North of 60 Interview: Hugh Thompson

At home and away

PW: Where are you based?

HT: I actually live now in Halifax, Nova Scotia. On the east coast.

PW: You took a liking to Nova Scotia when you were working on "Black Harbour"?

HT: I took a liking to it when I was brought up there. I was actually born there.

PW: Oh, I didn't realize that.

HT: I was brought up in a place called Antigonish, Nova Scotia. It's a nice little--well, it used to be a nice little town, [slipping into Scottish accent] before McDonald's got ahold of it. [all laugh]

PW: Hey, McDonald's is a nice Scottish company! An appropriate Celtic influence...

HT: They're "Mcs," not "Macs"! [all laugh] Anyway, I grew up there, and then I moved to Toronto, I guess, in '86, to pursue some jobs in the theater and TV. And I bounced around a lot. I was in New York for a bit, I was out in L.A. actually for a while, as everybody goes for a little bit of time. [slipping into funny accent] And decided dat dat no good. And den we go back. [all laugh] We went back to Toronto. But we've just moved back to Nova Scotia, just two years ago, 'cuz it was just getting time to put down some more roots there. I'd never sort of envisioned myself in a city, so it's great.

FH: Have you ever worked out here before, in Calgary?

HT: No, I've never worked out here. I used to live in Jasper [Alberta], when I was very young and foolish.

PW: A ski bum?

HT: I wasn't a ski bum, actually, I was a bouncer at the ski bum bar. So I used to pummel the ski bums when they got out of line. [all laugh] But that was probably 20 years ago now.

(Click on photo for larger image.)

PW: So at least you're used to this cold weather.

HT: I actually got to go home for a lot of the cold breaks. My wife's birthday was around that time, so I missed the -30 one. We did get a couple of -19 nights in, though. They were fun, especially when you're rolling in the snowbanks.

PW: Are you talking about when you lived in Jasper, or during this filming?

HT: This filming.

FH: Unfortunately, Patty, despite the intention to shoot in the spring, we're shooting in the winter!

PW: It was -30 Celsius here sometime in the past few weeks? In late March?

HT: Oh yeah, yeah. It was like -27, -29.

FH: Be grateful for this [about -10C] now. This is the light at the end of the tunnel!

PW: Yeah, I heard it might break zero sometime in the next couple of days!

HT: We got out there today and it was like t-shirt weather, man. That was great weather. I was inside and it was cooking.

FH: There was a night you were rolling in the snow.

HT: Uh-huh.

PW: Rolling in the snow? It was some fight scene or something?

HT: Yeah, we were out there Thursday, I guess. Holy Thursday. I spent it in a snowbank.

FH: That's your penance, honey!

HT: Yeah, my penance!

PW: For what? [laughs]

HT: For being Buddy! [Buddy Brigley on "Black Harbour"] I was telling Andrew Wreggitt, he's always got me getting my ass kicked on film. Every fight in every film he writes, I always lose! He's gotten me beat up about seven times in my film career. So I figure he has to write me one where I actually win some fights.

"Another Country"

PW: Well, we'll have to see whether you win any fights in "Another Country"! You're playing a Calgary policeman, right? Or is he an RCMP officer?

HT: Calgary PD. I'm Detective Bruce Connelly. He's just kind of a straight, by-the-book police officer. The way Gary [director Gary Harvey] and I have discussed the character is that for this guy, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. When Michelle shows up in his neighborhood, he doesn't see the need to cooperate, collaborate, or to pay much attention, because really, she's not been officially put on this case. Until such time as she is, she's more of a hindrance than anything else. It's not something he's really going to be a part of until he has to be.

PW: They're territorial.

HT: Yeah, it's kinda like turf, a turf thing.

PW: Does Detective Connelly get involved in all this when Teevee is first arrested for drunk driving, or when he's re-arrested for murder, or when?

HT: Connelly makes the arrest, Teevee's second arrest. After his first arrest, he's in the station, but there's no real reason for Connelly to be suspicious of anything. It's only after that he gets some information and acts on that in connection with the murder.

PW: We're giving away some spoilers here, but this part has already been mentioned in the promos for the movie anyway. Teevee escapes from jail, and I guess Connelly goes after him?

HT: Yeah, he goes up to see if he can take him back. It's obviously very important that he gets him. Michelle's very concerned with Teevee's safety, and as time goes by, it gets more and more dangerous for Teevee. Again, I was talking with one of the police officers, and if you get out in an area like this, like out in Lynx River, and you're not in your home, you're not in Calgary, it's a very uncontrolled environment for a police officer. Anything can happen out here. It's not like you're going downtown to a street you know and you've got backup and you know what's going to happen. This is his home, not ours.

PW: So to Connelly, Lynx River is another country.

HT: Yeah, yeah. And the whole response to that is to ratchet up the level of aggression. The policing rules become very aggressive in that situation, because they want to minimize the risk to officers first and foremost. They want to make sure that they follow rules and everything, but when you're in that situation, you don't take chances. So the pursuit becomes very dangerous, much more dangerous for Teevee.

PW: Is he out to get Teevee to any greater extent because Teevee is native? Or is Connelly just taking it personally because Teevee is someone he arrested and now he's escaped?

HT: I think he would do the things he does in the script to anybody.

(Click on photo for larger image.)

PW: He isn't presented as a racist cop?

HT: No, I don't see it that way. It's not the reason that he does the things he does. But there are lines in [this movie] where the race issue is kind of explored. That kind of stuff is, unfortunately, still around, still with us. As Teevee says it, "What's another dead Indian?"

I was in Winnipeg at one point and I just couldn't believe it. I was working with these people every day, and I went over to have dinner, and someone just started talking about this stuff, because we were on Balmoral Street, and there were a lot of guys on the street and people hanging around outside bars. You couldn't reason with them. You couldn't say, "Well, I understand, there's reasons for this stuff." It isn't a reasoned position, so you can't reason with them. People just don't want to see that they've been kneecapped by a lot of things that have happened that are not of their doing. It just takes time to adjust.

I do see so many positive signs. This show, too, is such a great thing, like with Tom and Tina, and Tamara [Podemski], and Dakota. Tamara Podemski plays Jane in this show. She just came in from the Aboriginal Achievement Awards, and she's a singer and a dancer and an actor. And George Leach. I saw George just before I came out here. What a performer that guy is. I saw him in a Thomson Highway piece in Toronto. So these are the role models you get out there, and that's what people need. That's what everyone needs is role models. So it's a great show that way, too.

FH: Had you worked with Gary [Harvey] before?

HT: Yeah, I'd worked with Gary before on "Traders." He was much less abusive on "Traders." [all laugh] No, he's just a great guy. It's just so easy to work because he's so organized. That's what it takes in this business--it's not just about having an artistic vision. Things have to get done. It's really cool for me playing this role [because I] have to play [certain] things very subtly, and I think he's getting it.

For instance, this morning when we were walking along near the police station, Michelle comes up to Connelly and says [something he doesn't expect her to know]. My immediate instinct was not to look at her. And Gary says, "You know what? He's better than that. You can't give her that. You can't let her shake you like that."

PW: You've gotta bluff?

HT: Yeah, you've gotta bluff better than that. And it's interesting because it's natural for me. When I'm uncomfortable talking to someone, I try not to look at them. When we're talking about something that's engaging me emotionally, I tend to stare off into space. But you can't do that, because it's a very clear signal that something's wrong, or something's up. So just little things like that, he caught it right away. I felt it.

PW: So he has to look surprised when Michelle mentions this certain fact.

HT: Yeah, and as a cop, he knows what people do when they lie. They know the body language. You talk to these guys and they say, "You can tell when people are putting their hand up to their mouth a lot, or they're doing this kind of thing." Or lack of eye contact. Or too much eye contact. Or repeating yourself.

There was a guy who was undercover for a long time who I spoke to, and he said what you tend to do is to keep saying things over and over, because you have to believe them. But what is also a pattern is when you keep repeating the same thing without variation. Because people always have variations in the way you tell a story. If you tell it the exact same way, it's hard to believe it's the truth. You have to be so comfortable with it that you can go around it and carry it different ways.

The best way to tell a lie is to tell the truth, to convince yourself that it's the truth, or that it's for the best that this is the truth. If you believe that, you can lie very, very well. I mean, as actors we do it. As actors, we're nothing but liars. You have to, for the good of the story and of the people and for your work, you have to convince yourself and convince others that you are actually in that situation.

TK: Hey, "pleasantly surprised"! [laughing] "Pleasantly surprised." You gotta tell them the story!

HT: [laughing] It's a direct quote from Gary Harvey. We were in the Palliser Hotel, and there's all kinds of uncontrolled stuff going on. There's people yelling, "Honey, could you bring my umbrella!" during the middle of our scenes.

PW: People in the hotel?

HT: Yeah, 'cuz it's a working hotel. And I have to say phrases like "provincial hydro entity" and "California power corporation." And I'm going, "Okay, okay, I gotta focus." And [the other cast members] were all there, and they were laughing at me, and I failed miserably, I know I did. Didn't get one of them! [all laugh] So I was in a big sweat, and Tina and I were both kind of crazy about it. And Gary's shaking his head and he's all very unhappy.

So we get in the next day and they're editing very quickly, so they kind of got it together, and I said, "Gary, what happened to my day?" And he looks at us and says, "Well...I was really pleasantly surprised by the whole thing." So that was our ringing endorsement from Harvey! "Pleasantly surprised with your work." You know, as an actor, you're kind of going like, "Please, just say it was great. Not 'pleasantly surprised.'" [all laugh]

PW: "It wasn't as bad as I expected..."

FH: "You didn't totally suck..."

HT: "It wasn't as terrible as it could have been..." [all laugh]

PW: Well, I'm sure he meant it as a compliment! From what I saw in that scene you just shot, though, Michelle Kenidi doesn't seem to like you much.

HT: Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, because I think at a certain point, she's just a real good police officer, and the great thing about Michelle's mind is that it doesn't close. She doesn't rush to conclusions about things. She makes it very difficult for Connelly to do what he's doing because her mind doesn't shut off. She asks questions. And she doesn't say anything, so he thinks he's doing okay, but she's still trying to figure out what's going on. He actually says that. He says in one of the scenes, "She's a really good cop. She's better than ninety percent of the guys I work with." And he knows that.

Watching "North of 60" and joining the Lynx River community

FH: I always wonder what that's like for someone who's new to the show, because Tina is buckets of fun. She can be laughing her soul out one minute and then go into a tear-jerking scene the next. I find it interesting that you talk about her as a calm and still person. The character is, totally, but...it's true, she is.

HT: She is, too. It's not posed. When you talk with her about something serious, about something that means something to her, she's just so measured about certain things. She loves fun, but that doesn't stop her from having that stillness. Which is so great as an actor.

I was going for a call one time, I was doing film in Halifax, and I was watching "North of 60." She was talking to Elsie at the side of the river, and the phone's ringing and they're ringing up from downstairs 'cuz my call was like quarter to, and I got into this scene and I took the phone off the hook, and I would not leave. Man, just unbelievable. Just ripped my head off. It was absolutely one of the best pieces of television I've ever seen. Just amazing.

PW: Which scene was that?

HT: Her daughter had died and she was just returning.

PW: When Michelle comes back to Lynx River after Hannah dies?

FH: The thing with Tantoo? Or with Elsie?

HT: I think it was Elsie, 'cuz they were sitting by the river. I think they were by the river. It's been a few years ago now. But it was just greatness. That's what you want your work to have. And not in any kind of self-aggrandizing way.

I was so happy when I found out I was going to work with her. This is the best Canadian TV series that's ever been made. I firmly believe that. I loved our show, "Black Harbour," but I have to take it out of the mix because I can't really comment on it. But all of these shows stand up. I just saw the one when Teevee was trying to get the position as assistant band manager, and Dakota had that little bit at the end with Lori [Lea Okemaw] where he says, "I won't tell my mom. She'll never find out, because I won't tell her." He had that stillness, too. It was just amazing to see him sacrifice himself for his mother.

(Click on photo for larger image.) (c) Fran Humphreys

PW: Were you a pretty regular fan of the show when it was first on?

HT: Actually, you know, when the show went up, I was in the States at the time. And then when I came back I went on sort of a TV strike, I have to admit. I had no TV. I'd actually quit acting at the time, so I didn't want to have anything to do with it. So I missed so many of them, but I see them on Showcase now all the time. Whenever I see one, I'm just so fascinated to watch it. On [many] shows, you see people tearing up the scenery all the time, and it doesn't have any kind of effect. People cry on soap operas every day. But it's not the same. There's a different quality to it that I can't really explain.

FH: So you like the writing. This script, for me, out of the movies, is probably the strongest one yet. I don't know whether you've had the opportunity to see the others.

HT: Yeah, yeah, I saw one of the other ones, but again, that was a long time ago now. The thing about this one is that it's such an adventure. Things are happening, [people] are in strange locales. There's different ideas, and different characters, and different things are happening. I found the script very tight. There's not very much you could drop out of it.

FH: So you've had a good experience shooting here and being part of it?

HT: Yeah. I went out last night with Tina and Tina Louise and Lori and Tim. It's funny, because they were all going on about things and laughing about different stuff. I didn't catch on to half of the stuff, because I wasn't part of the team for that long. It's so great, though, to see them. They're so comfortable together. There's so much goodwill and so much happiness to see each other. They're just really happy to be here. It was quite something. We went and played pool, and we won. Lori and I went three for three! We beat Tina. She wasn't too happy. [all laugh]

PW: You were playing two against one?

HT: No, she was playing with Tina Louise. I'm a terrible pool player, but it was just like we kept getting these good luck things happening, so it's more infuriating for the good players when they can't beat you.

PW: So you and Lori Lea Okemaw are the current champions?

HT: Yeah, but I'm never playing again! I'm undefeated, and that's the way to keep it!

FH: Well, it's wonderful to have you in Lynx River.

HT: Ah, I just love this place. It's amazing. It's a great place to film, and cities aren't really my favorite thing, so it was quite something. It's funny when you've seen something on television over a number of years. So it's really wild to actually be walking and seeing this. It really does feel like a little place, you know.

"Black Harbour" and Buddy Brigley

PW: You mentioned that you really liked the script for this movie, which was written by Andrew Wreggitt and Peter Lauterman. Have you done stuff by either of them before?

HT: Yeah, Andrew and Peter also wrote for "Black Harbour" at some points. That's how I first met Andrew. Actually, Peter wrote something that I did, too. He wrote "Recipe for Revenge," didn't he? Did you ever see that movie?

FH: You know what, I never did.

HT: I was having fun!

FH: So you were a bad guy in that?

HT: I was bad.

FH: You don't look like a bad guy!

PW: Uh, Fran, have you ever seen "Black Harbour"? [laughs]

FH: I actually did see some.

PW: Of course, there's a big debate as to whether Buddy Brigley was really a bad guy!

HT: He was misunderstood. He was a nice man! [all laugh] I just loved that. They would let me do things that were just absolutely off the scale. 'Cuz I grew up there, in Nova Scotia, and that whole series is based there.

I read for the series with Wayne [Grigsby] and Barbara [Samuels]. I was doing a play at the time in Montreal, so I went down and I read. And on my audition tape I unleashed a stream of curse words because there was this scene where we were doing something, and I just decided, "You know, if this person was presented with this situation, he would just curse his head off." So I just did it, and the casting director said, "Do you really want to do that?" I just let it rip, and she wanted me to do it again, and I said, "No, no, just send it off to them. It doesn't matter anyway." You know, you have just have to go with what you're thinking. And they loved it. It is one of those things where it was just built for me.

I wanted to play that guy in a big way when I read it. When they started to actually write for the character, it was so good, it was so much fun. Andrew is such a good writer. They all were. The staff of writers is amazing on that thing. And they let me run with ideas, too. On "Black Harbour" especially, where I kind of knew the ground, they had respect for that. Here they do, too. I'm sure that when ideas come out that they listen to you. You have a different take on it or something that you want, they're quite behind it to do it.

There's one fabulous scene we did [in "Black Harbour"]. I had this scene where I was sitting in a bar, and Buddy had sort of a drinking thing going at that time, he had a few pops every once in a while. [laughs] The sheriff was going to take away his boat, and there was this outburst for about two minutes, two and a half minutes of just constant bile. Just vicious. But it was very funny at the same time, 'cuz the way you could deliver it was very almost light but at the same time all those colors were in there. That's what they're good at. That's what Andrew's good at. There's a lot of different levels. And Peter and all those guys. They're very good at giving you several different things to play. We had lots of fun.

PW: Did you ever see much of "Black Harbour," Fran?

FH: A few episodes. It was on on a night I had another commitment.

PW: Buddy was a fisherman who was basically out of a job because of fishing restrictions, and he was not taking it too well. Of course, he represented a common sentiment in that area.

HT: Oh man, it's still there. I live in a fishing village, and it's not as bad as it used to be, because I guess people just adjusted and got out of the industry. But at that time, there was an RCMP officer who was killed when they went to serve this guy notice that his boat was going to be seized. So yeah, that's the thing about it, they weren't afraid to write that stuff, they weren't afraid to write about it, they weren't afraid to leave it on the bone. Those episodes, they aren't meaningless. They're about things that really happened. I liked the writing.

PW: It sounds as though you, especially being from that area, saw Buddy as being, if not exactly sympathetic, at least you understood where he was coming from during those times when he went over the line.

HT: Yeah, yeah. But I think for people who do that, there are always reasons why that happens, and I think I kind of understood that about him. I never really thought about even judging his actions at all, because I modeled him on some people that I know. Well, not modeled him, I don't do that, I don't work like that as an actor. But I would see certain situations, and I would see certain things that happened in his life that paralleled things that happened to people that I knew in their lives and how they reacted.

I never thought about him having crossed the line really. You just do it, and those consequences that come about from his behavior, those things that happened to him and that happened to the people around him, those are just things you don't think about, that Buddy would never think about that way. It just would never cross his mind that he was doing anything out of the ordinary. He knows he's pissed off, and that's about it at that moment.

And then you get wisdom. I think the character changed quite a bit over the course of the show. In the first year, he was in very serious distress all the time. Then the things that happened to him, I think they changed him. When he came back [from being in jail], I think he was changed. He still had a lot of that hot-headedness, but it was tempered.

There was one show, a Christmas show, where Paul [Isler, the boatyard manager] and Buddy were painting these little Christmas toys, and it's just a neat little thing because it's what Paul's father had done all the time. So it was a tradition that these two guys who had known each other their whole lives were carrying on, without saying anything about it. They were just painting these toys and giving them to kids who didn't have toys at Christmas.

PW: I forget, what was the last we saw of Buddy Brigley? Didn't he go to jail after holding those people hostage?

HT: Well, the second year I had to sit in the penalty box for the first few eps. [all laugh] There was even a "Free Buddy Brigley" campaign. So they brought him back about six months later. He got released from wherever he'd gotten incarcerated. And it's so funny, you can go and do horrible things, then you just come out of jail, like if it's the first sort of thing that you've done wrong, and he came back and eventually he winds up running the boatyard. Through the second year he's still kind of doing these things, his life is still a little bit screwed up, but he ends up eventually taking it over, because he knows the business. That's the responsibility he eventually assumes.

That's what I liked about it, that he didn't stay the same through the whole thing. But the stuff that people remember is when he was completely nuts and he was like doing all these weird things. But you know, it's nice when you come around. He's able to work with the people that he was at one time so angry at, so jealous of, I guess, in a lot of ways. So it was very nice. He actually learned something during that show. He wasn't static.

"Blessed Stranger: After Flight 111"

PW: Could talk just for a few minutes about "Blessed Stranger"? I know you won a Gemini Award for your starring role in the movie. Maybe you could briefly describe the story and your character.

HT: Sure. Everett Barkhouse was sort of an amalgam of all the fishermen who went out after Swissair Flight 111 went down off Peggy's Cove, actually off Blanford, Nova Scotia. It was about six miles offshore. So this plane hit the water, and those guys got out in the boats. And we were there during the time this happened, doing the show.

PW: Oh, gee, that's right, "Black Harbour" was filming right near Halifax then.

HT: Yeah, it wasn't more than 12 miles away. So we were all there at the time. So they went out to try to rescue people, but they didn't find anything except very smashed-up pieces of things. So that was my guy in the show, sort of a representation of some of those people. The whole province and all of Atlantic Canada tried to go out and help these people, these families. They took them into their homes and tried to make their stay there...these horrible circumstances...they tried to help these people. Michael Amo, the writer of that show, did an amazing job.

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PW: Wasn't it your character who goes out on a boat with his son and sees things people should never have to see? I remember one scene that, I think, takes place the morning after the crash, and they're seeing all this stuff floating. In the movie, we don't see body parts, but the implication was there. Was it tough to film that, to be reenacting something you knew had really happened, and had happened to a community that you were a part of?

HT: Yeah, yeah, it was hard. Some of the scenes in the movie were very tough to do. It's a pretty tough space to be in for all that time. All the time you're filming, no matter what you do to try to prevent that, it kind of seeps into your mind. And I think the whole thing was that the film speaks against hopelessness, and it speaks for life. That's the way I looked at it.

Everett felt in a certain way that he couldn't help, that he did the wrong thing at a crucial time. Which is not true. He had an experience where he couldn't stay out there any more, which happened to a lot of guys. And I think that left Everett with a kind of guilt that he wanted to be able to do something. It's a common thing, I think, after accidents, that you just feel guilty about being alive. Why should you be alive? Especially when you see something on the scale that he sees. It's one of the reactions that happens to people. So he was unable to go back to his life. He couldn't go back to it.

PW: He bottles things up and starts taking it out on his family. But then he finally starts coming to terms with what he's feeling.

HT: Um-hmm. That's basically it. He meets the mother of a victim on the plane, and she tries to make him talk about it. He finds a sweater before he's forced to go in by seeing something he just can't absorb. He finds a torn sweater in the water. So he sews it together. He tries to do what he's able to do at that time, and that's all he's able to do.

The mother of the girl discovers this and asks him why he did it. So that became sort of the centerpiece of the film. He runs from her all the time. He runs from everything. He doesn't want to talk about it because he still feels a failure, he still feels the weight of that on him. That's the great thing about the writing of the film is that he doesn't get the weight off him at the end of the film. It's always there. It's not going to go away. It's just that you have to go on somehow. That's why I love the writing. It doesn't say everything's going to be all right, but it goes for life. It was just brilliantly written, I thought, and brilliantly directed.

PW: And don't forget that there was some great acting in it, too! It really was nice to see you in this role after "Black Harbour." You did a great job on "Black Harbour," but Buddy was not the most sympathetic person in the world, so it was really nice to see you do this one. I'm sure you play other nice people that I maybe haven't had a chance to see in the States.

HT: Not really. I'm basically a jerk. [all laugh] But I'm glad you saw the film, because I was very happy to be part of it. Wayne [Grigsby] and David MacLeod [the producers] were just so careful with it. And [director] David Wellington, I just can't say enough about him.

"100 Days in the Jungle"

PW: By the way, do you have anything lined up after this that we could alert people to keep an eye out for?

HT: Yeah, I just completed a film called "100 Days in the Jungle."

PW: Oh, okay. I was just talking with Nathaniel Arcand about that yesterday. I hear you guys had a delightful time down there in Costa Rica. [laughs]

HT: It was fabulous. Actually it was fabulous. I saw a rough cut of the thing, and all the miserable things that happened to us, the unfortunate stuff..."man, can anything else go wrong?" And when I actually saw the film, all I could think of was the good memories of it. I think it's going to be a good piece, because they just had so many good people on it in all departments. It as just great.

PW: CTV this fall?

HT: Yeah, CTV this fall. It's on in November, I think.

[At this point, Ron White and some other actors came to the green room after finishing their scene, and Mr. Thompson had to leave to get ready for the next scene.]