By Diane Wild
At the Banff World Television Festival, actor Peter Keleghan (18 to Life) related the upside and the downside of being a Canadian actor.
Shooting a pilot in LA years ago, he was working with en executive producer who became a “mother figure,” as he said. She would ask about his family – he and his wife were expecting a child – and his new life in Hollywood. When it came time for the producers to decide if they’d pay the small fee to extend his contract while waiting for the pilot to be picked up, his agent was told they decided against it because “we heard from him personally about the auditions he’s going for and he’s not really close to anything, so we don’t think we’re going to lose him.”
“I was blown away that she used the information from me against me,” Keleghan said at the festival panel on Homegrown Canadian Talent.
“When I tell my American friends this story, they all say to me, ‘What are you, f***ing stupid? You don’t tell a producer your business.’ And my Canadian friends say to me, ‘Jesus Christ, that’s dreadful!’ And that to me is the difference between America and Canada, and that’s why I came back to this country.”
After the national pride applause and laughter had died down, Keleghan shared a national-pride-squashing anecdote.
After being recognized by a fan in his home country, another woman approached him to say, “Oh, you’re an actor? What have I seen you in?”
“Well, I don’t know,” he recalled telling her. “The Red Green Show? No. The Newsroom? No. Oh, Made in Canada? And she replied: ‘That’s the problem isn’t it? It’s made in Canada.'”
In our interview after the panel, where we talked about the state of the Canadian television industry, Keleghan turned the tables on me, asking: “Think of Jim Carrey or Mike Meyers. What would your mindset be if they came back to this country and starred in a sitcom or a movie?”
From Connie Adair of the National Post:
Born in 1975 in Murrayville, BC, Dylan Rhymer began his comedic career at the age of 18 while still in his senior year of high school. Since then, he has developed as one of Vancouver’s boldest voices in political comedy. Rhymer has performed all over North America and Great Britain, sharing the stage with many great comedians including Zach Galifianakis and Mitch Hedberg. He has made regular appearances on XM Radio and CBC and was featured as the voice of Dick Hackney for the popular videogame Scarface: The World is Yours.
