series - most recently he starred in a CBS remake of 20 000 Leagues Under the Sea, which he prefers to call 20 000 Scenes Down the Drain.
But without some setbacks, Gross would not have been available for the Due South pilot in the summer of 1993. The show's Canadian creator, Paul Haggis (thirtysomething, Michael Hayes) remembers their first meeting: "He was the character. It was his entire demeanor, the combination of an honest facen and a bent, perverse sense of humour."
As the deadpan Mountie, Gross came to personify Due South. But his American co-star, David Marciano, signed on under the assumption that he was joining a buddy cop show, not playing a sidekick in a Mountie show. This season, says Marciano, Alliance offered to hire him back with a 40-percent paycut, which he took as a none-too-subtle suggestion that he was not wanted. Gross stayed clear of the negotiations, and Marciano - who is making two guest appearances this season - insists he bears no grudge against him, although he now coolly refers to Paul, his former partner, as "Mr. Gross."
Alliance also sacked the dog that played Benton Fraser's deaf husky, Diefenbaker. Haggis had given the lucrative dog handling contract to his father, but the animal was so notoriously slow and unskilled that on the set, it had earned the nickname "O.T." for overtime. The new Diefenbaker is reportedly smarter, faster and cheaper.
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Monday morning. After a three-week holiday, the Due South crew is back at work. The show's offices and studios are scattered through the brick confines of a bleak factory space in downtown Toronto. Hundreds of blue barrels of toxic waste are stacked beside the parking lot where Gross's Winebago is parked. The trailer, which has a double bed in the back, serves as a roomy second home. A laptop sits on the desk, containing the script now being shot, which has yet to be finished. Gross takes a couple of mineral waters out of the fridge. "It was hard to sit down with Martha and say Lantos wants to do another year of this," he says, thinking back to the day he broke the news to his wife. "It means pretty much that I'm gone for a year. On occasion, it's been very difficult."
Because Martha Burns is an actor herself - she met Gross in 1983, when she was cast as an Indian princess in Walsh, a play in which he starred as a Mountie - she also has to contend with a measure of professional envy. "I'm thrilled for him as long as he's happy," she says. "It's like seeing someone discover another side of himself - that he's good with people and a good manager. But it's been three years of resenting not having him around." Then, laughing, she recalls: "I remember the first year he was doing Due South. I saw this big hard-cover novel in his kit bag, and said 'When do you have the time to read this?' The idea of someone sitting in a trailer reading a newly published hard-cover during the day - that's what you resent." She adds, "This year, I know he doesn't have the time to read."
Burns stresses, however, that Gross is a good father and caring husband, and she seems unfazed by the incessant drone of female adoration that surrounds him. But then Gross himself appears to have a healthy perspective on his glamor-boy image. His friend Benedict Campbell went on a camping trip with him a few years ago. With them were Campbell's brother Tom and nephew Liam. "We were sitting very late one night," Campbell recalls, "and this '60s Chrysler comes rumbling past, and all thses faces peered out of the windows at us. It was eerie. It felt like Deliverance. Suddenly, the doors opened, and all these teenagers poured out of it. Paul had been spotted in the store, and these kids had tracked him down - at 1 in the morning. He very graciously signed autographs and had pictures taken with all the girls. Liam, who has dreams of being a baseball star, thought this was just fantastic. And he asked Paul how it felt to have all thses people adoring him. Paul gave this off-the-cuff explanation that it wasn't him they were coming to seek - it was this image they see on television."
A response worthy of Benton Fraser. But once again, Gross is no Benton Fraser. He swears, smokes, drinks, has strong opinions. He even gambles. One weekend, he chartered a small plane and flew to Atlantic City with two stunt guys and Campbell. "We checked in, pretended to have something to eat, then stood at a craps table for 12 hours," says Gross. "They give you free drinks and pump oxygen into the room so you make incredible stupid bets. By the end of the night, I was $2000 down." Gross spent the next day dutifully earning it back. "I was terrible hungover. I dragged myself to some table and threw the dice without looking and they just went straight across and hit a guy on the forehead. But by the end of the day, I'd broken even."
There is a knock on the trailer door. Due South is waiting for Benton Fraser. The set is dressed as a small-town sheriff's office in Michigan, festooned with antlers, gift-shop doodads and a stuffed fish. The scene calls for a tricky continuous shot, which begins with Diefenbaker jumping up and grabbing a Kleenex box off the desk to take to a weeping prisoner. The dog nails it on the first take. But the actors and crew need more time to get it perfect. By then, Diefenbaker has lost interest. There are many more takes and the dog misses the Kleenex each time. Finally, Gross loses his patience and decided to use the first take. He can do that now. He's the boss.
Toronto Sun - May, 26, 1996
Actor Callum Rennie can explain why normally sane, logical people go wild when attending the Cannes Film Fest - and it has everything to do with the sultry, smoky Mediterranean air.
"It's the freedom to smoke anywhere. It creates this general naughtiness," claims Rennie, a sweeter, not-so-psychotic-looking version of John Malkovich.
In Cannes for his performance in Bruce MacDonald's Hardcore Logo, Rennie vows he quit smoking a few months ago. But like a drinker who's giddily fallen off the wagon, he's been imbibing everywhere in France - doing it in elevators, restaurants ("Every section is a smoking section!"), theatre lobbies and restrooms.
In Hardcore Logo, chain-smoking was par for his character as a guitar-slapping punk rocker. For research, director MacDonald sent Rennie on tour with the Ontario-based rock band Headstones, where he got a taste of life on the road. Thinkin' it'd be like Jim Morrison in his wild '60s heyday, Rennie was a tad disappointed with the healthier '90s version of touring.
"You'd think in a band you'd get lots of sex and cocaine," he jokes, "but it was mostly down time. Just like acting - except there's this gang mentality."
Born in England, but reared in Edmonton and Vancouver, where he still lives, Rennie's been a regular on the Canadian TV series My Life As A Dog and in the CBC-TV movie For Those Who Hunt The Wounded Down. His rebel roles are close to home for the 30ish actor, who, as a teen, shaved his head and thrived on the Sex Pistols. "I wasn't a rebel, I was a 'Revel,' and people used to lick me ..."
In Cannes for the first time, Rennie brought along his brother - a philosopher living in Belgium - for moral support. "But he got really nervous when he saw me on screen," says Rennie. "He was worried I was going to do something to really embarrass myself."
Not to worry. Rennie's already received rave reviews from fellow thespian Leonardo Di Caprio, who predicted to our Canadian boy's face that he'll be "the next James Dean."
What with all the smoke and compliments, how did Rennie keep his head from spinning?
"I wore my Roots shoes," says the Armani-clad actor. "I figure if I at least have on my Canadian footwear, it will keep me grounded."
******
From Hellion to Hot Property
Maclean's - October 13, 1997
Callum Keith Rennie makes up for lost time
by Brian D. Johnson
Outside the industrial ruins that house the Due South studios in mid-town Toronto, Callum Keith Rennie can be found in his trailer, assiduously stuffing carrots into an electronic juicer. He used to prefer a stronger kind of juice, and spent so much time under its influence that there are several years of his life that he cannot quite account for. But Rennie has not had a drink since catching a shard of glass in his eye during a barroom fight four years ago back home in Vancouver. The eye survived, and the story has become a signature scar in the career of an actor who like to deal in sharp edges.
On CTV's Due South, Rennie is the new guy. Replacing David Marciano as the sidekick, he plays Chicago detective Stanley Raymond Kowalski, the street-smart foil to Paul Gross's Mountie-with-a-heart-of-gold. "The basic dynamics remains intact," says Gross. "I'm naive and from the wilderness, and he's cynical and from the street. But I think our relationship is more combustible. David had an easier charm. Callum is spikier."
As he sips his carrot juice, a picture of studied casualness in a v-neck pullover, navy sweatpants and tan biker boots, the 37-year-old Rennie does have a rugged intensity about him. And he seems as cagey as Gross is forthwright. Bit by bit, he offers up threads of his past. Born in England, raised in Alberta. Did not start acting until he was 25. His parents are middle-class, separated. Wanted to be a mountaineer and supported his climbing habit with "crummy jobs - cooking, laying railroad track, digging ditches" - before discovering theatre in Edmonton.
Relocating to Vancouver, Rennie burned through a variety of TV roles, criminals mostly, in The X-Files, The Commish, The Highlander and Lonesome Dove. But he began to attract serious notice with a volley of small Canadian features - as a nerdy boyfriend in Double Happiness (1994), as a recovering junkie in Curtis's Charm (1995) and, most notably, as a charasmatic punk guitarist in Bruce McDonald's mock rockumentary, Hard Core Logo (1996). He also stars in McDonald's offbeat CBC series Twitch City, set to debut next January. And as a cocaine-addled nut in Kari Skogland's recent Men with Guns, he steals the movie. "Everything has happened pretty quickly," says the soft-spoken actor. "I've had a great run the last little while."
With his film career heating up, Rennie had qualms about locking into the weekly grind of Due South. "I'm by nature better suited to flashing quickly on roles and getting out of them without having to expose myself too much," he says. Gross, meanwhile, had reservations about hiring him. "Paul was worried I wouldn't have the endurance or the ability to take direction," says Rennie. "He thought I was really raw and didn't have any technique - it actually just looked like I had none, which is maybe a good thing." Finally, the two actors went to a bar (beer for Gross, soda water for Rennie) and ended up flipping a coin. When it turned up tails, they made it best out of three.
"It was the most potentially disastrous decision I had to make," says Gross, who doubles as the show's executive producer. "It's like a marriage. I spend more time with Callum than I do with my wife." But the partnership has clicked. "It has, on balance, been a riot," says Gross. "Callum's also very daring, physically, and that really benefits the show. David didn't like to do stunts, which becomes very limiting. Whereas if you chucked Callum out of a plane, it would be fine."
Replacing a character on "an established show that has a huge fan base," says Rennie, "means you're gonna be judged as ,'Well-you're-not-the-other-guy'." And it took him a few episodes to feel secure in the role. But there was instant chemistry with Gross. "I understand him as a good ol' Alberta boy," Rennie explains. "I know how whacked he is. People go, 'Jeez, you guys are so different.' But we're so much the same. We both have that outside-looking-in-at-the-rediculousness-of-things. We keep a cool exterior and underneath, it's sort of a lot of other stuff."
Still, Rennie does not expect to stick around. He insisted on a rare one-year contract - and it is doubtful that Gross would want to risk type-casting himself as a Mountie for another season. When thi on ends, Rennie plans to head straight for Los Angeles. "I just want to up the ante," he says. "In this country, I seem to work with a lot of first-time directors. And at this point, I can't risk being fucked with by people who are too neurotic with their material to allow me to do what I want." And like Gross, Rennie is unhappy with the kinds of roles available in Canada. "Things have to change in the way we make movies," he says. "We don't write for heroic characters." Rennie seems to have his mind set on leaving the Canadian archetype in the dust. In Vancouver, he owns what he calls a "racing truck - a 1964 Mercury shortbox with a 390 El Camino engine." And he looking forward to a long drive - due south.
*******
Getting Under Callum Keith Rennie's Skin
Vines - April/May 1999
Searching for the Calm in Callum Keith Rennie
By Cynthia Amsden
"I am the thinking man's David Hasselhoff." This is how Callum Keith Rennie described himself three years ago. He prided himself, then, as being an objective bon vivant. In his opinion, none of this should have happened to him and yet, all of this should have happened to him.
Callum Circa 1996: Sitting in Bar Italia on College Street in Toronto, the 5'11" actor appears much taller than his measure -- a unique turnabout in the acting world. Wearing jeans and a t-shirt, with heavy silver rings on his fingers, Callum (no one calls him Rennie) is taking time off from shooting the Kari Skogland film, Men With Guns. His role, a drug-addled dervish who whirls to an early demise, is a character piece which steals the film.
Our interview started out politely, like all Canadian celebs interviews do, nothing more than earnest bilge. As I began to dig, he pulled back and began to perform. Parry. Thrust. Parry. Thrust. Smile. Later on, I learn he has done the same thing the day before with an interviewer from another publication. A very middle-of-the-road publication. The journalist asked him to describe his ideal date. "Well, she's blonde and has blue eyes... and she has really big tits," he responded. To date, that interview has never seen the light of press.
The attitude was a carry-over from Callum's youth. He was born in Sunderland, England and raised in Edmonton. At 18, he had his first epiphany that he was someone apart from the mainstream world. "The challenging started... the music changed... the Sex Pistols, the Ramones. I was hanging out with Bruce McCulloch (Kids in the Hall) at high school. People I'd grown up with were offended by my choice of a new friend and my choice of social commentary which had an anti-conservative message rage to it."
The next 15 years involved a long personal struggle. His desire to be in the arts was complicated by the feeling that dramatic schooling, which he lacked, was a prerequisite. That was the high road excuse which covered a low road personality dodge. "I had my own idea of what an actor was which was a loud, verbose, outwardly-extended person and I wasn't that." Instead he worked at jobs which required no emotional committment: a cook, a bartender, a construction worker and he edged up to the periphery of acting by moving furniture on movie sets. It culminated in what is now regared as CKR-lore about barrooms and brawls and bodily injury, all adding up to Epiphany No. 2 -- he needed to act. Instead of just acting out.
Perhaps a decade and a half of teeth-gnashing had greater value than mere procrastination. His unusually high level of articulation suggests he was thinking, or at the very least, positioning himself for the psychological leap. One of the first roles he landed was an ideal mixocological blend of cinema and high anarchy -- the multi-screen psychodrama short, Frank's Cock, directed by fringe cinema icon, Mike Hoolboom. Few audiences outside of film-fest circuits have seen this cinematic bon-bon, although it won Best Canadian Short at the 1994 Toronto International Film Festival. Two years later, he revisted the scene of his first success and starred in Hoolboom's Letters From Home, which again took the prize for best short at the 1996 festival. Next came his lead in Mina Shum's acclaimed cross-cultural romance, Double Happiness, which lead to a 1994 Genie nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and critical praise for John L'Ecuyer's gritty film, Curtis's Charm.
Confident of his talent, the burgeoning star developed a taste for life on the fun side of the velvet rope and wanted more. But reluctant to band on unadorned ability, he tinkered with a bad-boy image because of its built-in "I'm good, but if I screw up, then at least I still have my integrity" voucher. This swagger was a tidy, if philosophically empty, approach but Callum was fully aware of the ramifications. "The more you work, the more you become a caricature of your own personality traits," he admits.
The 1996 half hour interview turned into an hour, then two, then three. The bottom line was apparent: he wanted to be an actor/storyteller. No lusting after directorship, no visions of having writing credits, no wet dreams of producerhood -- he just wants to be an actor.
Three years click by. This time the interview is at Callum's Toronto residence. The decor is understated, except for the couches. Very big, very nap-oriented. The t-shirt and jeans are still there, ditto the rings, which evidently are more a talismanic statement than a fashion accessory. But the attitude has evolved from latter-day James Dean rebel-with-a-contract into a more introspective understanding of his own creative mortality.
Another thing that hasn't changed are his goals. He still invokes the word "storyteller" when he discusses his acting. If it was just a handy phrase, he'd have changed his script. No one continues to use old material if their objective is to entertain the press. Too big a risk.
Callum has used the time profitably. His role in Last Night as Craig Zwiller, the man with the check list of sexual proclivities to accomplish, earned him a 1999 Genie for Best Supporting Actor. This award sits next to his 1997 Genie for Best Actor, Youth Series for My Life as a Dog. In addition to this, he appeared alongside Alicia Silverstone in Excess Baggage, in the Patrick Stewart non-Star Trek thriller, Masterminds, and in Don McKellar's cult hit TV mini-series, Twitch City. Hard Core Logo, another star turn, was picked up by Quentin Tarantino for U.S. release. And then there is Due South, in which Callum plays Stanley Kowalski, the American cop/doppelganger to Paul Gross' Mountie. The inherent humour and bonhomie in this role brought Callum front and center in the public mind, giving him official "Yeah, I know that guy" accreditation he considers valid.
While listing past and upcoming projects is considered standard operational reportage when profiling an actor, with Callum, it likens itself to seeing which color combination a painter chooses to use in his self-portrait. Next up are a variety of screen gems which greatly exceed the lable of simple filmography: Ken Finkleman's television series, Foolish Heart, a reprise of his role as Newbie in the second Twitch City series, Life Before This, with Sarah Polley, and David Cronenberg's much heralded new film, eXistenZ. No frivolous committments here.
What has not evolved much in the elapsed time is his personal life. He has been Mr. Suitcase for the last five years. Bedouin Boy. While freedom isn't the motivation for being an actor, it is one of the perks. "Freedom to travel, to see the world in a way that's not conventional, to grow. But it's an assumed freedom -- it can all go away." In Callum's case, freedom also means never staying in one place long enough to have to mow a lawn. Domesticated, he is not.
While many people create their comfort zones in a household environment, Callum's idea of a safe harbour can be found on set. There is a distinct and sustaining intimacy between himself and the camera lens. That quantum space expands and allows for a direct connection to where he is at one with himself. "Almost everything I've done is an accomplishment of desire over circumstance."
Translated into real life terms, Sunday nights are an anathema, while Monday mornings bring welcome relief as the working world kicks back into gear. "Getting up early to go to work feels blue collar. My life and thoughts haven't caught up with me yet. Working on Due South was the happiest I've been because it felt like family. So you work for a year in close proximity with a great amount of creative freedom and it's a lot of fun."
Fun, indeed. Series television is the pearl in the oyster that is acting. Easy living. Callum discovered both sides of this truth on Due South. "You forget a lot of the fear, a lot of the 'where's my next gig coming from,' the money issues, even that someone's gonna feed you at a certain time. Once that's done, you're back into the regular mode which is the hustle. Now I realize I have to get over that comfort that I found."
Once of the reasons the security afforded by Due South had a magnetic appeal is because Callum is, in down home, everyday terms, shy. Legitimate shyness is definitely not an attribute people volunteer as an explanation. Rather, it's the symptoms that give it away. Ordinary shy people decline party invitations and live in cyber space. Successful actors don't have that option. They learn how to hide in plain sight. Callum's compensating technique is not unique, but it defines him: he prefers meeting people individually and he seems to want others to get to know him as a person rather than a personality. "Seeing who a person is with you is very different that seeing them in a group," he explains.
Still, he eyes other people who have groups of friends with a curious envy. Not a motivating envy, mind you, because Callum is known for testing the tensile strength of a friendship, stretching it out over time and distance. Down times between telephone calls can last upwards of four weeks. It's the Callum Keith Rennie version of the Sting song: set a friendship free. If it's true, it will be there when you come back to it. If it isn't, it will slap you upside the head.
There was a period in mid-1998 where Callum extracted himself from acting to allow himself simple pleasures. He took his first holiday in five years. Using his earnings to purchase a black 1998 Ford Expedition (it replaced his 1964 truck, both of which close friends say he drives like a stolen vehicle), he drove down to Mexico to fish, a hobby he had as a youth. In Puerto Vallarta, he attempted his first Hemingway thing. "This was no Old Man and the Sea behind us. A 300-pound swordfish jumped out of the water behind us. It was surreal. The rod completely bend like I'd just snagged a cow. My arm was numb and my eyes were bugging out of head but I brought it in myself." The catch, no dubbed Marlin Brando, is destined to hang as a trophy in the Vancouver office of his close friend and manager, Elizabeth Hodgson.
In the study of psychology of fame, living in the spotlight causes people to become self-conscious. Callum corrects this perception. "Not self-conscious -- self-aware. The effects of it can wear on you, wondering why people want to talk to you or what people want. It's easier to stay home than go out. Whatever private moment you may be having suddenly get broken up by a stranger. Then you feel like you were watched or you are going to be watched and it becomes something other than the experience you were having."
Celebrity, he has learned, is a far cry from the geniune distinction he seeks. Two incidents, which should be funny, but never amount to more than moronic, highlight this. One occurred early in his career when he finally merited the attention of CBC. He saw the interviewer enter the bar where they were meeting and watched her wait for 30 minutes. She had no idea who he was. The second took place two years ago on a flight from Toronto. A flight attendant wanted his autograph even though she admitted she has never seen any of his work. He was astounded, he says, that not even knowing who he was, this person still played the sycophant.
But how does he explain his flirtatious reputation? Laughter is his first reaction. Boyish, evasive laughter. Then he settles down and justifies himself. "After you've been living in L.A. where you're just another actor, high points like film festivals, where there's all these people around, is fun. You're empowered by the status. There's potential in that moment; it's easy to get sucked in, dangerous but ti's resistible and no, it's not real. The repercussions of that mindset are vanity and shallowness."
Orson Wells said "the greates enemy of art is the absence for the lingering which may well account for the lingering dalliance with the underdog status." "I've always preferred the 'behind the 8-ball' sensibility," he confesses. Freedom, he thinks, is not all it's cracked up to be. Limitations can be our friend. The trick, he is convinced, is "to recognize that it's part of your nature and when that can be effective and when it cannot be effective."
While other actors abide by the philosophy of go big or stay in bed, Callum is happy perfecting the small stuff right now. He is working towards achieving the "beginner's mind Zen reference for unfettered thought. "Today, it's all personal, today's it's all seeking clarity and grace." At the podium, accepting his Genie for Last Night, in February, he explained how accepting compliments is very difficult, but the award he could accept as a geniuine compliment.
From there, Callum would be happy to reside in a calm place. Not a geographical location, he explains when asked where his ideal spot in the world would be. "Eventually, it will be in my own skin."
******
Due South's Mountie Paul Gross takes off his Tunic
Elm Street - October 1997
Due South's Mountie Bares All (and a writer contemplates a musical ride)
by Veronica Cusack
Amsterdam Natural Blonde, Marlboro, faded jeans, absolutely. You did want to know. What he drinks, what he smokes, what he wears, is he really that gorgeous? Now, enough. This is a serious article. The man has a substantial brain even though, to steal from one of his movies, he looks as if he belongs on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But that habit of running a flat moist tongue along his lower lip is most disconcerting. I may have to confiscate it if this continues.
A soft summer morning, only the faintest whisper of gathering city swelter. Leprous grasses struggle though the cloven asphalt of an industrial midden. In an amiable white trailer, a guitar on the bed, an overflowing desk, Angela's Ashes open on a side table, jostled by RCMP boots, jodhpurs and sweats all tattooed "Fraser" as if he is going off to camp, Paul Gross ponders, carefully, visibly working out an understanding of his own youthful actions, of how he arrived in this life. He is embarassed, briefly runs neat lace-maker fingers through his cropped hair, didn't expect to justify the rejection of his first love, probably thought I'd ask about his hobbies. Later, when relaxed, he will tap or cross or stretch his long legs, snap his fingers to a burst of music, bring his enery to surface. but he has not yet taken the measure of me, is nervous, self-conscious. He is still.
"In this country, committed people end up in the theatre because there is no interesting alternative. The crap that's on TV and in Canadian movies, well, I'd rather vomit than write like that." Perhaps it's not fair to remind Gross of that statement. He uttered it 15 years ago, when he was only 23 and enjoying the first flush of success as a dramatist. But why would a man whom, in late 1984, writer and editor Alberto Manguel called "one of the most interesting writers of the new generation," in 1986 abandon the field in which he showed so much promise?
The third and penultimate season of Due South is playing on CTV, and Gross again stars as the recondite RCMP constable, Benton Fraser. This year he also acts as executive producer and senior writer for the series, earning a rumoured $1.5 million. One hundred and ten countries follow the mountie's droll adventures; fan letters arrive from Norway, Israel and Zimbabwe. To millions of people, Gross is Fraser. They know him no other way. And even most Canadians don't recognize the respected actor, the celebrated dramatist.
A langourous evening, heat still clenches in Toronto's metal heart. Gross, framed against the twilight dawdling in the coloured glass window, is saved from matinee-idol cliche by the monkeyshine in his eyes. Mellow best describes his mood, engaged, delighting in what he obviously considers a triumph: an interrogation recast into argument, wordplay, laughter. I will allow him this vanity. (I would allow him just about anything.) Hours of conversation, undisguised opinions - American protectionism, lapsed Catholics, The Englishman's Boy, Gross's profanity reaches psychedelic hues; we exhume succulent tales, giggle like sophomores over references to PVC and golden showers. But he always knows I am a writer and retreats behind a fire screen if I reach too close.
In 1982, Gross's The Dead of Winter won the Alberta Culture Playwriting Competition. It went on to production at Toronto's Free Theatre (where its run was extended) and a Chalmers Award nomination. Gross had started to write while a drama student at the University of Alberta. "I was acting in a show I thought was really badly conceived and my job was simply to execute mistakes day after day. I thought, this is going to happen a lot, so I must have something I can do to alleviate things." Set in a farmhouse in the Alberta Badlands, his play weaves a parent's guilt-ridden nightmare through a Christmas Eve. The father uses cadences of the King James Bible to reveal his sin. The mother relates her life in lyric simplicity. The critics loved it: "its honesty and its unforced theatricality," praised one; Gross's "unique slant on the world," encored another. Director Guy Sprung described him as "the Canadian Sam Shepard: he writes big; he write thematically; he's got guts; he writes poetry."
"My ambitions in The Dead of Winter were pretty modest," recalls Gross. "But you get sort of fat-headed, you think you've got to write a great play, or at least a bigger play." In the fall of 1986, Toronto Free mounted Gross's drama Buchanan. It explored a surgeon's arrogance and power, and had begun life two years earlier as Sprung Rhythm, produced at Ottawa's National Arts Centre. Gross was invited to be playwright-in-residence at the Stratford Festival, and there he revised and workshopped the text, though never to his complete satisfaction. "I made the mistake of concentrating on the arias when in fact you need the mundance stuff, the connecting tissue. You've got to earn the right to the poetry." The Toronto production was considered to be seriously flawed. "It was really beaten up by the critics," Gross says quietly. "They had a lot to do with making me wonder what the point of it all was." What the young man failed to register were the positive aspects of those reviews. The Toronto Star's Robert Crew noted his "willingness to use language to the full," and called him a "literate writer who doesn't talk down to his audience - there are echoes of Shakespeare as well as Greek drama."
Ten years earlier, in 1976, Robin Phillips was into his second lambent year as artistic director of the Stratford Festival: empty theatrics were swept away, replaced by provocative and superb performance. Gross was 17, working in the theatre box office for the summer. The boy took certain exception to certain matters of staging in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Antony and Cleopatra. He ploughed in Phillips's office brandishing a list of complaints. "I remember it vividly," says Phillips. "He came in sort of cocky and smart, but it was very quickly dropped down to an interesting conversation when he realized I was going to listen. To a certain extent, the early writing is the same thing. He had to make sure that people paid attention, like boxing his work in a purple-and-gold envelope so it will be noticed in the mail. But he's a very good writer and I believe he will go back to the stage. It is too much a part of him."
Gross moved to television. "I was writing for the CBC and knew at the very least they would pay me real money. I abandoned the play I was developing; I didn't have the drive to actually get through it." He showed no fear of the new medium. Working with director Atom Egoyan, he limned two portraits of angry men clutching at the edges of society. In This Corner dismembers terrorism's nationale; and Gross Misconduct uses mundane title cards to herald the approach of death, a boy with the face of an angel to unravel the fears of his adult self. Gross stares into the deepening night. "If I was faced with the prospect of having everything - writing, directing, producing, acting - stripped away from me but for one thing, then I would hang on to writing. It's the most frustrating thing, but it's the most rewarding thing I do."
"Will I return to writing for the stage? You have to think about what your life expectancy is. There are stories I would like to tell in film." He is currently writing a tale inspired by a controversial First World War sculpture depicting a Calgary sergeant crucified against a barn door. Rumours of the atrocity swept through the lines at the Third Battle of Ypres, and Paul Gross's screenplay demands the recreation of the foul, fatal, infinite mud of Passchendaele of 1917.
Robert Lantos, head of Due South's parent, Alliance Communications, and of its film arm, Alliance Pictures, is interested. "But it's very expensive," Gross explains, "so he is yelling at me." Hands splay across his temples, eyes roll back, voice thickens into a cursing Count Chocula: "Paul, vy can't you just fuking make a filum for five mill-i-yon dollars?" In person - fine linen, diplomatic machismo, one leg perpetually pulsing like a randy borzoi - it is obvious that he adores him: "strong minded...without conceit...Due South in an unprecented state of harmony..." This despite Gross's mimicry: "You mayke me sound like a Russian. I yam not a Rrrussian. I yam a Hungarian, you fuk!"
Testimonials to Gross's charms are plentiful. New co-star, mercurial Vancouver actor Callum Keith Rennie, argent power, fierce fingers, a man not prone to flattery: "Here is a person I consider noble." Wife, mother of his two children, actor Martha Burns: "He is a very fast typist." (She said more, but that's quite enough from significant femails.) Friend David Keeley, Cominius in the Stratford Festival's Coriolanus, Clarence in Richard III, long legs and leather: "Paul is a kid who refuses to grow up, and everything and everybody is a new experience. Wonder is what he always has in his eyes and in his work, and he never shuts down that wonder for life and how life works and how it goes around."
"The greatest prize that doing film and TV gives me," muses Gross, "is that I am afforded a sniff of being inside someone else's life. When we were making Buried on Sunday in Herring Cove [Nova Scotia], I would go out with the guys in the morning and help pull in their mackerel nets and they would drop me off at the dock. I'd work fo the day, then we'd sit around in the boat shed at night drinking hot rum and they'd tell stories about wrecks and great storms. Making Tales of the City in L.A., it was a privilege to meet [author] Armistead Maupin. In Nashville [shooting a vaporized CBS pilot], I wandered around the dressing rooms at the Grand Old Opry, talked with brilliant musicians sporting incredible architectural hair; whole colonies lived up there." The visit to Nashville generated an album, written and recorded with David Keeley, of songs redolent of John Hiatt and John Mellencamp, defying easy classification, songs that illustrate experience: "These are the memories I have you; no, these are the gifts I took from you."
"When I started out as an actor, there were three roles I wanted to do: Romeo, Brick and Lear." In the summer of 1985, Gross created a Romeo of careless athleticism within Toronto's High Park. He hung from the branches of surrounding trees to touch Juliet's outstretched hand, shinnied up vines to gain her lips, and received a Dora nominations for his efforts. Tennessee Williams's tormented drunk from Cat on a Hot Tin Rood appeared at the Manitoba Theatre Center in 1989. The Winnipeg Free Press gushed: "His gradual animation an unpeeling of [Brick] is something that should be videotaped for drama classes."
Richard III is now added to the list of desired parts, "a guy I would love to have a beer with"; Prince Hal piques his interest and still he retains a desire to one day suffer the role of Lear. "I know the guy. I know him."
His Canadian Stage portrayal of the arrogant and frightened Kenneth Pyper in Frank McGuinness's examination of a nation's terrible sacrifice, Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, garnered Gross the 1988 Dora for best actor. In his final speech, Pyper prays fro strength, for mercy, for the glory of his land, for the lives of himself and seven comrades as they go into battle only he will survive. "I have to look up at the guys and say, 'Observer the sons of Ulster marching towards the Somme,'" Gross remembers. "On the very last night, I look up and tears are pouring down everyone's faces. It was just a tremendous feeling, crushing that when was over."
"So," I ask, "explain Aspen Extreme," a 1993 Disney tale of hunks-go-skiing. Gross drops his head into his hands. "Fuck, fuck, fuck." Mock sobbing. "I was summoned to a breakfast meeting they are all so fond of in Los Angeles, on the Disney lot, to this oxymoron of a building, vaguely like the Parthenon: the columns are giant dwarfs holding the fucking roof up. I meet this guy who is running Hollywood Pictures and he says 'Paul, the film, we love it, we just love it,' and I know there is not a cut of it, and I say 'Have you seen a cut?' and he says, 'No, but we can sell the shit out of it.' and I realize that I have just taken part in something that was made into a movie based on some pre-existing ad campaign."
In Canada, the average budget for prints and advertising is minuscule. Here, we make films to do well at festivals, in the hope that they will attract a certain buzz and in turn succeed at the box office. Perhaps this is why, in the world of feature films, only small Canadian movies reveal Gross the actor: Cold Comfort, Buried on Sunday. No prodigious publicity campaigns or giant dwarfs. Just a detachment of actors and a director who searches for their best.
Watching from across a plastic tabletop, I try to decided of this particular thespian is feigning elaborate innocence. There sits a graceful, perfectly symmetrical, bomb-blast example of manhood who describes himself simply as "not ugly." Film directors, a candid breed, framed his assets: Buffalo Jump - biceps and triceps; Aspen Extreme - glutei maximi; Tales of the City - deltoids and pecs. In contrast, Due South exploits the power of tease. His body is most often encased from toe to throat in serge and cow hide. Benton Fraser open a top button or rolls us a shirt sleeve, and women across the world, plus not a few men, retreat in turgid fantasy. Fan fiction zines and Websites swell. And slash fiction, the porno sub-genre of fan, goes wild.
Slash, so-called because of the "/" between protragonists' names, is written predominantly by women for women. It explores in graphic detail a monogamous sexual relationship between strongly paired male characters in television or film - from Spock/Kirk to Fox Mulder/Walter Skinner. The stories circumvent TV's dead-girlfriend-of-the-week syndrome and instead portray the men as equal partners sharing mountains of angst plus prolonged foreplay, frottage and copulation - romantic or rough.
Gross turns out to be entirely ignorant of the world of slash. I explain, and his eyes "as blue as dusk on a winter afternoon," widen in the "heartbreaking, passion-glazed" face. (You are reading a serious article. Due South is quite well presented amoung prizewinners in the Slash Talent In Fandom writing and artwork awards, the STIFies. Could I make this up?) I bring out a Due South zine. Gross begins to read. Note: we are sitting in a crowded blue-collar pub. He chuckles. In the background, the Mills Brothers swing. Now, he laughs. Then again - a long, strong laugh ending only when his lungs give out. Tears appear at the corners of his eyes and he reads out loud from the page, louder than the "glow, little glowworn, glow and glimmer" issuing from the speakers.
He splutters, draws breath in a high-pitched wheeze. Large men with bad teeth begin looking our way. I am convinced that one of us is going to get punched. But Gross is having too much fun to care. His voice gets louder as incredulity rises.
"Shhhh, you'll get us bounced."
"What do they do," he asks, "masturbate to this stuff? I tell you, slash fiction is going to go crazy when they see the new guy. He is really good-looing and sexy, the dangerous side of Fraser. It will be totally homoerotic. How can I see this stuff? Where do I go in on the Internet?"
"...glow for the female of the species; turn on the AC and the DC..."
Moonshine and patio lanterns. The city preparing to sleep. The mood has shifted. We talk of the Holocaust, Christian symbolism in Gross's writings and the suicide of a close friend more than 20 years ago. Midway through his teens, Gross began a study of the world's major religions, searching for an understanding of how a life should be lived, of how to make sense of what he found hanging from that tree in West Virginia. "I think there is larger design; there is such a thing as sin. It is better to be generous than to be miserly; easier to be nice than to be deliberately nasty. And the idea of suicide... I can't understand how a person wouldn't find something to enjoy within their day." His constant wonder for life and how life works and how it goes around.
*******
Amazing Gross
Maclean's -- October 13, 1997
Amazing Gross
By Brian D. Johnson
"So have you ever been arrested?"
It seems as good a place as any to begin an interview with Paul Gross, the actor who plays the impeccably polite and upright Mountie on CTV's Due South. He sits on a bar stool in the kitchen of the Toronto home smoking Winstons and sipping coffee, a little bleary after a night of too much wine -- not the kind of behavior that his alter ego, RCMP Const. Benton Fraser, would get up to. But this morning, Gross is out of uniform and out of character, barefoot in a T-shirt and jeans. Some stubble darkens his chin, a dusting of grit on the smooth, square-jawed features.
"Arrested? Yeah, for drunk driving," he says, fielding the question without a flicker of hesitation. It was the mid-1980s in Stratford, Ontario. Gross was playing darts over drinks with an actor friend, Benedict Campbell. "I was worried that the car was going to get towed," recalls Gross, "so I put it in this church parking lot. I was trying to park it, but while I was trying, I thought I'd just spin a 180 in the gravel. And then they appeared out of nowhere, all these guys with flashlights -- 'You're under arrest.' That was a year's suspension. It's very effective legislation."
Drunk parking. It is, come to think of it, a Benton Fraser kind of crime. And although Gross likes to make it clear that, in real life, he is no Benton Fraser, there is enough Mountie in him to appreciate the beauty of an effective bit of law enforcement. Gross may lack Fraser's punctilious reserve, but he does elicit the same sort of adjectives: charming, witty, smart, honest, articulate, athletic, generous, dedicated and drop-dead handsome -- in other words, like Fraser, he sems infuriatingly perfect.
At 38, Paul Gross is the Renaissance dude of Canadian television. This year, Due South enters its third season as the country's most popular homegrown TV drama, averaging 1.5 million viewers per episode on CTV (Sundays at 7 p.m.). And for the first time, Gross is not just the star but the boss as well. He has streamlined the production and cast a new sidekick, the smouldering Callum Keith Rennie, to replace the nonchalant David Marciano. Now as actor, executive producer and head writer, Gross earns combined fees estimated at between $2 million and $3 million for the season, making him the highest-paid performer in the history of Canadian television. "I hate to say this because he's got enough going for him already," says Robert Lantos, chairman and CEO of Alliance Communications, the company behind Due South. "But he's turned out to be a first-class producer. This show was always problematic. There were always budget overruns. It was behind schedule. There was always panic on the set. Since Paul's been running the show, I don't hear anything. It's completely calm and smooth. It's even below budget. It's astonishing."
As if that were not enough, Gross is an award-winning playwright. He composes songs, and sings with remarkable assurance for someone who does not make a living at it -- he has just released his first CD, Two Houses, a country album recorded with fellow actor David Keeley. He can ride a horse and play guitar. He is an expert skier. His friends report, with palpable envy, that he can party into the night without visible damage, rise at dawn the next day, knock off The Globe and Mail crossword puzzle in 10 minutes while being driven to the set, then work for 18 hours without losing his sense of humor or flubbing his lines. And somehow, despite his punishing schedule, he has managed to hold together a nine-year marriage to stage actress Martha Burns, and be a father to their two children, Hanna, 7, and Jack, 3. Dudley Do-Right, eat your heart out.
Gross, an army brat who was born in Calgary and schooled in England, Germany, Canada and Washington, just seems to have talent for whatever he puts his hand to. "He's not just smart for a good-looking television star," says Toronto writer Paul Quarrington, who has scripted some Due South episodes and wrote the 1994 movie Whale Music, in which Gross appeared. "He's just really, really smart. Plus he's very honest. He's one of those guys who will say things that people are thinking but wouldn't have the gumption to say out loud. When we were doing Whale Music, he managed to get us kicked out of perhaps the sleaziest bar in Vancouver, just by his forthrightness. It had something to do with dissing the local sports franchise. He's a bit of a cowboy, but an intellectual cowboy." Adds Quarrington: "It's not that he misbehaves in any standard way. He doesn't go out womanizing or doing heroin or anything."
In fact, a sense of innate virtue seems a big part of Gross's appeal. Then there's the Hunk Factor, which cuts both ways. "It's something that's dogged me all my life," he sighs. "There's an assumption that if you're pretty, you can't be smart." And in a film culture of Atom Egoyans and David Cronenbergs, where the weird is a more valued currency than the heroic, Gross sometimes feels out of place as a classic leading man.
Egoyan, in fact, considered Gross for his movie, The Sweet Hereafter, for the role of the simmering father, Billy Ansell, but hesitated because of his looks. "Paul is a very fine actor and I was really close to casting him," says Egoyan, who cast Bruce Greenwood instead. "The problem is that he is really good-looking. Paul is very pretty; Bruce looked rougher." Gross, who views his own image with sanguine detachment, is under no illusions. "I'm not going to get to play Ratso Rizzo," he says. "But Canadian film and television does not celebrate beauty. In Canada, you can't be serious if you're also attractive. My face is more organized for the American system somehow."
But Gross has also had his frustrations with Hollywood. He keeps getting asked to play male bimbos in U.S. movies-of-the-week that he considers an insult to his intelligence. He winces at the mention of his one starring role in a Hollywood feature, the cheesy Aspen Extreme (1993), in which he was cast a a babe-magnet ski instructor. And he audtioned for a role opposite Jack Nicholson in the upcoming comedy As Good As It Gets, only to be told he was "too fine-featured" for the part.
Still, what Gross has accomplished with Due South cannot be underestimated. He has created a complex character who is heroic, campy, sensitive and utterly uncynical. That is all the more remarkable considering that the show, concocted in a 1992 meeting between Lantos and then-CBS president, Jeff Sagansky, was born as a act of co-production opportunism: a Crocodile Dundee comedy-adventure about a Mountie from the Canadian North who ends up working with the Chicago police. Shot in Toronto, Due South became the first Canadian series to crack American prime time. It is now seen in some 60 countries. It is a top ten hit in both Germany and Britain, and has a large following of hard-core fans who swap Due South trivia on the Internet. As the Mountie peacekeeper, Gross had turned a rusty Canuck cliche into a sublimely ironic international icon.
Neither a sitcom nor a TV police drama, Due South corresponds to no existing TV formula. Swinging unpredictably between farce and drama, it is urban fable with a surreal edge and can be wildly uneven. "CBS had no idea where to slot it or how to sell it," says Gross. Buoyed by a fiercely loyal fan base, the show weathered a rollercoaster ride of network cancellations and renewals. Then, after last season, the U.S. network pulled the plug once and for all, and Due South was presumed dead. But Lantos marshalled support from CTV, the BC and other foreign broadcasters to resurrect it for a third season.
Now, the show's success hinges substantially on Gross. He does the hiring, approves all major decisions, puts the final polish on all scripts, and writes about half a dozen episodes himself. On the set, meanwhile, he commands loyalty. "Paul's very poised," says Gordon Pinsent, who plays the ghost of Fraser's Mountie father. "He's not pushy. And he's very respectful of the other actors." Gross is also the self-appointed life of the party. "He's on all the time," says one crew member. "He's constantly kibitzingand doing stand-up routines and pratfalls. He's like a kid -- he has to be the center of attention. But he's very well liked; it's a giant love-in."
And a laugh-in. Gross's quirky sense of humour is all over the show. An episode last season called "All the Queen's Horses," which Gross wrote, featured a flatulent Leslie Nielsen (Naked Gun) in a deliriously absurd sequence involving a trainload of singing Mounties from the Musical Ride. Gross says he cast Nielsen over lunch after a chance encounter on the street in Manhattan: "I said, 'OK, the Musical Ride is on a train and they're all gassed by terrorists except for you, and I see you going to the bathroom so I crawl underneath the train and we have a conversation through the hole in the toilet.' And he says, 'I'm sold.' "
Gross brings a sense of physical as well as comic bravado to the show, performing a number of his own stunts -- he did a fight scene without a safety harness on top of a moving train in "All the Queen's Horses." And he displays a giddy sense of adventure as a writer-producer. This season, his pride and joy ia a two-part episode titled "Mountie on the Bounty," which airs next February. Costing $4.2 million, it features a naval battle filmed in the middle of Lake Ontario between a freighter and a squad of Mounties on a three-masted frigate -- the same one used by Marlon Brando in Mutiny on the Bounty.
Even on a normal day, commanding a TV series that costs an average of $1.5 million an episode and employs a crew of 200 is like a military operation. In fact, Rennie's nickname for his co-star is "Tank Commander." And Gross's interest in things military runs deep: his dream is to make an epic movie that he has written based on the unsubstantiated story of a Canadian soldier being crucified on a barn door in France during the First World War.
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Gross, the older of two brothers, grew up with the military. There are snampshots of him as a small child sitting on the barrel of a tank in Germany. His father, Bob Gross, was a career soldier, a colonel with a Canadian tank regiment. (Now retired, he lives in southern Alberta with Paul's mother, Renie, who is now completing a book about dinosaurs and the Badlands. They have a spread with a few horses at the edge of Dinosaur Provincial Park.) During his iterant childhood, Paul spent three years in Germany. "One of my favorite pastimes," he recalls, "was to sneak into the German army base through this hole in the fence and find old gas masks and spent shells. Or go into the cemetery with a screwdriver and take the iron crosses of the graves. That was fun."
In Paul's early teen years, the family moved to Washington, where a drama teacher inspired him to become an actor. "We did huge plays," he recalls, "Cantebury Tales and Faustus." And at age 14, he acted in his first commercial, a public-service ad about shoplifting. Yet another move took Gross to Toronto, where he finished high school at Earl Haig Secondary School. There, faced with a drama program offering such chestnuts as My Fair Lady, he looked elsewhere for excitement. "I spent my time downtown playing pinball or pool," he says. "I did the requisite amount of delinquency. I was in this little group and we'd break and enter houses. But I never stole anything. I would look at their record collections and see what kinds of books they had on the shelves."
Meanwhile, Gross continued acting in commercials, paying his way to study drama at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where he began writing for the stage. His model was the black-humoured angst of American playwright Sam Shepard. "That's how I started writing," he says. "I fell in love with Shepard's stuff." Shortly after completing his studies, he saw his first two works produced. Mounted in Edmonton, The Deer and the Antelope Play - about a fractured family at a Prairie gas station - won the 1982 Alberta Cultural Playwriting Award. But a review of the play, in an Edmonton paper, is forever seared into his brain. "The headline said, 'Gross is an insult to theatre,' " he recalls. "It took me months to recover."
But the critics loved his second play, The Dead of Winter, a gothic drama set on Christmas Eve in a farmhouse in the Alberta Badlands. Featuring actress, Jackie Bourroughs, it enjoyed a sellout run at the Toronto Free Theatre. It's director, Guy Sprung, says the writing was rich with "big, powerful images, none of this kitchen-sink shit. It had poetry in it; it had ideas; it had huge emotions and colors." Taking Gross under his wing, Sprung went on to direct him in several plays, including an athletic production of Romeo and Juliet in Toronto's High Park. Gross was a rock-star Romeo with shoulder-length hair who would swing from tree branches and shinny up vines. "As you could imagine, he had lots of young groupies coming to see him," says Sprung. "After the 'Is it a lark? Is it a nightingale?' scene, he would jump from the wall onto a horse and ride off into the park - with much swooning from the teenage girls."
The new golden boy of Canadian theatre, Gross also served as playwright in residence at the Stratford Festival. There, he wrote his third play, Sprung Rhythm, a psychodrama about a megalomaniacal doctor, that included a grisly reenactment of open-heart surgery. The experience left its author dissatisfied. Though it was well received at Ottawa's National Arts Center in 1984, a revamped Toronto production two years later, retitled Buchanan, was less successful. Meanwhile, Gross's fourth play, Thunder, Perfect Mind, an overwrought science-fiction musical extravaganza staged at Toronto's planetarium, was "a mess," admits Gross. "It made me realize how difficult it is to get up plays of any size in this country. And the doctor play was so badly reviewed, I just thought, 'I can't take this anymore.' There's no money. It takes three years to write one of these things. And you just get beat up."
Gross found an exit in TV and film. And he now holds the unlikely status of having scripted the only two Atom Egoyan films that the director has not written himself, both CBC dramas: In this Corner, about an Irish boxer mixed up in terrorism, and Gross Misconduct, about the death of hockey player Brian Spencer. He was disappointed with the spin that Egoyan put on his scripts, especially the strangely caricatural Gross Misconduct. "It was an odd pairing," conceded Egoyan. "We have really different sensibilities. But I hugely admired him. He really was our Sam Shepard, writing these magic, realist, very cool riffs on this mythic Alberta."
With his writing career on hold, Gross concentrated on acting, which proved no less frustrating. He starred as a First World War veteran in the mammoth CBC mini-series Chasing Rainbows (1988), and the chaotic 18-month shoot, he recalls, "was like a prison sentence." But it fuelled the actor's fascination with trench warfare, and led to his Dora-Award winning stage role as another First World War soldier in Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme at Toronto's St. Lawrence Center.
In the early 1990s, Gross starred in two offbeat Canadian movies - as a terrorized saleman in Cold Comfort, and as a Maritime mayor in Buried on Sunday. Then Hollywood came calling with the regrettable Aspen Extreme. He tried to turn it down. "I said, 'It's a terrible script, it's stupid.' But Sandy Bresler, who was Jack Nicholson's agent, got on the phone and said, 'What the fuck is wrong with you? You came down here, you want to star in studio pictures, it's a studio picture. Jack Nicholson did 27 crappy pictures before Easy Rider.' "
But actors today are not allowed so many false starts. And Aspen Extreme offers up what is perhaps the most nightmarish metaphor for Gross's career. He plays an aspiring writer who get rejected by Esquire and ends up as a Powder magazine cover boy, a star ski instructor with a drooling clientele of wealthy women. The ski school boss tells him that he has to "have a certain look - part of the job is fulfilling the fantasy." Gross is actually very impressive in Aspen Extreme. With his flashing white smile and easy charm, he comes across as a more natural Tom Cruise. But in the cutting room, Disney destroyed whatever integrity and continuity the movie had, says Gross. "They gutted it until it corresponded to Disney's original ad campaign: that Aspen is money, tits and skiing."
Aspen Extreme never took off at the box office, and Gross's first shot at Hollywood stardom was squandered. Since then, his U.S. offers have been limited to uninspired movies and mini-series - most recently he starred in a CBS remake of 20 000 Leagues Under the Sea, which he prefers to call 20 000 Scenes Down the Drain.
But without some setbacks, Gross would not have been available for the Due South pilot in the summer of 1993. The show's Canadian creator, Paul Haggis (thirtysomething, Michael Hayes) remembers their first meeting: "He was the character. It was his entire demeanor, the combination of an honest facen and a bent, perverse sense of humour."
As the deadpan Mountie, Gross came to personify Due South. But his American co-star, David Marciano, signed on under the assumption that he was joining a buddy cop show, not playing a sidekick in a Mountie show. This season, says Marciano, Alliance offered to hire him back with a 40-percent paycut, which he took as a none-too-subtle suggestion that he was not wanted. Gross stayed clear of the negotiations, and Marciano - who is making two guest appearances this season - insists he bears no grudge against him, although he now coolly refers to Paul, his former partner, as "Mr. Gross."
Alliance also sacked the dog that played Benton Fraser's deaf husky, Diefenbaker. Haggis had given the lucrative dog handling contract to his father, but the animal was so notoriously slow and unskilled that on the set, it had earned the nickname "O.T." for overtime. The new Diefenbaker is reportedly smarter, faster and cheaper.
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Monday morning. After a three-week holiday, the Due South crew is back at work. The show's offices and studios are scattered through the brick confines of a bleak factory space in downtown Toronto. Hundreds of blue barrels of toxic waste are stacked beside the parking lot where Gross's Winebago is parked. The trailer, which has a double bed in the back, serves as a roomy second home. A laptop sits on the desk, containing the script now being shot, which has yet to be finished. Gross takes a couple of mineral waters out of the fridge. "It was hard to sit down with Martha and say Lantos wants to do another year of this," he says, thinking back to the day he broke the news to his wife. "It means pretty much that I'm gone for a year. On occasion, it's been very difficult."
Because Martha Burns is an actor herself - she met Gross in 1983, when she was cast as an Indian princess in Walsh, a play in which he starred as a Mountie - she also has to contend with a measure of professional envy. "I'm thrilled for him as long as he's happy," she says. "It's like seeing someone discover another side of himself - that he's good with people and a good manager. But it's been three years of resenting not having him around." Then, laughing, she recalls: "I remember the first year he was doing Due South. I saw this big hard-cover novel in his kit bag, and said 'When do you have the time to read this?' The idea of someone sitting in a trailer reading a newly published hard-cover during the day - that's what you resent." She adds, "This year, I know he doesn't have the time to read."
Burns stresses, however, that Gross is a good father and caring husband, and she seems unfazed by the incessant drone of female adoration that surrounds him. But then Gross himself appears to have a healthy perspective on his glamor-boy image. His friend Benedict Campbell went on a camping trip with him a few years ago. With them were Campbell's brother Tom and nephew Liam. "We were sitting very late one night," Campbell recalls, "and this '60s Chrysler comes rumbling past, and all thses faces peered out of the windows at us. It was eerie. It felt like Deliverance. Suddenly, the doors opened, and all these teenagers poured out of it. Paul had been spotted in the store, and these kids had tracked him down - at 1 in the morning. He very graciously signed autographs and had pictures taken with all the girls. Liam, who has dreams of being a baseball star, thought this was just fantastic. And he asked Paul how it felt to have all thses people adoring him. Paul gave this off-the-cuff explanation that it wasn't him they were coming to seek - it was this image they see on television."
A response worthy of Benton Fraser. But once again, Gross is no Benton Fraser. He swears, smokes, drinks, has strong opinions. He even gambles. One weekend, he chartered a small plane and flew to Atlantic City with two stunt guys and Campbell. "We checked in, pretended to have something to eat, then stood at a craps table for 12 hours," says Gross. "They give you free drinks and pump oxygen into the room so you make incredible stupid bets. By the end of the night, I was $2000 down." Gross spent the next day dutifully earning it back. "I was terrible hungover. I dragged myself to some table and threw the dice without looking and they just went straight across and hit a guy on the forehead. But by the end of the day, I'd broken even."
There is a knock on the trailer door. Due South is waiting for Benton Fraser. The set is dressed as a small-town sheriff's office in Michigan, festooned with antlers, gift-shop doodads and a stuffed fish. The scene calls for a tricky continuous shot, which begins with Diefenbaker jumping up and grabbing a Kleenex box off the desk to take to a weeping prisoner. The dog nails it on the first take. But the actors and crew need more time to get it perfect. By then, Diefenbaker has lost interest. There are many more takes and the dog misses the Kleenex each time. Finally, Gross loses his patience and decided to use the first take. He can do that now. He's the boss.
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4/6/17 14:38 (UTC)