Pickle Barrel
WHEN SCOTT SPEEDMAN arrives for
the North American premiere of
Atom Egoyan’s Adoration at the
Toronto International Film
Festival, it will be just the latest
step in a career that has been
weirdly, inextricably linked to the
city’s annual celebration of
cinema.
Speedman remembers that in 1996 — as a 20-year-old actor, fresh out of Earl Haig Secondary School where he excelled as a drama student and competitive swimmer — he was struggling to find work in Toronto.
“I started auditioning for short films at the Canadian Film Centre,” he says. His efforts landed him a part in a 17-minute short called Can I Get a Witness? in which a convenience store’s surveillance camera suggests an impossible crime.
“It went really well and got in the festival,” he says. Speedman credits the notice he and the film received for leading to his first starring role, in the film Kitchen Party by Calgary director Gary Burns (Waydowntown and 2006’s Radiant City). In turn, Speedman’s performance in Kitchen Party helped him land the role of Ben Covington on the TV series Felicity. It was a part he played from 1998 to 2002 and remains the role for which many fans still recognize him.
In the six years since the series ended, Speedman has gone on to appear in Underworld and its sequel, Underworld: Evolution, as well as the action movie xXx: State of the Union, the thriller Anamorph and others. But his professional life keeps intersecting with the festival in the city where he grew up. (Speedman was born in London, England, but moved to Bayview soon after. He now lives in L.A.)
In 2003 he starred opposite fellow Bayview native and friend Sarah Polley in the acclaimed Canadian film My Life Without Me, which had its Canadian premiere at the Toronto festival and picked up numerous awards at other festivals around the world. Just last year, he starred in Weirdsville, a very funny dark comedy about two slackers trying to pay off a debt. It was directed by Allan Moyle, the Quebec-born filmmaker who made the 1990 cult hit Pump Up the Volume and 1999’s New Waterford Girl. Weirdsville, too, had its first Canadian screening at TIFF.
Now Speedman has a starring role in Adoration, which also screened in competition at this year’s Cannes film festival, the fifth time for an Egoyan film. Shot and set in Toronto, the newest work from the director of Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter and Where the Truth Lies follows a high school student named Simon (Devon Bostick) who tells his classmates that his father once tried to blow up a plane on which his mother (played by Rachel Blanchard), then pregnant with him, was a passenger. Speedman plays the boy’s uncle, raising Simon after his parents are killed in a car crash. Egoyan’s wife, Arsinée Khanjian, is the drama teacher who takes an obsessive interest in their family history.
The actor, who turns 33 on Sept. 1, took a chance auditioning for the role, which was originally written for an actor at least 10 years older than Speedman.
“Obviously I’ve always wanted to work with Atom,” he says. “I decided to get on a plane [to Toronto], and Atom said he would have lunch with me. He was really upfront right away. He said, ‘I really like your work, but you’re just too young.’”
Nevertheless, the director agreed to let him audition for the part. “After he went and watched the tapes,” Speedman says, “he really got excited by the idea that this character could be played younger.”
Egoyan says it was all Speedman’s doing. “He touched me,” he says simply. “There must have been something in the script that he got. From the moment he read it, it was so emotional, and I realized there was this whole other possibility for this character.”
With Egoyan in control of both the writing and directing of the film, it was easy to modify the script to suit a younger actor. “When Scott auditioned it suddenly refracted in a different way,” Egoyan says. “He’s given up his twenties to look after this kid rather than his thirties. There’s still a possibility in his life to learn from this experience.”
“Auditioning is such a weird thing,” says Speedman. “It’s a different craft [than acting] in a sense. But I’ve gotten better and better at it, and winning someone like Atom over definitely gives you more confidence.”
It also helps that he’s happy with the final product. “I’d be mumbly and weird if I didn’t like it,” he says frankly, adding that, unlike a lot of actors, he’s not generally a fan of watching his own work. “Most of my friends in L.A. invite me over when they’re on TV,” he says, chuckling.
His satisfaction started on the set, when the imposing Egoyan proved far less intimidating in person than his record of accomplishments — two Oscar nominations, eight Genies and numerous other international accolades — might imply.
“I had this image of him in black suits, behind the camera,” Speedman says. “But he was very warm. It felt like he trusted me and let me go with my instincts.” He adds that his co-star Blanchard, who also appeared in Egoyan’s previous film Where the Truth Lies, “was always telling me what a great guy he was, but that was pretty evident right away.”
Trust is a two-way street, Speedman stresses. “Reading the script, it was quite stark and simple. You trusted the filmmaker was going to elaborate. But that’s the luxury of working with a director who’s had past successes. You really had to trust that Atom was going to fill the holes. You can see it in his [other] films.”
Speedman shares the pride that other Canadian celebrities feel when they screen a made-in- Canada film in front of a hometown crowd. But, he adds, “Truthfully, it’s a little more stressful in some ways. There are more requirements from the press, from family and friends. It’s a little more of a high-pressure situation. I like to sort of hide away. I’d rather go to Berlin or Cannes and disappear into the fray.”
But don’t think he’s not happy to be here. “Obviously it’s my favourite film fest,” he concludes. “I love it and I love being able to come home with these movies that I like.”
Like most festival glitterati, Speedman doubts he’ll be able to see any other films during the whirlwind of interviews and screenings for Adoration. But he has fond memories of a festival long ago when he had his nosed pressed to the glass from the outside, looking in.
He and two film-buff friends from the University of Toronto had been up late the night before but decided to catch an early morning screening of Pin Gods, an 82-minute documentary by Larry Locke about the hopefuls on the pro bowling circuit in the United States. Speedman loved it. No one else he tells about it has ever heard of it.
“Those are my favourite things,” he says. “The ones that may or may not get distribution.” He adds wistfully, “It would be nice to go back as a fan. It was an innocent time. It’s changed a lot since then.”
It certainly has. Pin Gods had its first screening at the Toronto International Film Festival in September of 1996. Four days later, on a Wednesday, the short Can I Get a Witness? debuted in the Perspectives Canada program.
Scott Speedman had arrived. 
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