Men With Brooms: Gall sees an Olympic dividend
At 6-foot-5-inches tall, Brendan Gall ruefully admits it’s not easy to make curling look graceful when you’ve virtually no experience.
“Mostly, it’s about trying to look good coming out of the hack, delivering a rock and not falling over. If I do that and look halfway like I can keep my balance, I consider it a victory,” said Gall, the star of Men With Brooms, a TV series based on the 2002 film of the same name, premiering Monday at 8:30 p.m. on CBC.
The ensemble comedy, set in fictional Long Bay, Ont., features Gall as Gary, a typical hoser of a guy with major 5 o’clock shadow and commitment issues, his three teammates - Gary’s the skip - and the women in their lives. Paul Gross, who wrote and starred in the original film, is the series’ executive producer and narrator.
In fact, no-one in the cast - with the exception of William Vaughan, who plays dim-bulb best friend Matt - had much experience with houses, stones, rinks or sweeping before getting down to business.
“I think Will said he took curling in gym class in high school. That made him the expert in our group,” Gall said.
So after shooting the pilot last December and getting the green light to shoot a full season in February, the cast headed out to Winnipeg in June with a 10-week shoot, under the tutelage of Connie Laliberté, a world champion curler.
The best Gall can say is that his curling skills are “getting better.”
“I would say it’s a steep learning curve and a slippery surface that you’re dealing with that curve on,” Gall said.
The timing for the series couldn’t be better, following the Vancouver Winter Olympics, which for some reason gave curling some unexpected but welcome world-wide hip-to-be-square exposure, Gall noted.
“Curling has had this weird kind of resurgence with the Olympics. They’re even saying that traders on Wall Street are watching curling after a day of trading just to calm down and relax. So it is making all these strange appearances in our culture and the timing feels right,” he said.
Gall, 32, whose experience to date has been primarily as a theatre actor - he’s co-founder of The Room, an independent theatre company and currently playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre - said the series has been an interesting departure.
“I’m much more used to the theatre world. I’ve had brief little field trips into TV and film but really nothing to speak of, so this has been a real game-changer for me,” Gall said.
He’s also impressed by the rapid pace of turnaround from shoot to screen. After finishing filming the first season of the series - 12 episodes - at the end of August, the show is on the boob tube within a matter of weeks.
“Normally (in television), there’s a lot of hurry-up-and-wait. You work hard and do something and then you have to sit around and spin your wheels and wait for it to come out, and kind of forget about it. In this case, it’s pretty crazy, the turnover,” Gall said.
While Gall is ostensibly the leading man, he insisted the series is an ensemble piece with “seven very different personalities.”
“I think if anything, my character is maybe the filter that a lot of the audience will see the show through. In some ways, he’s the straight man and that’s a role that I’m not uncomfortable with. It’s a familiar kind of archetype to play. (But) I don’t think too much about carrying the show because . . . it really is truly an ensemble piece,” he added.
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“Mostly, it’s about trying to look good coming out of the hack, delivering a rock and not falling over. If I do that and look halfway like I can keep my balance, I consider it a victory,” said Gall, the star of Men With Brooms, a TV series based on the 2002 film of the same name, premiering Monday at 8:30 p.m. on CBC.
The ensemble comedy, set in fictional Long Bay, Ont., features Gall as Gary, a typical hoser of a guy with major 5 o’clock shadow and commitment issues, his three teammates - Gary’s the skip - and the women in their lives. Paul Gross, who wrote and starred in the original film, is the series’ executive producer and narrator.
In fact, no-one in the cast - with the exception of William Vaughan, who plays dim-bulb best friend Matt - had much experience with houses, stones, rinks or sweeping before getting down to business.
“I think Will said he took curling in gym class in high school. That made him the expert in our group,” Gall said.
So after shooting the pilot last December and getting the green light to shoot a full season in February, the cast headed out to Winnipeg in June with a 10-week shoot, under the tutelage of Connie Laliberté, a world champion curler.
The best Gall can say is that his curling skills are “getting better.”
“I would say it’s a steep learning curve and a slippery surface that you’re dealing with that curve on,” Gall said.
The timing for the series couldn’t be better, following the Vancouver Winter Olympics, which for some reason gave curling some unexpected but welcome world-wide hip-to-be-square exposure, Gall noted.
“Curling has had this weird kind of resurgence with the Olympics. They’re even saying that traders on Wall Street are watching curling after a day of trading just to calm down and relax. So it is making all these strange appearances in our culture and the timing feels right,” he said.
Gall, 32, whose experience to date has been primarily as a theatre actor - he’s co-founder of The Room, an independent theatre company and currently playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre - said the series has been an interesting departure.
“I’m much more used to the theatre world. I’ve had brief little field trips into TV and film but really nothing to speak of, so this has been a real game-changer for me,” Gall said.
He’s also impressed by the rapid pace of turnaround from shoot to screen. After finishing filming the first season of the series - 12 episodes - at the end of August, the show is on the boob tube within a matter of weeks.
“Normally (in television), there’s a lot of hurry-up-and-wait. You work hard and do something and then you have to sit around and spin your wheels and wait for it to come out, and kind of forget about it. In this case, it’s pretty crazy, the turnover,” Gall said.
While Gall is ostensibly the leading man, he insisted the series is an ensemble piece with “seven very different personalities.”
“I think if anything, my character is maybe the filter that a lot of the audience will see the show through. In some ways, he’s the straight man and that’s a role that I’m not uncomfortable with. It’s a familiar kind of archetype to play. (But) I don’t think too much about carrying the show because . . . it really is truly an ensemble piece,” he added.
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