Four more CKR articles
This time: two Flower & Garnet, a Hard Core Logo, and a due South.
Breathtaking Flower
Believable and winning performances all around
By LIZ BRAUN
Flower & Garnet begins with a birth and ends with a birth, and the difference between the two is the difference between despair and hope.
Garnet is an infant whose birth has caused his mother's death. Initially he is left with neighbours, as his grieving father (Callum Keith Rennie) cannot cope, but Garnet's sister Flower -- all of about seven or eight years old -- goes and fetches her baby brother and brings him home.
Flower & Garnet moves at once into present time, and baby Garnet is now a boy of eight. His sister Flower is a beautiful teenager and the anchor of his life; dad is still wandering around in some emotional no-man's-land of unexamined grief. Dad is clueless and withdrawn around his own children and about the same with his girlfriend.
And that's the set-up: A motherless child, a lonely young woman with adult responsibilities and a father who is present but emotionally unaccounted for.
As you'd expect with this sort of creation, the potential is there for tragedy and disaster. Events do take a grim turn or two in Flower & Garnet -- there is a brief flirtation with melodrama that doesn't quite work -- but that's not what it's all about.
The film is character-driven, subtle and believable. This is a coming-of-age tale for all three main players.
And the performances are entirely winning. As Garnet, Colin Roberts is a heartbreaker, all sad eyes and sweet nature. Callum Keith Rennie also falls into the "heartbreak" category with this performance as a bewildered father.
As Flower, an adolescent standing in that impossible place between childhood and adult life, Jane McGregor probably has the toughest role; she is breathtakingly good.
Writer/director Keith Behrman's work is smart and understated and he doesn't go around tying up loose ends. This is the sort of film that assumes thinking adults sometimes go to the movies. Incredible!
Thanks to Behrman and his cast, Flower & Garnet plays like a series of loving observations about people you will come to care about rather a lot.
http://jam.canoe.ca/Movies/Reviews/F/Flowers_And_Garnet/2003/03/28/752926.html
Callum Keith Rennie Hunky Hard Core Logo star gives himself away
By CAMERON BAILEY
If Canada wants its Brad Pitt, Callum Keith Rennie is here for the taking. Blessed with the same fashionable scruff and bad-boy-on-a-good-day attitude, he's the first local leading man who doesn't seem too slight, too scared or too ugly for the job.
Rennie's co-starring gig in Bruce McDonald's shit-sharp punk elegy Hard Core Logo is only his latest career-making performance. The Edmonton-raised, Vancouver-based actor first bust out as the white boyfriend in Mina Shum's Double Happiness, then took a role as a questing ex-junkie in John L'Ecuyer's Curtis's Charm.
He's also done two award-winning experimental confessionals for Mike Hoolboom, and recently played opposite younger confection Alicia Silverstone in her new, Vanity Fair-hyped movie. It may be a bellwether or a fluke, but Rennie's screen presence has none of the deliberate infirmity favoured for so long by local leads, nor the never-neverman quality of export boy-wonders Keanu Reeves, Jim Carrey and Michael J. Fox.
In Logo, Rennie plays Billy Tallent, the one member of the band Hard Core Logo with something approaching a life.
Tallent gets called back from his tryout gig with Los Angeles alterna-gods Jenifur to tour with HCL one last time. On the road between Vancouver and Saskatoon, they tear through the old hits - Rock 'N Roll Is Fat And Ugly, 10 Buck Fuck, Edmonton Block Heater - until their own demons start to gnaw at them again.
Rennie emerges as a credible rock star, with enough angst to temper Tallent's self-absorption and enough scars to complicate his looks.
Unsettling questions
Of course a Canadian Brad Pitt would have to be less slick, and more thoughtful. Talking by phone one morning from Vancouver, Rennie tackles the subject of himself with hesitation. He walks around questions that unsettle him and offers the same map of reflecting surfaces that characterize his on-screen work.
"There was something about Billy that I always understood completely," he asserts. "Like Brando says, there are certain parts you'll work like a Turk on and still be way off. You're doing all the stuff you can do and you still can't get... in. With others, you get it right away.
"With Hard Core it was more me than a lot of other things I've done. Knowing it's in a documentary style meant I couldn't play anything but who I was. There was no affectation to hang onto.
"Blocking didn't have to be as precise. We didn't wear a lot of makeup, so you could be touching your face all over the place. The focus was on being as real as possible, and prepared enough to allow mistakes to happen."
Still, Rennie admits that "You feel safer when you're not giving yourself away. Usually, you've got these layers of performance that protect you."
When it comes to talking about himself, Rennie's got layers like phyllo pastry.
Ask him about his place in the face-first economy that governs leading men and he'll stumble and falter and finally say, "I can look a lot of different ways."
Pressed further, he retreats and gets abstract.
Withholds information
"You take a photograph of five people and there's one you can't not look at," he theorizes. "It's not a technique you can find, it's something about the person. It's a withholding of information."
Yes, and?
More than once during our conversation, Rennie starts out in one direction, only to reconsider and trail off into, "What was the question?" or "I don't want to get into that."
In an almost shocking display of humanity, Rennie actually thinks during interviews. In person and on-screen, the thing he most wants to avoid is being what he calls "talking meat."
But despite his artful dodges, Rennie can be surprisingly direct. He answers my question about his pre-movie star years with a blunt confession.
"I was drinking."
Drinking?
"Yeah, I called it research.
"Honestly," he continues, "at this point, it's a blur. It was setback after setback, stuck in the same routine." He pauses, then offers that "There was probably a certain fear of success."
Everything changed one night, he recalls, when he was in a bar and - he slips into the abstract - "a fight ensued.
"A piece of glass went into my eye. It damaged my retina and, you know, in a millisecond your life changes. There I was, three days later, almost having a heart attack realizing where I'd sunk myself. I haven't had a drink since."
His left eye has mainly healed, though those big black glasses he wore in Double Happiness were his own.
"I've played a lot of bad guys in the past," he continues, "because in my mind there was a history of me being a bad guy. But at some point, all of a sudden that was stripped away, and all the characters I started to get were about redemption. And that coincided with where I was."
He pauses to think about that for a moment, then concludes.
"This is one of the only jobs in the world that tells you who you are."
http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/16/07/Ent/cover.html
Callum Keith Rennie is Mr. Cool
by Lynne McNamara, Vancouver Sun, January 23, 2002
Callum Keith Rennie has been called "the coolest actor in Canada." Best known for his edgy role as rocker Billy Tallent in Bruce McDonald's punkumentary Hard Core Logo, over the past decade Rennie has become a favourite of leading Canadian directors with starring roles in Mina Shum's Double Happiness, John L'Ecuyer's Curtis' Charm, Don McKellar's Last Night (for which the actor won a Genie), David Cronenberg's eXistenZ, and Lynne Stopkewich's Suspicious River, which earned him a Leo.
He also had a role in American director Chris Nolen's recent hit Memento and is on the ice in the upcoming hockey sequel Slap Shot 2.
On the TV side, Rennie is probably best known for his Gemini-winning regular role in the kids' series My Life as a Dog, for his guest-star turns on Nikita, for a costarring role on Due South (where he played Chicago Detective Stanley Kowalski) and roles on Twitch City and Da Vinci's Inquest.
But his latest part may prove to be the most shocking. Forty-one-year-old Rennie becomes a grandfather in Keith Behrman's low-budget indie Flower & Garnet.
In the film, he plays Ed, a father of two who has never recovered from his wife's death several years earlier. "He's just getting by. He's not a bad person, he just doesn't understand how to get through this thing that happened. It colours both relationships with his children, Flower and Garnet (played by Vancouver actors Jane McGregor and Colin Roberts). Both of them have to live out some of his problems. It starts with a death and ends with a birth. Full circle," explains Rennie, shivering outside the film's St. Mary's Hospital set in New Westminster.
Born in Sunderland, England, Rennie travelled across the pond with his family at the age of four, landing in Edmonton, where he grew up. There he began his acting career on stage in his mid-20s. Early on he gained a tough-guy reputation -- a nasty 1993 Vancouver bar brawl left a sliver of glass in his left eye, almost costing the sight. That was the end of his boozing days.
So is he still looking for edgy roles? The question cracks him up.
"See I don't know, I think that's a version of me that people have decided to look at ... I guess if you look at Twitch, Hard Core Logo, some of the Bruce McDonald projects, it's a bit more rock and roll, but Double Happiness, or Curtis' Charm ... Okay some of them are ... [dissolves into laughter]."
And how about his 1993 film with the provocative title, Frank's Cock?
"Oh yeah, that's a bit off," he says, calling the experimental short "really quite brilliant."
And the same year, his very first film, Purple Toast -- what was he thinking? "I know," he says and grins. "Exactly." Again, he cracks up.
"Hey, you're startin' out!" he adds, doubling over. "Actually, Frank's Cock is a good film. It's a great film, actually. Super effective. I've never seen it. I've seen bits and pieces."
In the past couple of years, in fact, Rennie hasn't looked at any of his own films. "I think there was a narcissism that existed originally and a need to watch the results of what I was doing. But lately, I just want to be in the moment of what's happening and try not to think that I'll ever see it, 'cause I don't need to see myself.
"I need to be there. I don't need to be thinking about myself down the road. It's always disconcerting, so I thought maybe I won't put myself through that for a while and see how I feel."
And why Flower & Garnet? "I knew he (Behrman) was going to handle this film delicately -- it's a delicate piece and I haven't done that in a while. I haven't done grassroots Canadian -- well that's not true," he says recalling his work with McDonald and Stopkewich. "I'm full of s---," he adds with a smile.
CALLUM KEITH RENNIE The Buddy System
TV ZONE magazine
The due SOUTH tale moves on, with a new partner pretending to be the original one - well, that's how the story goes...
Constable Benton Fraser of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police travels south of the border to Chicago, Illinois in search of his father's murderer and is befriended by Detective Ray Vecchio of the Chicago Police Department. He introduces the Mountie to big city life while helping him "get his man". Despite their cultural differences, Fraser and Ray come to respect each other and a close friendship develops as they continue to fight crime and injustice in the Windy City.
Such is the premise of Due South. Cancelled twice by America's CBS Television Network, the series recently finished filming its third season in Toronto thanks to the financial support of its creator, Alliance Communications, and international backers. David Marciano was only able to reprise his role of Ray Vecchio in two episodes so Canadian actor Callum Keith Rennie was hired to appear as Ray Vecchio in the remaining stories.
"I was living in Vancouver at the time and the DS people called my agent to see if I would be interested in the role," recalls CKR. "I'd seen a couple of episodes, but because they shot the series in Toronto they rarely flew people in from the West Coast to work on the programme. When something's not being filmed in your neck of the woods you tend not to have the same sort of awareness of it.
"I'd worked with George Bloomfield [DS director and third season creative producer] on a couple of episodes of La Femme Nikita, so he sort of knew me. They flew me out to Toronto for a week to go over the material and do a courtesy read for the BBC. I kept going back and forth with my agent trying to figure out if DS would be a cool thing but I still wasn't convinced. One night Paul Gross and I went out for a drink at a bar and he asked me, 'So, are you going to do the show or not?' I said, 'This is an important decision, so important, in fact, that we should flip a coin.' So we did and the show lost," he jokes. "I suggested that we go two out of three and I guess that convinced him that I wanted the job."
New 'Ray'
Rennie makes his first appearance in DS in the third season opener BDTH. Fraser returns to Chicago after a working vacation to discover someone impersonating Ray Vecchio. No one else appears to notice the difference but Fraser decides to play along with the charade long enough to help 'Ray' capture the arsonist. Fraser is eventually told that his 'new' partner, Detective Stanley Raymond Kowalski, is masquerading as Ray to protect the real Vecchio who has gone undercover. Despite his character's self-assured stance in the story, CKR was understandably concerned from the beginning about finding a comfort level with his performance.
"It's hard enough coming into a show that's already established but the fact that you're replacing someone means you're probably going to be judged even more severely," he explains. "You're apt to hear, 'Oh, he's not the old guy,' or 'The old guy would never have done that.' You sort of have to grit your teeth and say to yourself, 'Yeah, I'm not the old guy. If that were the case then the old guy would be here but he's not, so why not just watch and see what happens.'
"You never know right off the bat whether or not it's going to work out and if you're going to fit in," continues CKR. "You always start work on any new project with a certain amount of hesitancy and try to find the line that you can cross. Of course, once you find that line and cross it, the more you want to keep crossing it. There were some aspects of the show that I felt hadn't perhaps been as fully explored with the previous partner, so I tried to incorporate some of these new qualities into my character.
"There is an episode, I think it's Seeing Is Believing, where I began acting up between takes. Paul asked, 'What are you doing?' I said, 'Paul, this is what I do normally.' He just laughed and told me, 'Well, we'll just normally keep doing that.' I said, 'OK,' and he gave me the freedom to do what I do best in my mind, which is to loosen things up and be a little more eccentric. Naturally, there are acting compromises you have to make as you go along because you're not the one paying the bills. You think, 'OK, they already know what the series is all about, but what if I could show them where things *could* go? Maybe then they'll jump on it and we'll go there.' It took, I think, five episodes for me to really find my footing, but from that moment on DS became what I though it should be."
Brando Name
The cocky, quirky, broody Detective Kowalski is named after Marlon Brando's equally unsociable character in the 1951 film 'A Streetcar Named Desire'. Despite his sometimes abrasive attitude the detective is a sensitive and passionate man but a lonely one. A talented boxer, Kowalski retired from the ring when he married his childhood sweetheart Stella. The two have since divorced but Kowalski occasionally still sees Stella is her capacity as an assistant state's attorney and secretly hopes to win her back one day.
While Detectives Vecchio and Kowalski may share similar views in regard to the criminal element and have an equally unorthodox approach to their jobs they remain two very different individuals. It was not long before CKR made Stanley Raymond Kowalski completely his own. Even the relationship between Kowalski and Fraser changes as the two learn how to trust one another and come to terms with their unique backgrounds.
"I think when he first takes on this assignment Kowalski is thinking, 'This is going to be a lousy job.' He's obviously done something not so popular to be hitched up with a Mountie and pretending to be a guy who he doesn't even know. It's even insinuated a couple of times throughout the programme that he's not sure he even wants to be a cop. Kowalski's attitude towards himself and his work begins to change the more he gets to know the Mountie. Fraser has several qualities that Kowalski need but he's also aware that Fraser needs a bunch of his, so there's this sort of competition that takes place between the two. This gives their friendship a slight edge but deep down they know they can depend on each other."
Breathtaking Flower
Believable and winning performances all around
By LIZ BRAUN
Flower & Garnet begins with a birth and ends with a birth, and the difference between the two is the difference between despair and hope.
Garnet is an infant whose birth has caused his mother's death. Initially he is left with neighbours, as his grieving father (Callum Keith Rennie) cannot cope, but Garnet's sister Flower -- all of about seven or eight years old -- goes and fetches her baby brother and brings him home.
Flower & Garnet moves at once into present time, and baby Garnet is now a boy of eight. His sister Flower is a beautiful teenager and the anchor of his life; dad is still wandering around in some emotional no-man's-land of unexamined grief. Dad is clueless and withdrawn around his own children and about the same with his girlfriend.
And that's the set-up: A motherless child, a lonely young woman with adult responsibilities and a father who is present but emotionally unaccounted for.
As you'd expect with this sort of creation, the potential is there for tragedy and disaster. Events do take a grim turn or two in Flower & Garnet -- there is a brief flirtation with melodrama that doesn't quite work -- but that's not what it's all about.
The film is character-driven, subtle and believable. This is a coming-of-age tale for all three main players.
And the performances are entirely winning. As Garnet, Colin Roberts is a heartbreaker, all sad eyes and sweet nature. Callum Keith Rennie also falls into the "heartbreak" category with this performance as a bewildered father.
As Flower, an adolescent standing in that impossible place between childhood and adult life, Jane McGregor probably has the toughest role; she is breathtakingly good.
Writer/director Keith Behrman's work is smart and understated and he doesn't go around tying up loose ends. This is the sort of film that assumes thinking adults sometimes go to the movies. Incredible!
Thanks to Behrman and his cast, Flower & Garnet plays like a series of loving observations about people you will come to care about rather a lot.
http://jam.canoe.ca/Movies/Reviews/F/Flowers_And_Garnet/2003/03/28/752926.html
Callum Keith Rennie Hunky Hard Core Logo star gives himself away
By CAMERON BAILEY
If Canada wants its Brad Pitt, Callum Keith Rennie is here for the taking. Blessed with the same fashionable scruff and bad-boy-on-a-good-day attitude, he's the first local leading man who doesn't seem too slight, too scared or too ugly for the job.
Rennie's co-starring gig in Bruce McDonald's shit-sharp punk elegy Hard Core Logo is only his latest career-making performance. The Edmonton-raised, Vancouver-based actor first bust out as the white boyfriend in Mina Shum's Double Happiness, then took a role as a questing ex-junkie in John L'Ecuyer's Curtis's Charm.
He's also done two award-winning experimental confessionals for Mike Hoolboom, and recently played opposite younger confection Alicia Silverstone in her new, Vanity Fair-hyped movie. It may be a bellwether or a fluke, but Rennie's screen presence has none of the deliberate infirmity favoured for so long by local leads, nor the never-neverman quality of export boy-wonders Keanu Reeves, Jim Carrey and Michael J. Fox.
In Logo, Rennie plays Billy Tallent, the one member of the band Hard Core Logo with something approaching a life.
Tallent gets called back from his tryout gig with Los Angeles alterna-gods Jenifur to tour with HCL one last time. On the road between Vancouver and Saskatoon, they tear through the old hits - Rock 'N Roll Is Fat And Ugly, 10 Buck Fuck, Edmonton Block Heater - until their own demons start to gnaw at them again.
Rennie emerges as a credible rock star, with enough angst to temper Tallent's self-absorption and enough scars to complicate his looks.
Unsettling questions
Of course a Canadian Brad Pitt would have to be less slick, and more thoughtful. Talking by phone one morning from Vancouver, Rennie tackles the subject of himself with hesitation. He walks around questions that unsettle him and offers the same map of reflecting surfaces that characterize his on-screen work.
"There was something about Billy that I always understood completely," he asserts. "Like Brando says, there are certain parts you'll work like a Turk on and still be way off. You're doing all the stuff you can do and you still can't get... in. With others, you get it right away.
"With Hard Core it was more me than a lot of other things I've done. Knowing it's in a documentary style meant I couldn't play anything but who I was. There was no affectation to hang onto.
"Blocking didn't have to be as precise. We didn't wear a lot of makeup, so you could be touching your face all over the place. The focus was on being as real as possible, and prepared enough to allow mistakes to happen."
Still, Rennie admits that "You feel safer when you're not giving yourself away. Usually, you've got these layers of performance that protect you."
When it comes to talking about himself, Rennie's got layers like phyllo pastry.
Ask him about his place in the face-first economy that governs leading men and he'll stumble and falter and finally say, "I can look a lot of different ways."
Pressed further, he retreats and gets abstract.
Withholds information
"You take a photograph of five people and there's one you can't not look at," he theorizes. "It's not a technique you can find, it's something about the person. It's a withholding of information."
Yes, and?
More than once during our conversation, Rennie starts out in one direction, only to reconsider and trail off into, "What was the question?" or "I don't want to get into that."
In an almost shocking display of humanity, Rennie actually thinks during interviews. In person and on-screen, the thing he most wants to avoid is being what he calls "talking meat."
But despite his artful dodges, Rennie can be surprisingly direct. He answers my question about his pre-movie star years with a blunt confession.
"I was drinking."
Drinking?
"Yeah, I called it research.
"Honestly," he continues, "at this point, it's a blur. It was setback after setback, stuck in the same routine." He pauses, then offers that "There was probably a certain fear of success."
Everything changed one night, he recalls, when he was in a bar and - he slips into the abstract - "a fight ensued.
"A piece of glass went into my eye. It damaged my retina and, you know, in a millisecond your life changes. There I was, three days later, almost having a heart attack realizing where I'd sunk myself. I haven't had a drink since."
His left eye has mainly healed, though those big black glasses he wore in Double Happiness were his own.
"I've played a lot of bad guys in the past," he continues, "because in my mind there was a history of me being a bad guy. But at some point, all of a sudden that was stripped away, and all the characters I started to get were about redemption. And that coincided with where I was."
He pauses to think about that for a moment, then concludes.
"This is one of the only jobs in the world that tells you who you are."
http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/16/07/Ent/cover.html
Callum Keith Rennie is Mr. Cool
by Lynne McNamara, Vancouver Sun, January 23, 2002
Callum Keith Rennie has been called "the coolest actor in Canada." Best known for his edgy role as rocker Billy Tallent in Bruce McDonald's punkumentary Hard Core Logo, over the past decade Rennie has become a favourite of leading Canadian directors with starring roles in Mina Shum's Double Happiness, John L'Ecuyer's Curtis' Charm, Don McKellar's Last Night (for which the actor won a Genie), David Cronenberg's eXistenZ, and Lynne Stopkewich's Suspicious River, which earned him a Leo.
He also had a role in American director Chris Nolen's recent hit Memento and is on the ice in the upcoming hockey sequel Slap Shot 2.
On the TV side, Rennie is probably best known for his Gemini-winning regular role in the kids' series My Life as a Dog, for his guest-star turns on Nikita, for a costarring role on Due South (where he played Chicago Detective Stanley Kowalski) and roles on Twitch City and Da Vinci's Inquest.
But his latest part may prove to be the most shocking. Forty-one-year-old Rennie becomes a grandfather in Keith Behrman's low-budget indie Flower & Garnet.
In the film, he plays Ed, a father of two who has never recovered from his wife's death several years earlier. "He's just getting by. He's not a bad person, he just doesn't understand how to get through this thing that happened. It colours both relationships with his children, Flower and Garnet (played by Vancouver actors Jane McGregor and Colin Roberts). Both of them have to live out some of his problems. It starts with a death and ends with a birth. Full circle," explains Rennie, shivering outside the film's St. Mary's Hospital set in New Westminster.
Born in Sunderland, England, Rennie travelled across the pond with his family at the age of four, landing in Edmonton, where he grew up. There he began his acting career on stage in his mid-20s. Early on he gained a tough-guy reputation -- a nasty 1993 Vancouver bar brawl left a sliver of glass in his left eye, almost costing the sight. That was the end of his boozing days.
So is he still looking for edgy roles? The question cracks him up.
"See I don't know, I think that's a version of me that people have decided to look at ... I guess if you look at Twitch, Hard Core Logo, some of the Bruce McDonald projects, it's a bit more rock and roll, but Double Happiness, or Curtis' Charm ... Okay some of them are ... [dissolves into laughter]."
And how about his 1993 film with the provocative title, Frank's Cock?
"Oh yeah, that's a bit off," he says, calling the experimental short "really quite brilliant."
And the same year, his very first film, Purple Toast -- what was he thinking? "I know," he says and grins. "Exactly." Again, he cracks up.
"Hey, you're startin' out!" he adds, doubling over. "Actually, Frank's Cock is a good film. It's a great film, actually. Super effective. I've never seen it. I've seen bits and pieces."
In the past couple of years, in fact, Rennie hasn't looked at any of his own films. "I think there was a narcissism that existed originally and a need to watch the results of what I was doing. But lately, I just want to be in the moment of what's happening and try not to think that I'll ever see it, 'cause I don't need to see myself.
"I need to be there. I don't need to be thinking about myself down the road. It's always disconcerting, so I thought maybe I won't put myself through that for a while and see how I feel."
And why Flower & Garnet? "I knew he (Behrman) was going to handle this film delicately -- it's a delicate piece and I haven't done that in a while. I haven't done grassroots Canadian -- well that's not true," he says recalling his work with McDonald and Stopkewich. "I'm full of s---," he adds with a smile.
CALLUM KEITH RENNIE The Buddy System
TV ZONE magazine
The due SOUTH tale moves on, with a new partner pretending to be the original one - well, that's how the story goes...
Constable Benton Fraser of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police travels south of the border to Chicago, Illinois in search of his father's murderer and is befriended by Detective Ray Vecchio of the Chicago Police Department. He introduces the Mountie to big city life while helping him "get his man". Despite their cultural differences, Fraser and Ray come to respect each other and a close friendship develops as they continue to fight crime and injustice in the Windy City.
Such is the premise of Due South. Cancelled twice by America's CBS Television Network, the series recently finished filming its third season in Toronto thanks to the financial support of its creator, Alliance Communications, and international backers. David Marciano was only able to reprise his role of Ray Vecchio in two episodes so Canadian actor Callum Keith Rennie was hired to appear as Ray Vecchio in the remaining stories.
"I was living in Vancouver at the time and the DS people called my agent to see if I would be interested in the role," recalls CKR. "I'd seen a couple of episodes, but because they shot the series in Toronto they rarely flew people in from the West Coast to work on the programme. When something's not being filmed in your neck of the woods you tend not to have the same sort of awareness of it.
"I'd worked with George Bloomfield [DS director and third season creative producer] on a couple of episodes of La Femme Nikita, so he sort of knew me. They flew me out to Toronto for a week to go over the material and do a courtesy read for the BBC. I kept going back and forth with my agent trying to figure out if DS would be a cool thing but I still wasn't convinced. One night Paul Gross and I went out for a drink at a bar and he asked me, 'So, are you going to do the show or not?' I said, 'This is an important decision, so important, in fact, that we should flip a coin.' So we did and the show lost," he jokes. "I suggested that we go two out of three and I guess that convinced him that I wanted the job."
New 'Ray'
Rennie makes his first appearance in DS in the third season opener BDTH. Fraser returns to Chicago after a working vacation to discover someone impersonating Ray Vecchio. No one else appears to notice the difference but Fraser decides to play along with the charade long enough to help 'Ray' capture the arsonist. Fraser is eventually told that his 'new' partner, Detective Stanley Raymond Kowalski, is masquerading as Ray to protect the real Vecchio who has gone undercover. Despite his character's self-assured stance in the story, CKR was understandably concerned from the beginning about finding a comfort level with his performance.
"It's hard enough coming into a show that's already established but the fact that you're replacing someone means you're probably going to be judged even more severely," he explains. "You're apt to hear, 'Oh, he's not the old guy,' or 'The old guy would never have done that.' You sort of have to grit your teeth and say to yourself, 'Yeah, I'm not the old guy. If that were the case then the old guy would be here but he's not, so why not just watch and see what happens.'
"You never know right off the bat whether or not it's going to work out and if you're going to fit in," continues CKR. "You always start work on any new project with a certain amount of hesitancy and try to find the line that you can cross. Of course, once you find that line and cross it, the more you want to keep crossing it. There were some aspects of the show that I felt hadn't perhaps been as fully explored with the previous partner, so I tried to incorporate some of these new qualities into my character.
"There is an episode, I think it's Seeing Is Believing, where I began acting up between takes. Paul asked, 'What are you doing?' I said, 'Paul, this is what I do normally.' He just laughed and told me, 'Well, we'll just normally keep doing that.' I said, 'OK,' and he gave me the freedom to do what I do best in my mind, which is to loosen things up and be a little more eccentric. Naturally, there are acting compromises you have to make as you go along because you're not the one paying the bills. You think, 'OK, they already know what the series is all about, but what if I could show them where things *could* go? Maybe then they'll jump on it and we'll go there.' It took, I think, five episodes for me to really find my footing, but from that moment on DS became what I though it should be."
Brando Name
The cocky, quirky, broody Detective Kowalski is named after Marlon Brando's equally unsociable character in the 1951 film 'A Streetcar Named Desire'. Despite his sometimes abrasive attitude the detective is a sensitive and passionate man but a lonely one. A talented boxer, Kowalski retired from the ring when he married his childhood sweetheart Stella. The two have since divorced but Kowalski occasionally still sees Stella is her capacity as an assistant state's attorney and secretly hopes to win her back one day.
While Detectives Vecchio and Kowalski may share similar views in regard to the criminal element and have an equally unorthodox approach to their jobs they remain two very different individuals. It was not long before CKR made Stanley Raymond Kowalski completely his own. Even the relationship between Kowalski and Fraser changes as the two learn how to trust one another and come to terms with their unique backgrounds.
"I think when he first takes on this assignment Kowalski is thinking, 'This is going to be a lousy job.' He's obviously done something not so popular to be hitched up with a Mountie and pretending to be a guy who he doesn't even know. It's even insinuated a couple of times throughout the programme that he's not sure he even wants to be a cop. Kowalski's attitude towards himself and his work begins to change the more he gets to know the Mountie. Fraser has several qualities that Kowalski need but he's also aware that Fraser needs a bunch of his, so there's this sort of competition that takes place between the two. This gives their friendship a slight edge but deep down they know they can depend on each other."