Canucks on camera
If you love Canadian film (as I do) you’re bound to start seeing familiar faces crop up all the time. Eventually you stop saying “Hey it’s that guy!” and start saying “Hey it’s Peter Outerbridge!” (Or Roy Dupuis or Colm Feore or Stephen McHattie etc.) Our country just happens to be filled with interesting talented actors; far too many to catalogue here — but let’s start with just a few of them anyway. This spotter’s guide contains a pathetically small sample of some of the Canuck actors who are keeping busy up here in the great white north.
• Greg Bryk: Casting directors must find something about this guy’s handsome features vaguely unsettling because he keeps getting cast as villains. He’s pulled a gun on Viggo Mortensen in A History of Violence (2005) and bedeviled Clive Owen in Shoot ‘Em Up (2007) (he was the guy who got his hand burned by the hair dryer) but to me he’ll always be Abel the nutty Satanist from Weirdsville (2007). Here is a character that manages to be menacing and ludicrous at the same time. His slow-burn irritation towards all the interruptions of his attempted satanic ritual gets pretty darn funny.
• Nigel Bennett: This accomplished British actor has been living in Canada since 1986. Audiences initially knew him from a series of funny Oatmeal Crisp cereal commercials in which Bennett affected a thick Scottish accent and commented “It’s a bonny cereal… but it’s naw’ oatmeal !” Since then the actor has been a prominent fixture in Canadian film and television most famously portraying sinister vampire Lacroix in “ Forever Knight ” (1992-1996). You can see him in Legends of the Fall (1994) Murder at 1600 (1997) Top of the Food Chain (1999) and the TV series Lexx (2000-2002). I particularly like his performance as Rocco the mad surgeon from Rats and Rabbits (2000) who said “There is no psychiatrist in the world who can cope with me. I am the absence of God.”
• Caroline Dhavernas: Unforgettable as the star of the short-lived but well-loved TV series “ Wonderfalls ” (2004) this French-Canadian beauty also played the female lead in Paul Gross’s war epic Passchendaele (2008). She’s really good at disguising her accent and at being likable talented and hot.
• Jordan Prentice: At four foot one inch tall Jordan Prentice would be easy to recognize even if his best roles weren’t so outlandish. In Weirdsville (2007) he steals entire scenes as a grouchy security guard who hates Moonies and dabbles in medieval battle-axe combat in his spare time. He followed that up with an even better role in the superb In Bruges (2008) playing a foul-mouthed drug-snorting racist actor making a film in Belgium. It’s impossible not to laugh when Colin Farrell’s character first spots the little guy flipping off a production assistant and squeals “They’re filming midgets!” like an excitable 10-year-old.
