(long) haul

You can catch Crowe in the first episode of Season 3, which premieres Wednesday on CBC. He and his old pal Alan Doyle, lead singer of Great Big Sea, play members of a group of tough guys who show up and complicate Jake's life.

We lured the ever-multitasking Hawco out of the editing room to find out more about the season and its famous guest stars, including Crowe and Shannon Tweed. He dished on everything from what it was like hanging out with Gene Simmons of Kiss, to what he learned from Crowe, to why working with his real-life dad is a weird yet wonderful thing.

What can we expect to see from Russell Crowe this season?

Russell is in the first episode. He shows up as part of a group of troublemakers who make Jake's life very complicated. Russell was fantastic in the episode, obviously. He's one of the best actors I've ever met, let alone worked with.

What was it like working with him?

Russell's got a fantastic sense of humour, but he takes the work very seriously, as do I. As does all of our cast! When there's time for a good laugh to be had, he's awesome. We did have a blast. I learned a lot from him. Because I'm editing all of the episodes, I was able to do full comparisons of one of the best actors in the world. I'd watch his takes and then watch my own. It was like a master class in acting.

Are you picking up on things in editing that you didn't notice at the time?

Oh yeah. It's completely changed my life as an actor. I'm editing in my head while we're shooting. You can't focus on that in the moment. In the moment, you've just got to try to be the best actor you can be.

I know that Shannon Tweed also guest stars this season ...

Shannon is originally from Newfoundland. She was born in Dildo, believe it or not. She left when she was 16 and moved out west. She plays someone from the Doyles' past, and she comes back looking for something that she feels is owed to her. She's fantastic in the episode. This season has a pretty good lineup of amazing guest stars -- but Shannon was a rock star.

Speaking of rock stars, did Gene Simmons pop by the set?

He did. It's very funny. I'm from a little district called Goulds in St. John's, and we were shooting out by the racetrack where, as a teenager, we would spend some of our time idly standing in the woods listening to Kiss on an old ghetto blaster, and there was Gene Simmons standing with me at the monitors. It was very surreal.

Obviously St. John's is one of the show's major characters. Do you have any idea whether the show has increased tourism there?

Oh yeah, it certainly has. But it's a two-way street. There's a direct impact that the show's had because we're reaching more people than just their ad campaign could, and we're also airing in 100 countries around the world. We're showcasing the city through the goggles of how I view it, and I'm in love with the city. That being said, I really feel that a huge part of the success of the show is that it's set in such a unique and interesting city.

I read that your father is a crew member on the show.

It's the weirdest thing! Imagine you walk into work every day and hear your dad say, "Lord Jesus, I'm roasted!" It's so weird. You hear your father from your childhood speaking in your office. And he's not there to see you or have lunch with you. He's doing something, and everyone around knows who he is. It's so weird and beautiful at the same time. I work a lot of hours. Dad is a PA, and the team has titled him "senior production assistant" because he's a senior citizen.

He runs around town picking up packages, dropping off cheques, etc., etc. Every now and then, sometimes I work 21 hours a day, I'll need someone to go grab me a coffee at Starbucks or a coffee house downtown. Like a real heavily caffeinated one. They'll ask my dad to go get it, and he'll walk into my office and say, "I'm not going all the way down there in this traffic!"

It's fun, though. It's so great. Part of the reason why I wanted to be here was to be around my parents. My mother comes in and does background work sometimes. She's truly the sweetest thing on earth, so it's nice to be able to share that with your family that way.

Do people ever stop you on the street these days to talk about the show?

Oh yeah. Sure. That's a great thing about being Canadian. Every city and town I've been in since we've started making the show, I get stopped by people. But people aren't going through my garbage, y'know what I mean? People are always positive. Luckily, the negative people have left me alone!

Like many successful actors, Allan Hawco finds himself living a bicoastal existence. But in his case, the defining bodies of water aren’t the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, but Conception Bay and Lake Ontario.

As a native Newfoundlander, he couldn’t be happier that Republic of Doyle, his TV series set in St. John’s, NL., has been renewed for a sixth season on CBC while many other programs felt the budgetary headsman’s axe.

And as a stage actor plying his trade in Toronto, he’s thrilled to return to the group he co-founded, The Company Theatre, after a five-year absence.

The play that brought him back, Belleville, has already been a hit in New York and Chicago, making its young author, Amy Herzog, a force to be reckoned with. The production officially opening Thursday at the Berkeley Street Theatre stands poised to give her a hat-trick in North America’s three largest theatre cities.

“She wasn’t quite 30 when she wrote the script,” enthuses Hawco before a day of rehearsals, “and for her to have been so young and to have created such a deep, deep piece of material is deeply disturbing for me.

“By the end of next season on Doyle, I’ll have written 77 episodes of hourly television, but I’m still in awe of one script like this. You start working on many pieces of theatre and the holes in the plot become apparent so quickly if the nuts and bolts aren’t there. But with this script, every layer that you pull back reveals something deeper. There’s more to discover every day.”

The script of Belleville is so packed with twists and turns of character revelation that to mention much more than the title requires a spoiler alert.

Suffice it to say that it’s about a young married American couple living in Paris and how their lives start falling apart when the wife returns home unexpectedly from a cancelled yoga class to find her husband surfing the web for porn.

“There are a lot of themes going on here, which could be expressed as, ‘Is anyone what they ever seem to be?’ or ‘Can you ever really know your partner?’” says Hawco. “And hanging over it all is a portrait of a certain generation now in their late 20s who have a real sense of entitlement. People of a certain age believing they’re entitled to whatever they want.

“And although right from the beginning you say, ‘Something’s going on here,’ it’s not until the very end that it’s apparent what it is.”

A play like that needs a special kind of director and Hawco has one in Jason Byrne, the unconventional Irishman who has guided The Company Theatre through some of its biggest hits (A Whistle in the Dark, Festen).

“Jason’s not very traditional,” chuckles Hawco. “You may think the trajectory of a scene is from A to B, but he has a robust approach and tears at all the thousands of objectives, all the millions of possibilities he wants you to explore in rehearsal, so that you’re ready for absolutely anything.

“He doesn’t ‘block’ a show,” explains Hawco, using the theatre term for staging the action. “He approaches the work so that there’s only one answer and we have to discover it. He fights that urge to take us to a place that he’s predetermined and I personally love his method of working.”

He’s equally enthusiastic about the tremendous success of his Newfoundland cops-and-robbers series, Republic of Doyle. With solid enough viewership after five seasons that CBC has brought it back for a sixth, it was also recently sold to 80 per cent of the United States in a syndication deal.

“I’d actually forgotten about that until a friend texted me and said, ‘Friday night in Florida and Doyle is on the air,’” Hawco laughs. “‘How cool is that?’ and I’d have to agree with him.”

Hawco says, “The major thing I’d attribute its success to is that it’s a lot of fun. If we were to make a cold, dark-hearted crime drama in St. John’s, the sound of TVs being turned off would have been deafening. But we go for the comedy and the sense of humour, the light approach; the rock ’n’ roll barrel- through-this-hour tactic seems to work.

“But it’s minus any silliness. I wanted people to see our city the way we see it and love our city the way we love it. I didn’t want the rest of Canada to feel excluded. I wanted them to watch us. Otherwise you get cancelled.”