The Honourable Schoolboy
November 15, 2021
I recently read The Beachcombers at 40: Bruno and the Beach. Written by both the late Marc Strange (a writer and co-creator of The Beachcombers) and Jackson Davies, who played Constable John for most of the series’ run, the book delves into the biographies of the main cast and looks at the behind the scenes hijinks of a handful of the many episodes that aired on CBC Television from 1972-1990.
The book ended with Jackson Davies’ recollection of filming his last scenes with Bruno Gerussi, hundreds of onlookers craning their necks to the catch the last moments captured in a series loved by many Canadians. Davies mentioned that during the shoot in July of 1990, director Brad Turner and first assistant director Alex Pappas had arranged for Bruno Gerussi, who played Nick, and Robert Clothier, who played Relic, to shoot the last scene of the series together. It’s a heartwarming yet sad passage that ends the book.
Just four months before that final shoot of The Beachcombers, I had worked with Brad Turner and Alex Pappas in shooting two pilot episodes of Northwood (these episodes never aired). I hadn’t realized that The Beachcombers’s production, and key personnel, were so enmeshed in the chronology of Northwood’s production. Northwood had, in a sense, been starting production, not after, but during the final days of The Beachcombers’ lengthy run. It was quite a realization…
September 4, 2021
We were filming a promo for the first full season of Northwood in 1991. I was walking along railroad tracks near Mosquito Creek in North Vancouver, wearing Peter’s usual sneakers, jeans, glasses and grey hoodie with a jean jacket over top. Some of the main cast members, other series regulars, were walking along the tracks with me. Deanna, Brigitta, Gabe…we were there goofing around like the pals we were in the show, shooting the breeze, looking like middle class Canadian kids, belonging to something…belonging to a community.
The Beachcombers drew me in because Nick, Relic, Constable John, they all belonged to a community. My ambition had been, not necessarily to become a great actor, but to be part of a project that involved being part of a community. And I found it.
Even after all the bullying in high school was over, I had a hard time fitting in. I suppose I carved out a niche of own via drama club at Lansdowne Junior High, acting on stage but still I didn’t have a sense of community in Victoria. I loved the place, and my pleasant memories of that time in the late 1980s usually have me riding my bicycle along Beach Drive in the sun, dreaming of finding community elsewhere. Maybe in Vancouver.
My grandparents, my dad’s parents, had lived in North Vancouver, not far from where I was acting for a living to be part of a community. Eventually that pretending became reality, as I became friends with Gabe Khouth and more of a fixture with his family and friends. I had to come over to mainland to find it though.
Every time I drive over to North Vancouver, it comes back to me: that first experience of feeling of being part of something … something big.
July 12, 2021
I am indebted to BC Ferries. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I paid for my sailings across from Swartz Bay to Tsawassen, but if the ferries weren’t running I wouldn’t have made it across to auditions as I did, and would have surely not got the part of Peter Andersson on Northwood. It seems odd now, as I write this at my desk in Kerrisdale, but I had a long distance relationship with Vancouver back then, waiting for the phone to ring and my agent informing me of the next audition to get to. I would break my routine in Victoria, miss a day of school, sometimes two if necessary, and miss math class to read for Sid Kozak, Stuart Aikins or Michelle Allen.
Of course, any time I had the chance to march up those wide steps and enter the monolith of the CBC building on Hamilton Street I was awed. Yet, it felt like I was doing something I was suited to do, unlike math class. It was the start of a relationship I would have with the CBC that would last for 20 years until I left The Arts Report in 2007.
Did I know what I was doing? I look back on that idealistic time as a teen and wonder how I didn’t end up getting lost, missing a bus or getting robbed. But I knew that I was doing something that many actors before me had, whether auditioning for The Beachcombers, or a US network TV movie of the week.
I am also indebted to something, or someone, else: Michael J. Fox.
I knew that he had followed a similar path when he got the job on CBC’s Leo & Me opposite Brent Carver in the mid-1970s, missing a fair bit of math class too I would think. I knew that he had done just fine after that. And anyone watching Northwood in the early episodes knows that I had borrowed a fair amount of his acting style and mannerisms from having admired his work. Fox was living in Burnaby back in the 1970s and I just had to cross over from Victoria in the 1980s, but I didn’t see the difference. A little over a decade later I was doing my best to get a foothold in the same industry.
But I also, with some sadness, knew I was getting a foothold in the adult world, leaving what was familiar and established behind, and going to the big city. It wasn’t a complete unknown (I knew my father had grown up in North Vancouver, my grandfather operated tugboats in the North Arm of the Fraser and False Creek, and I’d been to Vancouver several times over the years) but still it was a commitment… a jump to a place where I was trying to set out on my own for the first time…
June 10, 2021
Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve bumped into someone you worked with or went to school with many years previous and made small talk, then only afterwards thought of something you’d wished you’d said or asked about from the old days?
Well, it happened to me, before the pandemic.
I was outside of Paper Ya at Granville Island with my son Michael looking at world map posters when I got a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and there was Maggie O’Hara, who played Nicole Williams on Northwood. In the second season, sixteen episodes we shot in North Vancouver and the surrounding area in the summer of 1991, Maggie and I regularly worked together, our characters Nicole and Peter stumbling through an awkward game of romance tag. Nearly 30 years later I was stumbling through trying to come up with an intelligent thing to say. I was clearly caught off guard and unprepared. I seem to recall saying: How long has it been? To which I think she replied: About 30 years! I introduced her to my son. She introduced me to her daughter. We said how great it was to see each other again. Then we went on our ways…but here is, in a roundabout way, what I thought afterwards I would have liked to have said to Maggie.
My wife Laura and I had finished watching a Harry Potter film one evening, before I had had my shoulder tapped that day at Granville Island. My wife and I were looking at the credits, when the term ADR came up. My wife asked what that was, and having been in the film and television business I was more than happy to oblige her query. ADR stands for automated dialogue replacement and involves an actor or actors re-recording their lines to match up with the movement of their mouths, usually because something sound-wise went awry on the day of filming. I told Laura about how one day, while working on the initial episode to lead viewers out of the second season we made (in the summer of 1991), in the spring of 1992, Maggie O’Hara and I had a scene where our characters were speaking of our feelings for her older brother Jason, who was in a coma after a terrible car accident (the “hook” from the previous season). We completed the scene, filmed in the cafeteria of a hospital in Port Moody. But unbeknownst to us at the time, the hum of a freezer in the kitchen would later make for a difficult sound edit. So both Maggie and I were booked in to historic Pinewood Studios, then located in Yaletown in Vancouver, to re-record the entire scene top to bottom. I’ll never forget being poised before a microphone, headphones on, looking at myself on a large big screen high in front of me while I waited for several beeps, then launched in to my desperate attempts to match my lip movements as best I could. It was like being a dialogue photocopier.
To demonstrate to Laura what a scene that had been subjected to ADR looked, and sounded, like I brought out the old Northwood tapes and DVD box and found that old episode. We watched the scene. I couldn’t help but cringe in the knowledge of how my lines and lips didn’t quite match up, but that’s because of insider knowledge. Laura didn’t seem to mind or notice.
So if I ever bump into Maggie O’Hara again, I’ll bring up that Pinewood Studios session and ask her: Is it just me, or is that ADR scene we did really difficult to watch?
December 9, 2020
In September 2004 I had the good fortune to interview actor Bruce Greenwood. I was busy working on The Arts Report for CBC Radio and he was back in his former hometown publicizing Being Julia, a film featured at that year’s Vancouver International Film Festival in which he had acted opposite Annette Bening. As we were wrapping up our interview, where we covered his teen days, university years and early acting days in Vancouver, I couldn’t help but ask him about The Beachcombers. He told me that approaching the old CBC building on Hamilton Street to meet me for the interview had sent shivers down his spine, as it had when he had walked up the steps many years before for his Beachcombers auditions. At nineteen and twenty years of age, holding on to “a few pages of dialogue in my sweaty paw” he would join a hallway lined with young actors, all waiting for their turn, desperate to get a part on the series. This was coming from a man who had recently gone head-to-head against Will Smith in I, Robot, so it struck me as odd and yet, as I thought about it, made perfect sense. Actors had to start somewhere and in the mid-1970s, as he put it, “there was The Beachcombers, and there was The Beachcombers, and then that was followed by…The Beachcombers.” He would act in two episodes. A decade later he would be a series regular on St. Elsewhere. Last month I watched him on Netflix playing Robert McNamara opposite Meryl Streep and directed by Steven Spielberg in The Post. The Beachcombers was a staple in the Vancouver actor’s diet in the 1970s. It had certainly led Bruce Greenwood to bigger and more prolific things. He wouldn’t be the first actor who cut their teeth playing a guest role on that Canadian series.
While I was getting my bearings on set in September 1990, I don’t think I realized completely the company I was in. I would be directed by Neill Fearnley, Eleanore Lindo and Stefan Scaini. Eleanore Lindo, who I knew had also directed The Beachcombers, was directing me in an episode where I featured quite prominently. The third episode was called “Breakaway Vision” and I would need to play hockey, and sort out my relationship with my father and coach, played by Ric Reid. I remember shooting the final scene of the episode, at the Harry Jerome Arena at Lonsdale and West 23rd in North Vancouver, and I appreciated the patience Eleanore took with what was the most dialogue I would have in any episode that season, knowing she was introducing a new actor to the nuances of performance, with the camera right in my face. I’ll never forget seeing that episode when it aired in 1991, the final words of my speech to my dad accentuated with the dramatic music provided by Claire Lawrence, who also composed the music for several seasons of The Beachcombers.
As you may have already guessed by now, I was starting to feel part of a British Columbia film & television industry tradition…
December 1, 2020
Through much of the initial six episodes Peter Andersson was dressed in his standard middle-class wardrobe: light blue jean jacket over light grey hoodie, light blue jeans and sport sneakers. I liked it. It said much about the no-frills, conscientious, no-nonsense guy Peter was. It spoke of simplicity, practicality and sports. And his glasses made him the owlish conscience of the group of fellows he hung with, or tussled with, in that first season. And much of the cast was similarly dressed, not extravagantly, noting the similar middle class upbringing of the other kids in Northwood, where money was tight and the flaws of the various families were on display.
Although I remember some interviews upgrading my own background, having come from Victoria, I also came from a middle class background. I grew up in Saanich, the son of a journalist and a nurse, and we didn’t have a whole lot of money to throw around for a wardrobe. So I could relate to my character from the get-go.
By the sixth episode though, my wardrobe would take a turn. I appeared in green tights, a green pillowed body suit and an immense frog’s head with a little top hat on top. The costume dance we all were preparing for had many in the cast dressing up. But even as I put the costume on, I wondered where it had come from. Surely this complex a costume couldn’t have been created just for the episode, for me to wear spanning into the first episode of our second season? Had a performer worn this on Fred Penner’s Place? Maybe it had been rediscovered in the costume department, having been made for a children’s program of many years past? Although I never did get to the bottom of the origins of that frog prince costume, I had fun wearing it. Even though I found it hard to believe that Peter’s mom could have created it without a team of costumers working for several weeks to complete it.
At any rate, my shame didn’t quite meet up to Peter’s as he walked up to his friends at the mall in his formal amphibian outfit. He didn’t know he was, maybe, wearing a bit of CBC history…
November 26, 2020
I’m driving down a secondary road in Saanich on a fall night, Steve Perry’s Foolish Heart is playing quietly on the radio, the only illumination are the brake lights of a distant pickup truck ahead of me. I can smell the smoke from leaves being burned in a nearby field. It’s somewhere in the early 1990s, and I’m behind the wheel of my first car, a metallic grey 1987 Volkswagen Golf. The satisfaction I have is tremendous. I’ve bought this car with the money I’ve made acting on a television series. I’m in my late teens and doing something I love and am being paid to do it. I drive on through the night, trying to hold on to this feeling, but know, like the road ahead of me, it’s going to run out eventually.
—
I would have this dual life while the seasons of Northwood were filmed, working in Vancouver, developing a life there, yet my family and girlfriend were in Victoria. It’s as though I needed that sense of safety my hometown gave me to do what I was doing in Vancouver; the knowledge I could retreat to it when I needed to. And so these night drives would feature prominently in those years, some of them ending in boarding a ferry ride back over to the Lower Mainland to get back to work. Sometimes these drives were just to think…and make sense of what was going on.
Byron Lucas, sporting long brown hair, leather jacket and menacing face, and I were engaged in some lapel-grabbing and shoving as Peter was trying to get to the bottom of why his sister was in possession of some illicit contraband, and Kirk Huber, (played by actor/poet/filmmaker Byron Lucas) was his go-to guy on the subject. The only problem for Peter, even though he was a decent hockey player and in shape, was that Kirk was several inches taller than him and had the aforementioned menacing face.
While I was shooting this scene at Argyle Secondary School in North Vancouver in September of 1990, I tried to shoo away the unhelpful thoughts of disbelief that I was taking on a guy in a leather jacket who reminded me of Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and dressed like him too. But then again, I imagine I reminded Byron of a bespectacled Michael J. Fox, as I was carrying off a fair impression of him in my grey hoodie with jean jacket overtop. I tried to focus on standing my ground in the scene, even though I couldn’t believe that mild-mannered, meek Trevor Hughes was going head-to-head with Byron Lucas who had appeared recently on 21 Jump Street. We were being directed by Neill Fearnley, a talented man and warm guy, adept at working with actors and the crew, who I was really enjoying working with. He had directed Johnny Depp in four episodes of 21 Jump Street, and, yes, had directed five episodes of The Beachcombers. Should I have told him I had no business being in a fight scene with Byron Lucas? No. Just soldier on, kid. Blend in, man. You’re in the army now.
Once Kirk had roughed up Peter and told him where to get off, Peter dusted himself off, went inside the school and chewed the fat with his good friend and hockey teammate Jason, played by Lochlyn Munro. This would be my first scene with Lochlyn, who clearly knew Byron, as I would learn they had the same agent, and he had also appeared in four episodes of 21 Jump Street. I was eighteen, and Lochlyn was twenty-four. I was still astonished I was in this situation. I had just graduated high school.
At Mount Douglas Secondary School I had been one of those drama students that was game for anything. I had played Bryce Winters in a weekly soap opera called Between The Lines that was performed live, directed by our ambitious drama teacher Matthew Howe, an enthusiastic man who was indefatigable when it came to theatre projects. Matthew and the cast would meet for rehearsals in a rundown portable classroom near the school’s parking lot, beginning with hammering out a loose story structure for an upcoming episode, then improvising the scenes we needed to fill it in, with Matthew adjusting our improvising to fit the bill during rehearsals, then we would perform the final product live in the portable classroom on Wednesday at lunch, along with appropriate soundtrack music played in the background by Matthew on his record turntable. It was a brilliant idea, designed to get the cast thinking about how we could contribute and etch out a story together, and improvise it from start to finish. As actors we knew we had to get from point A to point B but we didn’t know exactly what words would come out of our mouths. We didn’t have pre-written lines, just knew we had to get to the top of the mountain. It was extraordinary experience, in retrospect the ideal training before Northwood, and had me and my introverted self getting comfortable with performing for an audience once a week, along with getting my schoolwork done and increasing number of auditions in Vancouver.
Once I remember once, mid-season, we shook things up a bit and, without telling the school body, decided to perform the week’s episode in the crowded school foyer. In complete wardrobe (me in a suit and tie, as a Alex P. Keaton-esque man of deceipt and general corruption) I started the first scene, scattered among the kids in the foyer who were engaged in their lunchtime activities. If there was anything that would scare the shit out of my introverted self, and would be a baptism by fire, it was that experience, screaming my first words out over the cacophony of the high school population, to my co-stars placed in different corners of the foyer. As the scenes developed and we came closer together to act in proximity to one another, our audience gathered around us to watch what we were doing. The applause afterwards was extraordinary. It was a brilliant moment.
My improvised lines in Between the Lines aren’t really what is important, and I don’t intend to try to remember them and write them here. What is important is that drama got an introverted boy out of his shell and got him on the road to places that he couldn’t have dreamed of getting to while a quiet, introspective teenager in Victoria…
November 11, 2020
It was with a sense of duty I walked to the cenotaph in Regina on November 11th, 1993. I was 21 and nearing the end of a publicity tour for the fourth season of the series and, quite frankly, I needed to get away from it for a while. The crisp wintry air, the snow crunching underfoot, the exercise from the stroll I felt was doing me good. In as much as the interviews myself and three other cast members were doing for radio, print and television was a duty I was more than pleased to be doing, the extroverted and narcissistic aspect of the ten-day tour was becoming too much and I needed to do something on my own and to acknowledge the day.
So I found myself standing among those gathered for the Remembrance Day ceremony in Regina, Saskatchewan, paying my respects to those Canadians that selflessly served during wartime. It was what I found myself doing, wherever in Canada I was on Remembrance Day, noting the sacrifices made by those who fought for our collective freedom. And, on this day, in a town and province I’d never been to before, I stood with fellow Canadians, and together we looked to the past and observed a moment of silence at 11 o’clock in the morning. I heard Reveille being played on a bugle up ahead somewhere as I stood in a crowd of people with a solemn purpose. In a sense, it was the most connected I’d felt with Canada since the publicity tour began, which was ironic because I had been indirectly speaking to Canadians in radio interviews and directly talking with Canadians at autograph signings for over a week.
I recall having angered the other cast members in a couple of these autograph signings when I had taken too long in speaking with those who had spoken to me. I had wanted to connect with Canadians on this tour and had asked, nearly campaigned, producer Nick Orchard on several occasions if I could come along that year. Being nearly fluent in French, I could help with the French interviews in Quebec. I saw it as a valuable experience. I mean, how often does somebody get to travel across their country, all expenses paid and speak to Canadians? For a young man interested in his country’s geography, history, culture and peoples, this was an experience beyond what any university course could bring me. I wanted to sop it up. Unfortunately my fellow cast members were miffed I wasn’t moving the autograph line along. I muttered my apologies, shook the hand of the young man or woman I was speaking to, and greeted the next person in line.
You could say I was uncomfortable with being “a star.” This was small-scale stardom. I mean, I wasn’t Al Pacino. But it was a though by speaking with each person, despite the lineup for autographs (why were they lining up to see me again?), I was trying to equalize things. I was just an ordinary person, caught up in extraordinary circumstances. That didn’t seem to convince the young woman in Ottawa who wanted me to take her to her high school prom (I politely, modestly declined). And I suppose asking a few questions about how they were doing or what part of town they called home or commiserating about the cold weather had me feeling more comfortable. I mean, a mere five years previous I was one of them, scrambling in a small crowd to catch a glimpse of Bruno Gerussi as The Beachcombers was being filmed in Gibsons. I certainly wasn’t going to put on airs.
I didn’t know it yet, but my making the most of our Northwood publicity whistle-stop tour of Canada, passing through Montreal, Quebec City, Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Regina and Calgary was a good idea. It was the late fall of 1993. Northwood would be cancelled in spring of 1994. It would be the last publicity I would do for the show.
One of the first moments of getting the word out about the show along with the other series in the CBC-TV 1990 lineup including Mom PI and The Odyssey was an in-house soiree held on the studio floor at CBC Vancouver. The phrase on the banner plastered across everything that night as some of the cast hobnobbed with executives, producers and actors in the leafy jungle set of Fred Penner’s Place was CBC & You. It was a departure for the public broadcaster, the yellow and black of the promotional logo in stark contrast from blue background and the red and orange of the usual circular institutional logo that we had as viewers become accustomed to during commercial breaks. As my TV dad, actor Ric Reid and I made small talk and ate hors d’oeuvres off paper napkins and sipped Perrier in clear plastic cups, I couldn’t believe were I was.
Ric, Frances Flanagan, Tamsin Jones and I made up The Andersson Family on Northwood and had been filming in a boxy, nondescript two-floor house in Lynn Valley for a few weeks now. I was enjoying working with Ric, a seasoned film, TV and stage actor, even though when on screen he was playing an overbearing coach and I was frowning at his latest command. He played my coach dad to a T, a man who had had a failed NHL career and was determined his talented son wouldn’t blow it as he had.
So it was nice to just chat and laugh with Ric as we looked around the room, sipping our drinks, searching for other familiar faces. As The Beachcombers had wrapped and the new logo was branding 1990 with a refreshed look, it was clear the CBC was going into a new decade with a new zeal and direction. This was the start of an all-new lineup with many fresh faces. Also, it was worth noting that this season launch soiree was happening in Vancouver and not in Toronto, indicative of a change in thinking, as at least two of the new series, including Northwood, were based out of Vancouver.
I spent much of the evening wondering who to talk to as I didn’t know many of these new faces. Luckily producer Nick Orchard came by and I spoke with him for awhile, met some of the series’ actors and talked about the show before I made my quiet exit, putting my empty plastic glass of Perrier on a monitor in the set of Fred Penner’s Place, deposited my name tag at the security desk and exited from the automatic sliding doors out into the fall chill air of downtown Vancouver. I had been overwhelmed by the sensory information of the evening, astonished to be part of something this big just having turned eighteen and so welcomed the escape from the cramped social gathering in the studio as I walked to the Sea Bus, on my way back to my North Vancouver apartment.
November 4, 2020
The cast, umbrellas aloft, were guided by the third Assistant Director (or 3rd AD) down a wet ramp to the weaving boardwalk of a marina. The Second Narrows Bridge, also known as the IronWorkers Memorial Bridge, was above, the hum and clank of passing traffic just audible over the evening rain. The sun had set and our location for the shoot was before us: a houseboat, fictional home of the Potters. It was March 1990.
Somehow a rumour had gotten out in the fictional suburb of Northwood that there was going to be a big party at the houseboat occupied by Brian Potter and his dad, Ray, who was a fisherman with an alcohol problem and could be less than mindful about the family’s finances. Brian was adeptly and conscientiously played by Darrell Dennis and his father was played by Matt Walker, an extraordinary character actor who I knew had not only appeared in one episode of The Beachcombers, but two episodes. I’d get to watch him work as one of the “guests” at the party that Brian didn’t want anything to do with. I also had a scene to do with Tamsin, one of our many conflicting sibling scenes. But it was also where I’d get to be on set with Gabe Khouth, who always made things fun with his sharpened ability to improvise.
I remember Gabe doing an excellent impression of Axl Rose, cradling a microphone between two hands as his lower body undulated like the lead singer of Guns N Roses was wont to do. “Na na na na na na na,” Gabe would machine gun out as the cast and extras gathered in close proximity. Brad Turner (who had directed 1, 2, 3, four episodes of The Beachcombers) guided each scene with calm and charismatic panache. I’ll never forget when the smoke machine was started up to create the ambience of a smoky party without the cigarettes. The smell of that smoke, the faint chemical odour as it washed over my face, is one I’ll always associate with the film industry.
“I wanna watch you BLEED!” Axl Rose/Gabe was still at it prior to action being called. I’d approach Tamsin and a usual sneering match would ensue, with her getting in the last insult before walking away and me being left to eat it in a perfunctory nod towards camera. I’d say these were the usual scenes between her and I. It was an odd and paradoxical thing to be doing as Tamsin was a kind person and was my connection to Victoria on the cast. I could talk to her about Victoria and travel on ferries and that kept reminding me of home. But when action was called we were usually quite grumbly with each other
Gabe was yelling “I wanna hear you SCREAM!” as Axl Rose. It’s extraordinary how much Gabe could lighten up a room and make people howl with laughter. His ability to work the room and brighten things up even when cast and crew was tired was something I was learning was another of his many talents. Even though it was raining outside and the artificial smoke was thick inside, there were many laughs had in between takes. Not long upon having finished the master and coverage of the scene with Tamsin, it was time to watch Matt Walker who came in as an inebriated Ray Potter enthralled and energized by the party to the embarrassment of Darrell’s Brian Potter. I didn’t get to watch them work in person often throughout the series’ filming, but this opportunity would prove to be a snapshot of an onscreen relationship between these two characters that I was glad to be present for…
October 28, 2020
I can’t tell you just how many times I boarded the Pacific Coach Lines bus from the Victoria bus terminal near the Empress Hotel, usually on a school day, in Grade 11 or 12, with my destination being Vancouver. My mom would drive me to the terminal and see me off on my way, waving to me as I set off on another day trip to Vancouver and back to audition for some film or television project. I would sit down at a window seat, put my portable cassette player’s earphones over my ears, wave to my mom who waved back as the bus backed up and pulled out onto Douglas Street, bound for the ferry terminal at Swartz Bay.
As the landmarks went by on my way out of town, City Hall, Mayfair Mall, some favourite, inspiring music playing in my ears, building me up for the eventual moment in the audition room where I’d have to be at my best, I hoped eventually I would find something that would bring me over to Vancouver and have me working as an actor.
I’d been drawn to Vancouver since I was five and as I’m learning, a great deal of my dad’s family history was over there.
But the summer of 1988 when I was with my dad, mom and younger brother on the Sunshine Coast, watching Janet-Laine Green yell at Bruno Gerussi at Molly’s Reach, I had a good feeling about acting and I hoped that I might have a shot at something like The Beachcombers. In the spring, I had gone as a delegate to the British Columbia Festival of the Arts. It doesn’t exist anymore unfortunately, but it provided high school students interested in the arts in pursuits ranging from band to theatre the chance to go to the city or town where the event was being held that year and learn more about their interests through workshops and performances. It was held in Kimberley that year and one of my workshops was called Auditioning for Film and TV and was being taught by a Vancouver theatre director and talent agent named Carole Tarlington. I worked hard in the workshop and afterwards she had asked me to contact her during the summer if I was interested in auditioning for projects in Vancouver. I told her enthusiastically I would contact her.
Which was why when I watched the frenetic action on the patio of Molly’s Reach that afternoon in July I was feeling quite optimistic.
In August 1988 my mom and I travelled to Vancouver and met with Russell, an agent with Carole Tarlington’s agency. I remember stuffing myself into a dress shirt and khaki pants, which wasn’t what I usually wore, in an effort to impress. It seemed to work and my mom and I returned jubilantly to Victoria.
There were many journeys on the Pacific Coach Lines bus and on Queen-class ferries travelling from Swartz Bay to Tsawassen on the way to auditions. Neon Rider, various TV movies-of-the-week, Danger Bay, MacGyver and even 21 Jumpstreet were some of the shows I was brought in to audition for. Nothing stuck. But one audition that I did in the fall of 1989 for a new series called Northwood kept bringing me back. Several callbacks ensued. I wondered if this was normal. I was seventeen and even then felt a little worn out from all the callbacks. The final callback was held in a studio in the basement of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation building on Hamilton Street in Vancouver. By this time I had already had a prescreening for The Beachcombers with casting director Sid Kozak so was familiar with the CBC’s security procedures and had my fingers crossed that this time I clipped on a visitor badge would be the one that counted. The word was out that, to my distress, The Beachcombers would not be continuing on. What? How could that be possible? What I didn’t know was that the series I was auditioning for would be employing many of those crew, writers and directors that had worked in Gibsons on the Sunshine Coast.
I was at my girlfriend’s house in Victoria when I got the news. December 1989 was a few years before the mobile phone would be a viable, or portable, option, so we dealt in faxes and landline phone calls. My mom called me there and passed along the message to call my agent. I asked my girlfriend’s parents nicely if they’d mind if I made a long distance phone call to the mainland to my agent (see, I was even honourable then!). They readily agreed, knowing I was anticipating some news from Vancouver. During the call, my look of concern turned to elation in the knowledge that I’d got the part of Peter Andersson in Northwood and more details would be emerging in the new year.
I didn’t know it then, but I was about as close to being on The Beachcombers at that time as I would ever be.
So it was in March 1990 when I would be playing a scene in a North Vancouver house, arguing with Peter’s sister Karin played by Tamsin Jones. The fact that Tamsin was from Victoria made me feel I wasn’t quite the fish out of water I must’ve been. Her mother was a successful producer and so she was more familiar with the goings-on of a set then I. I was feeling claustrophobic with a camera in my face and every little movement counting. Coming from a theatre background, I still must’ve needed to tone my big expressions and movements down for the BetaCam right in front of me. I was sweating under the lights with all the makeup on, felt like I was whispering so silently no one would hear me and that my movements were so blocked they wouldn’t seem natural. But in the end the director, Brad Turner, seemed to be happy with the work, so I wandered off a bit stunned and stupefied that I’d managed my first day on set.
Home away from home was the Maple Leaf Motel on Capilano Road, where I stayed with my mom for the week, as at seventeen I was still a minor, but the following week I’d stay with one of my fellow cast members, who was becoming a good friend.
Gabriel Forest Khouth lived in East Vancouver. Not only did Gabe and I get along really well, we had quite a lot of scenes to do together, often with Nicholas Shields, a Toronto actor who was in his early twenties. My mom had to get back to work in Victoria the second week of filming and so she couldn’t be there to accompany me. As luck would have it Gabe offered that I could stay at his family’s house. I took him up on that and would be grateful that I did, because it would cement a friendship that lasted for over thirty years.
We would wrap up the shooting of two episodes at the end of March 1990, then I returned to finishing up Grade 12 as best as I could at Mount Douglas Secondary School.
In May, Northwood’s producer Nick Orchard invited me to come over to the CBC building in Vancouver for a screening of the first cut of the two episodes we’d made. Much of the cast would assemble in a screening room housed in the vast lower floors of the public broadcaster. I’ll always remember the journey over to Vancouver as I wasn’t taking the PCL bus on to a ferry this time, but flying the one and only time I’ve travelled on the HeliJet from Victoria. I was seated next to B.C. politician Grace McCarthy. Things were looking up.
I was so happy to see several of the other cast there at the screening room, including Gabe, Tamsin and others such as Darrell Dennis and Deanna Milligan. Once we were in our seats, Nick Orchard stood up in front of us, said some welcoming, exuberant words, the lights dimmed and the screening began…
October 24, 2020
It has been thirty years since I wrapped principal photography as a series regular on the pilot season of a North Vancouver-produced, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation-aired television series.
I hope John Le Carré doesn’t mind my borrowing this title, or Kiku Hawkes, the photographer who took this shot of me in 1991, as I brand this publicity photograph of me looking as serious and owlish as Peter Andersson, my character, was. She called this photograph The Honourable Schoolboy because, well, I looked like one and the novel was behind me in the rack. I played a hockey-playing high school student, living in a fictional suburb of Vancouver, who tried to correct the wrongdoings of his younger attention-seeking sister before she ended up in jail, or worse. He was conscience personified; a boy who seemed to have the weight of the world on his shoulders, and had a community around him that thought of him as the responsible sort.
For all four seasons of Northwood I’d played him, sometimes varying his conscientious nature by the final season filmed in 1993, but always veered back to doing the right thing.
When I got the part of Peter Andersson in late 1989, I certainly thought I was doing the right thing. I knew I’d be working with some of the crew and a producer who had spent years making The Beachcombers, a CBC-TV program that, if I were to be honest, I revered. I mean, I not only had regularly watched the tug-of-war between Bruno Gerussi and Robert Clothier, who played Nick Adonidas and Relic Phillips, for years, but I had seen the series filmed on the Sunshine Coast in the idyllic community of Gibsons as being the apotheosis of Canadian television success, having lasted for nearly twenty seasons on the public broadcaster (actually, twenty seasons if you count the later attempted reboots at the turn of the new century). Suffice it to say I couldn’t believe my luck, and, despite what I sensed from some of the other cast members who seemed to be playing it cool, I was in Canadian actor heaven.
One actor did an interview as the series was progressing and when asked what he thought of the fledgling TV show he said: “It’s cheese, but we get paid.” Now I know he was joking around, but the honourable schoolboy in me wanted to leap up and say: What? Are you kidding? You’re working with people who were filming at Molly’s Reach in Gibsons. Show some respect you…” Anyway, you get the idea.
I remember the first day on set, in March 1990 at a nursery in North Vancouver, I was trying on clothes for size for the scene we’d shoot at the next location. The costumers and myself were using a mid-size camper for our preparations and I remember saying it was a nice camper. Someone then said something I still haven’t forgotten: Yes, it is. Bruno Gerussi loaned it to us for the shoot.
What? I couldn’t believe it. The Victoria boy on one of his first acting jobs had landed on his feet when he was but seventeen. This was Bruno Gerussi’s trailer in Gibsons when he was filming The Beachcombers? I was trying to keep my enthusiasm inside, as no one else seemed to want to jump up and down at hearing that. I imagine it might have been like how Mark Hamill felt when he was finding himself in an iconic science fiction film, being a fan of the genre himself, or how Wil Wheaton felt when he got to pilot the Enterprise on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I was getting changed in a piece of Canadian television history. It was hard to not get all fan-boy-excited. But I had a job to do filming scenes with my TV sister, played by another actor from Victoria, Tamsin Jones.
The scenes’ filming went well. But the filming didn’t produce anything that aired. I use the term “filming” loosely as we didn’t use film. The entire series was shot on Betacam: video. Producer Nick Orchard, who had worked on The Beachcombers, and produced The Eastenders and Brookside in England, wanted Northwood to look like those British serials that we know so well now. Northwood would be screened for a prime time audience once a week, but I think it really wanted to be a daily soap if it had its druthers. Television critics were comparing it in early days to Peyton Place, which up to that point I hadn’t heard of.
The next time I met the cast and crew of Northwood was in September of 1990 and we were going for broke, with six episodes to make. We’d wrap later in October having filmed all over Vancouver’s north shore at locations including Argyle High School (which I learned while shooting was where Bryan Adams had attended, another feather in my Canadian fan boy cap), at Lynn Valley Centre, a mall across the street from the production offices located over a Dairy Queen outlet, and at houses dotting the Lynn Valley landscape as well as various parking lots.
Again, I was trying not to go fan-boy-crazy on a daily basis. I had even heard that some of the actors I was working with had been on The Beachcombers. I mean, first I was jealous, but then I said to myself: Wow. It was all I could do to not stop scowling at my TV dad Ric Reid in between threats that I was going to quit hockey and ask him questions about what it was like to film in Gibsons.
In 1988, I had been but a tourist, on holiday with my family on the Sunshine Coast, all of fifteen years of age, when I got to watch some of the filming taking place at Molly’s Reach. I remember Janet-Laine Green screaming at Bruno Gerussi to “keep it to a dull roar!” Here I was in 1990 working with some of the crew that worked on that episode. I was in for a ride…
