Canadian Finds Fame's Glare too Bright
It's not easy being shy when you're one of Canada's hottest actors.
by Valerie Fortney, Calgary Herald, October 4, 2002
But
Callum Keith Rennie is getting used to it.� The Gemini award-wining actor,
who's appeared on such TV shows as Due South, The X-Files and Da Vinci's
Inquest, as well as in films such as Memento, Time Cop and Hard Core Logo,
has spent the last seven years under an increasingly
glaring spotlight.
There are still some things he'll never quite
understand about the whole fame game, though.
For instance, why some
in the media have coined him Canada's answer to Brad Pitt.
"I don't
know who says stuff like that," the slow-talking actor says over the phone
from his Vancouver home.� "I don't know what that means.� What does that
mean?"
Or why, when you become successful for pretending to be somebody
else all the time, everyone wants to know every juicy detail about the real
you.
"It brings you a lot of attention," he says, "and some of it's
bad."
Rennie won't elaborate, but it's clear some of the unwanted
attention he's referring to revolves around his early, before-stardom
life.
The facts of the matter have been well documented in the media,
fuelling comparisons to other rebel actors such as Marlon Brando, James Dean
and Pitt.� Born in England and raised in Edmonton, Rennie dropped out
of school twice (Mount Royal College and the University of Victoria),
both times after only two weeks of enrolment.� He then worked at a variety
of jobs that included laying railroad tracks, bartending and tree
planting.
In 1993, he nearly lost an eye in a bar fight, an experience
that finally prompted him to halt years of heavy drinking.� He has a tattoo
on his right bicep of the Champion spark plug logo, inspired by American
Painter Stuart Davis.� He has a dog named Alberta, in homage to his home
town, and a cat named Cleek, a kind of golf club and a nod to his favourite
new sport.
The most important fact of all:� It took the ruggedly
handsome drifter until the age of 25 to uncover his natural-born
ability.
It's a discovery that he believes saved his life.
"At a
certain point in my life, I thought I was beyond repair," says
the 41-year-old Rennie.� "To come from where I came from to where I
am today... It's great to be doing what I'm doing."
Those who know him
saw this potential long before Rennie did.
"He was born with an actor
gene," says Calgary poet Sheri-D Wilson, who became friends with the
then-struggling actor in the early 1990s when he lived with her friend Babz
Chula, another Gemini award-winning actor (These Arms of Mine).
"He
has an instinct on stage and on camera that is unbelievable.� Not
just charisma, which he has in spades, but he also seems to
understand something innate about performance and text.� He knows it.� He
just knows it."
Such ability has allowed Rennie to play a wide variety
of roles, from Hard Core Logo's rock'n'roll rebel Johnny Gallant to a hired
thug in Bruce McDonald's Picture Claire and a malevolent lover in Lynne
Stopkewich's Suspicious River.
But it's his most recent role, as that
of Ed, a widowed father of two, that offered him his biggest acting challenge
yet.
"I didn't understand him at all," Rennie says of his character in
Flower and Garnet, which will be screened today at the Globe 2 at 9 p.m. as
part of the Calgary International Film Festival.
"Not having kids,
there was stuff that I thought would be simple, but ended up being much
harder to do."
Rennie credits the film's writer and director, Keith
Behrman, with helping him bring Ed to life.� "Keith had the balls to see that
maybe I hadn't played that type of character before, but he could see it in
me.� It was nice to be pushed and pulled around by him."
In the film,
Ed, whose wife died giving birth to their son Garnet (played by the adorable
Colin Roberts) is left to raise the boy with the help of his six-year-old
daughter Flower (Jane McGregor).
After a brief introduction to the main
characters, the story fast-forwards eight years, showing Ed as a
dispassionate, aloof father, Flower as a lost teenager and Garnet as a
lonely, socially impaired young boy.
Shooting the film in black and
white, and locating it in the barren British Columbia town of Ashcroft adds
to the feeling of isolation.� Yet life isn't always so predictable and the
film reflects that, as it follows the trio on their winding journey to
reclaiming a sense of family.
Rennie loves the film for many reasons, not
the least of which is its Canadian content and setting.
"I keep doing
Canadian films because they'll have me," he says with a laugh.� "Seriously, I
love to do them because I'm from here, and it's our stories."
The
actor continues to resist the pull to move full time to Los Angeles, despite
having no trouble snagging choice roles in Hollywood film and
TV productions.
He's so passionate about his "Canadian-ness," in fact,
that he's spent the past week in a tizzy over the possible departure of Ron
MacLean from Hockey Night in Canada.
"Don (Cherry) without Ron just
wouldn't work; it's like Martin without Lewis,"� Rennie says, getting audibly
agitated.� "I'll boycott it - CBC is our national network and if I pay tax
dollars, I should be allowed to vote."
Ask him about his career plans,
though, and he gets downright Zen-like.
"I live a bit too much on my
nerves, lots of stuff just happens; I don't really have a plan," says the
actor, whose other favourite downtime activity is painting.� "I wouldn't say
I'm ambitious, I just do what feels right for me."
Ambitious or not,
Rennie's ability to choose interesting characters and bring them to life in
his own inimitable way has given him the kind of fame and fortune other
actors would kill for.� He'd better get used to that spotlight glare, because
it's only going to get brighter.