Pickle Barrel
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN a Batman girl.
The mysterious black mask, the
tight muscle-revealing getup and
that enigmatic gravelly voice made
him, hands down, the sexiest
superhero of all-time. So when
dreamy, up-and-coming local movie
star Sergio Di Zio says his first
acting experience was
impersonating the crime-fighting
dynamo, I perk up, imagining his
warm chocolate eyes peeking from
the superhero mask, his playful
dimples hidden beneath a swath of
spandex. Alas, my excitement
wanes when I learn that he was a
little, ahem, younger at the time.
“I first started acting in my backyard when I was a kid,” Di Zio explains, gently pulling off his green Canada Goose parka. “Batman, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Han Solo. You take off the cape, you grab the sword, you grab the gun, and you’re running around the backyard and your mom’s at the window going: ‘Uh, okay, I guess he’s having fun.’” Sergio’s eyes sparkle at the memory. “It wasn’t supposed to be for anybody. It was just about me having a good time.”
I smile at him. “It never ended for you, did it?”
“No,” he answers. “I’m not doing this to become famous. I’m doing it because I love pretending, I love playing,” he says. And that playing has certainly paid off. This month, he has two big projects coming out. The Lookout, a big film opening in which he plays opposite Jeff Daniels, and the play Scorched, premiering at the Tarragon.
“Beginner’s luck,” Di Zio says, but as an actor, he’s always thrived.
In Grade 13, Di Zio moved beyond his shyness and the parameters of his backyard when he auditioned for his high school’s annual play, and scored the lead. And at his very first professional audition, the then fresh-faced 21-year-old landed a role in National Lampoon’s Senior Trip.
But in order to take the coveted spot, Di Zio had to pull out of a play for Toronto Summerworks Festival, a story about Italian-Canadian cousins growing up in North York.
“I was meant for this play,” he says. “I related to it completely and was so excited to be part of it.” But he turned the play down to take on the film. A decision he describes today as “a detour that made me lose my way.” So following his first big Hollywood role, Di Zio vowed to follow his instincts in the future . He took a break from acting, worked in a bookstore in Yorkdale Mall and wrote short stories. But his thirst for performing never disappeared.
He returned to auditions and quickly landed bit parts in TV shows Major Crime and The Wall and, in 2005, the now-defunct Gemini-winning dramatic television series This Is Wonderland where he played the bumbling crown attorney Marcus Weekes. “An amazing experience,” he says. But it was two lines in the Russell Crowe vehicle Cinderella Man that secured his current home at King and Spadina.
“Thank you very much Ron Howard!” Di Zio exclaims. “I knew the casting director, and she had me come in to audition, and so I got to meet Ron Howard, and he looked over at me and said, ‘You did a really good job. We’re going to find something for ya. We don’t know what, but we’ll find something!’ And I’m like: ‘That’s so sweet, that’s great, thank you!” recounts Di Zio. “And then the casting director suggests the young reporter, so I look at the script, and he’s got two lines!’ But the casting director, remember she was a friend, said, ‘Trust me, you want the reporter. You’ll be paid for 26 days.’”
“My lines in Cinderella Man were ‘Who’s Jim Braddock?’ (Jim Braddock was Russell Crowe), and in a later fight, Ron Howard used my brilliant ad-lib, ‘Holy crap!’ That becomes a down payment on a loft. Very strange business.”
But that “strange business” has treated him well, and on March 30, Di Zio joins Jeff Daniels in The Lookout, opening across North America. “I play Deputy Ted Tillman, a very sweet guy who was beautifully written by the screenwriter-director Scott Frank.”
Di Zio also recently completed a Canadian film called Pushing Up Daisies, starring Jay Baruchel and Graham Greene, that is being considered for the Toronto International Film Festival 2008.
“I play a priest. Mom would have liked the priest part. I took my collar for a souvenir, guess that’s a sin,” he says bittersweetly. His mother died in 2001.
Di Zio’s eyes grow distant when he speaks about his mom, who passed away after struggling with a long illness. “We were very close,” he says, taking a moment to compose himself. “It’s hard, but what are you going to do? You can’t do anything about it. You have to move on.”
To lighten the mood, I ask him about his favourite movies, and Di Zio leans in smiling.
“I grew up on The Godfather, with my Italian family, you know, that was our Christmas movie,” he says. “I know, it sounds horrible.”
He pauses, smiling widely.
“I remember when I was four or five, my aunts and uncles would all be watching it, like it was the word of God or something. We’re not Mafia,” he laughs, “but all the traditional stuff spoke to my family.”
His immigrant parents didn’t speak English very well, he explains, but “they got the film.” “The Godfather was the first movie that made me want to act,” he says.
Di Zio grew up near the Wilson Heights neighbourhood, in a small Italian-Canadian community. “There were a bunch of us,” he explains. “My parents bought there. My mom’s sister bought next door, and our grandmother lived next door to her. My cousin, who I hung out with all the time, was two doors over. Another cousin lived on the other side.” He clearly seems to relish the memories. “You could bike everywhere. It was a real sense of community for all of us.” Recently, Di Zio’s older brother Rob bought a house two doors down from his dad.
Di Zio grew up eating traditional Italian meals at his home and still meets his father once a week for lunch at Terroni on Yonge and St. Clair where they split a pasta, a salad and a half-litre of wine. “It’s the same thing every time,” he laughs. “They know us there, they know my dad. It’s sweet.” He describes his father, Silviano Di Zio, a furniture upholsterer, as “the proudest dad out there.”
“I am!” exclaims Silviano, when I speak to him on the phone a couple of days later. “I follow him wherever he goes,” he says. “When he was 3, he was watching TV, and he turned to my wife and I and said, ‘I am going to be an actor!’ Me and my wife used to laugh. My wife was very proud also,” says Silviano.
For Sergio Di Zio, happiness will always be Canada. He describes the wide open skies of Manitoba, the friendliness of Nova Scotians and the interesting experiences he has had through his acting travels across Canada. But he also makes it clear that Toronto is his home.
As we sit in a small room at the Tarragon Theatre where Di Zio is rehearsing for Scorched (alongside long-time acting hero David Fox), he muses about his birthplace.
“It’s multicultural and diverse, and people have different opinions, and there is an openness to all kinds of different people,” he says. “That’s so important for an actor. For me, acting is a way to understand different points of view.”
“Scorched is about that. There’s a lot of reconciliation in it. My character starts out very, very angry, and the journey is: Is he going to get to a place where the anger goes away? How do you get there?” He adds: “They’re on a quest for truth, a quest for honesty. And that’s really what I think acting is about.”
It’s a sentiment Bruce Wayne
would certainly agree with. 
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