Paul Gross receives Order of Canada, reflects on career
Eric Volmers, Calgary Herald
Published on: February 12, 2015Last Updated: February 12, 2015 8:53 PM MST
Paul Gross was in New York City when he was told he was to be appointed to the Order of Canada.
His memory of it is a bit fuzzy and he admits he isn’t 100 per cent sure why he was in the Big Apple when he took the call. It may have been during the short Broadway run of Noel Coward’s Private Lives that he did with Kim Cattrall in 2011, or he may have simply been in meetings for other projects.
But whatever he was doing, it was dominating his thoughts sufficiently enough that he completely misunderstood the purpose of the call.
“The phone line was terrible and I thought it was someone asking me to be on the jury for the Governor General’s Awards and I said ‘I’m too busy I won’t be able to do that’ and just hung up,” says Gross, in an interview from his home in Toronto. “They rang back immediately and said ‘Just don’t hang up yet. Would you be willing to accept the Order of Canada?’ ”
Yes, Gross said, he would be quite willing.
On Friday, the Calgary-born actor, director and writer will get his investiture into the Order of Canada at a ceremony in Ottawa, although the announcement of his appointment was made back in 2013. A few weeks from now, he will receive the Earle Grey Award from the Academy of Cinema & Television, a recognition of the three decades he has spent as a gifted, ambitious and stubbornly Canadian artist. These are generally the sort of honours that can lead to deep reflection and career assessment from the honouree. But, not unlike during that New York call, Gross has other things on his mind.
“It’s odd that the two are coinciding and it always seems faintly preposterous to me because I don’t really ever think of myself in terms of a career,” he says. “I just think in terms of projects I’m working on and what I’m interested in at that moment. In a strange way, I am kind of thinking I’ve done a lot of things that add up to what, I’m not sure. But both of them are quite humbling. It’s an odd feeling to think you’ve been around for so long.”
What Gross is interested in at this moment is Hyena Road, a film about Canadian snipers and intelligence officers in Afghanistan. Gross is barely recognizable, his hair white and shorn into a military cut as an intelligence officer named Pete. The film, which Gross also writes, directs and produces, is based on interviews he did with Canadians soldiers in Afghanistan when he visited the war zone four years ago. He took 50 hours of footage by going out on foot patrols in the Horn of Panjwaii with a camera crew. The film itself was shot in Winnipeg and Jordan, but some of that initial footage will be interspersed into the narrative of the film, giving it a “hyper real” feel, Gross says. It’s due out in the fall.
It’s the latest chapter in an eclectic, maybe even erratic, career that Gross cheerfully admits has unfolded without much of a game plan. If there is a prevailing theme, it’s that his triple-threat talents as a writer, director and actor have led to projects that require a significant investment of time and energy, which takes away from any time he might spend plotting career advancement. Dating back to his theatre-school days at the University of Alberta in the early 1980s, Gross was determined to be a writer and not just another hunky actor (None of his early works as a playwright were published although they were performed, including his debut The Deer and the Antelope Play in 1981). It has helped make him a rarity in the Great White North, a successful filmmaker and Canadian movie star who has dabbled in Hollywood, American TV and Broadway but enjoyed his most notable triumphs here at home. That includes the role of earnest Mountie Benton Fraser that he played from 1994 to 1999 on CTV’s Due South, a series that he would eventually go on to produce. It includes a run as Hamlet at the Stratford Festival in 2000. In 2003 he created another iconic Canuck role, playing wonderfully unhinged theatre director Geoffrey Tennant in the critically acclaimed series Slings and Arrows. In 2007, he returned to Calgary to shoot the First World War epic Passchendaele, arguably the most ambitious and certainly one of the most expensive Canadian film ever made. Hyena Road will offer a distinctly Canadian look at the murky world of modern warfare.
“It’s my home, it’s where I feel most aligned to,” Gross says. “I love to travel, I like to go other places. But in part I like doing it because I appreciate where I come from more. I’ve been lucky enough to stay in a place that I know to be my home and be able to work here. It’s not always easy and in some ways I’m sure I could have had a slightly easier ride of things trying to finance films. When I’ve thought of doing something I’ve been able to do it here. It’s a combination of this is where I’m from, this is what I know, my country is the country I like to talk to and the fact that I don’t particularly find the business of Los Angeles appealing.”
It’s not that the actor hasn’t taken a shot or two, but his adventures south of the border have tended to be less successful.
That 2011 production of Private Lives opposite Kim Cattrall was a huge hit when it opened in Toronto, but died a quick death on Broadway a few months later. He was finally lured to American TV in 2009 to play the devilish Darryl Van Horne in ABC’s short-lived Eastwick. Having resisted previous attempts to bring him to Hollywood, Gross was impressed with the initial pitch and had hoped it would maintain both the complexity of John Updike’s 1984 novel, The Witches of Eastwick, and edge of the 1987 film version starring Jack Nicholson. It did neither and was cancelled after one season, a victim of jittery network execs intent on watering it down for mass appeal, Gross says.
Finally, in 2010, he was asked by his friend Peter Berg — an actor turned A-list Hollywood director — to take a run at writing Battleship, a would-be blockbuster based on the board game. It went on to become an infamous $220-million bomb, but that was long after Gross left the project. His name was removed from the script after arbitration by the Writer’s Guild of America. These were not his first experiences with Hollywood. He went down in 1990 to discuss doing a CBS western series, which he eventually decided not to do. In 1999, he turned down David Kelley, creator/producer of Ally McBeal and The Practice, who wanted the actor for a lead in Snoops, an hour-long detective series that lasted less than one season on ABC. While Gross hasn’t completely given up on La La Land, he admits it’s not a place he is comfortable in.
“My first encounters with Hollywood were weird, there was such bravado and confidence and money was overflowing,” he says. “More recently it’s just dominated by a kind of terror because all of the platforms are changing. There’s influence of the Internet and the profits start to dwindle and networks see the end of the road. Instead of getting more courageous, they just seem to be doing what they’ve been doing, which is what led them off the cliff in the first place.”
Born in Calgary in 1959, Gross spent his formative years as an army brat, living in Alberta, Newfoundland, England, Germany and Washington. He doesn’t remember a specific epiphany that convinced him he wanted to act, but says his somewhat rootless childhood may have played a role.
“I’ve thought about that a fair bit,” Gross says. “I think it has something to do with reinventing yourself. Every place you move into has a whole new set of rules and behaviours and strictures. So you kind of reinvent yourself to fit into that new environment. That possibly leads you to imagine that acting makes sense because you’ve developed a flair for becoming somebody else.”
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