Pickle Barrel
EN ROUTE TO interview Don McKellar,
the ubiquitous and multi-talented
Canadian star of stage and screens
both big and small, my bike and I
were nearly nailed by a jerk in a
Jaguar racing through a crosswalk.
This wouldn’t be relevant except that the event hearkens back to so much of McKellar’s work, whether it’s the radicalized bicyclists bent on trashing the SUVs of gentrifying invaders in Monkey Warfare, the ego-fuelled, out-of-control mania of a 12-year-old in Childstar or even the mass blindness that befalls an entire town in his next film, Blindness. Assuming of course the driver of said luxury car would have to be either out of control or blind to nearly kill a defenseless writer.
“Oh, it’s dangerous,” McKellar laughs. “People can be cruel.”
Sliding his slightly rumpled form into a booth at Caffe Brasiliano on Dundas Street, his face lights up while discussing his favoured mode of transportation.
“It’s a great biking city. I don’t have a car and never have had a car. I don’t think it’s necessary the way I lead my life. There aren’t many cities in North America where you can do that. It’s not very hilly and it’s easy to navigate, but it’s also the quiet streets and the residential makeup of the city. That’s the best thing about Toronto — its residential neighbourhoods.”
It’s no surprise that McKellar understands our City of Neighbourhoods, considering he grew up in Midtown where his parents still live. His experiences growing up there were typical — hanging out with friends in parks and parking lots.
“We didn’t really do much,” he says. “Nowadays there are tons of bars and restaurants, but there weren’t even those as much in those days. I don’t even know what other options there were. We’d spend a lot of time in friends’ basements, watching movies.”
Still, those years proved pivotal, not just for going to the movies but also being a quick subway ride from the theatre district, he says.
“My parents were really big arts patrons, so they took me to lots of plays, to the extent that theatre seemed like a viable career path. That would be hard to imagine in most other cities in the country.”
In his latest project, the two-part CBC miniseries The Englishman’s Boy, McKellar finds himself in an ensemble that includes a host of Toronto-nurtured talent, whose contribution to the local arts scene is unimpeachable.
The story, based on the Governor General’s Award winning book by Guy Vanderhaeghe, set in 1920s Hollywood, follows a movie producer on the trail of a rugged star for his next picture. Can-con aficionados will recognize topflight Canuck talent like R. H. Thomson, Ted Dykstra and Nicholas Campbell.
Beyond the usual press-friendly glad-handing that comes with talking about your co-stars, there is an unmistakable reverence for McKellar among his peers.
“He has a courage as an actor. The camera reveals the enigma in him, and he has the ability to draw layered performances by doing very little,” says McKellar’s co-star Nicholas Campbell.
“In Englishman’s Boy, he was required to do an outlandish, brash and loud portrayal of that film director, instantly setting himself up as the despicable man that turns the focus of the film into a delight of his comeuppance,” Campbell says.
It’s no surprise he plays the role with such aplomb. He’s been active in the theatre since his voice changed. In high school and into university he had a children’s theatre troupe and, while attending University of Toronto, co-founded the experimental Augusta Company with Tracy Wright, his co-star in films such as Childstar and Monkey Warfare and in life.
But his most recent success arrived in the form of the Tony Award–winning Broadway musical The Drowsy Chaperone. The Fringe Festival play done-good, which made its triumphant return to Toronto this past fall.
“This was a strange return for me because it’s so mainstream,” he says and shrugs, adding his collaborators Bob Martin and Lisa Lambert also hail from his Toronto ’hood.
“We were all classmates at Lawrence Park and obviously kept in touch. We used to hang out at Lisa’s place on St. Leonard’s,” McKellar recalls.
“Certainly we can say without exaggeration it’s the most successful Canadian musical to ever appear on Broadway. And now I’m getting all these offers to do Broadway shows. I don’t know, it’s not the way I thought my career was going to go.”
No one else would have predicted that either, considering, over the past two decades, he’s become Canadian cinema’s most prominent presence. His breakthrough acting roles were in Bruce McDonald’s first two flicks, the 1989 no-budget Roadkill and 1991’s just-out-on-DVD cult classic Highway 61, which McKellar cowrote, about an American road trip involving a barber, a coffin and Satan himself.
He followed up with roles in Atom Egoyan’s Exotica and David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ and wrote The Red Violin, Dance Me Outside and Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.
This summer, fans can expect to be spooked by his latest screenplay, Blindness, a horror fable, starring Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Gael Garcia Bernal, and helmed by acclaimed Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (The Constant Gardener and City of God).
The story, adapted from a novel by Jose Saramago, tells the tale of a doctor’s wife who must cope with disorder and chaos when her entire town falls victim to blindness, and only she retains her sight.
It shares the “everything’s gone haywire” theme with McKellar’s project Last Night, an awardwinning film, which he wrote, directed and starred in, set in Toronto at the end of the world.
Beyond such eschatological fare, McKellar also penned and directed
Childstar, about an infamous 12- year-old. Plus, there’s his cult CBC series
Twitch City(also fresh to DVD) and his long-running Comedy Network cartoon
Odd Job Jack. All local productions, harnessing the talent this city seems to have in spades.
Though Toronto streets are always filled with film crews, what makes McKellar’s projects stand out is that they’re actually set here.
“I always look for that. There’s a very silly attitude that if you identify things as Torontonian it would be a negative thing for American and international sales,” says McKellar. “I just don’t believe that. There’s so little evidence to prove that’s the case. It might even be an advantage, a selling point. The fact that people have this internalized self-loathing about Toronto is really unhealthy for filmmakers.”
Though he admits, “It is hard to get a look for Toronto. We’re not used to seeing it in movies or television, and it doesn’t have as distinctive an architectural look as Montreal or even Vancouver. So you have to work for it a bit — but it is possible.
“When I grew up in [Midtown], it was all families and the local butcher and the local hardware store. I don’t know if there is a hardware store anymore — that’s always the first thing to go. Neighbourhoods change. I think it’s better for the kids going to high school now. It’s much more happening than when I grew up there,” he says.
“I could never afford it now.” 
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