Starting a conversation with actor Paul Gross with the obligatory “what-attracted-you-to-this-role?” question seems somewhat dense when it comes to his latest endeavour, playing one of the leads in ABC’s upcoming hour-long show Eastwick.
The role in question is the devil, a part that has always allowed actors the giddy freedom to chew scenery and unleash their inner ham. His co-stars are three gorgeous women, including Rebecca Romijn. And the original premise comes from John Updike’s classic novel The Witches of Eastwick, which was turned into a 1987 film of the same name starring Jack Nicholson, Cher and Michelle Pfeiffer.
The better question would be why on earth would anyone turn down the role.
“It’s really fun playing the devil,” confirms Gross, in an interview at the Banff World Television Festival. “There’s no real boundaries. There’s no limitations to what I can or can’t do. And I’ve been encouraging them to let me do things on the periphery, like set people on fire for no particular good reason.”
Still, Paul Gross has never been your average Canadian actor with starry-eyed ambitions to make it big on U.S. television.
The 50-year-old Calgarian is best known for writing, directing and producing Passchendaele, his $20-million First World War epic that paid homage to Canuck war heroes. His 1990s show Due South, which had him playing an earnest Mountie, may have been the first Canadian-made show to be sold to a major U.S. network, but it virtually oozed low-key, Canadian charm.
In general, Gross has acted as a hearty booster of Canadian-based productions, often lamenting about the long line of homegrown talent that flows into Hollywood and never returns. So why head to L.A. now?
“Every year I get offered a couple (pilots),” says Gross. “I needed to change things up a bit coming off of Passchendaele. So I said to my agent in the States that I’ll have a look at some pilots this year. I read a bunch of them and this one just made me laugh and it was very interesting and had a lot of odd undercurrents to it. I wasn’t really interested in doing a procedural. Part of what drew me to it is that I like things that have other elements in play. You’re not quite as restricted as saying, ‘Here’s a fingerprint, that leads to a footprint that leads to a gun that leads to a criminal.’ I think, after awhile, that would become mostly boring to do.”
However, this certainly doesn’t mean Gross is abandoning his Canadian connections. He was at the Banff World Television Festival to accept the NBC Universal Canada Award of Distinction, a honour that reflects his long tenure in homegrown broadcasting and film. Dressed casually in blue jeans and a faded jean jacket for the interview, Gross is also sporting an unruly hairdo these days for his role in the Canadian film, Gunless, Currently filming in Osoyoos, B.C., it’s a comedic western that has Gross playing a long-haired American outlaw forced to come to grips with peaceful Canadian townsfolk after accidentally landing across the border.
And while Eastwick will be shot in L.A., Gross says his schedule will only involve a few days of filming per episode, leaving him plenty of time to develop other projects in Toronto.
But beyond the question of time commitment, the other obvious concern is how any actor approaches a role that was stamped so iconically by Jack Nicholson. Nicholson, of course, played the devil with unhinged glee in George Miller’s film version. But the early trailers of Eastwick reveal Gross may be taking a more subtle approach.
“The show is quite a bit different from the film, which was also structured quite a bit differently from the novel,” Gross says. “And Jack Nicholson is like Mount Rushmore, you can’t exactly imitate him, or you’d be foolish to try. I think in a part like this, you have to connect with that piece of you that seems to be similar and just let that go. But I certainly thought about it when I was reading it. I thought, ‘Oh dear, this is maybe a bad thing to try.’ ”
As for his own followups to Passchendaele, Gross acknowledges there are a few ideas percolating. One is a heist film, the other a period drama.
For now, however, he says he is enjoying the relatively relaxed job of acting in other people’s projects.
“They tell me what to wear, and what to say and where to stand,” he says. “And I don’t care if the light is going down, it’s not my problem. No, but it is nice. It’s a nice kind of break. Directing, producing and writing and all that all at once is not something I want to do all the time. It’s a bit exhausting.”
windsorstar.com
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