ACTORS

*Raoul Ganeev

Not all actors have a history as colorful as Raoul Ganeev. Once a soldier in the Red Army, the Soviet-born actor defected on a 1991 tour of Canada – in Saskatoon of all places.

‘I knew nothing about Canada. I thought Canada was like the u.s. I knew it was an independent country, but I thought it was basically the same. Now I am here in Canada and I know it’s a completely different country with a different accent, eh?’

The classically trained actor found work initially delivering pizzas, then as a Russian dialect coach and as the Russian consultant on Vancouver-shot productions with Soviet scenes. Ironically, he acted in a variety of military roles, including that of a Siberian Gulag guard on The X-Files. ‘I can’t help it if I look good in an officer’s uniform,’ he says.

Ganeev gives credit for his love of acting to his mother, who worked as a tv director. In fact, Ganeev’s ultimate goals involve being behind the camera on motion pictures: ‘I think every actor would like to make movies one day.’

Ganeev has just wrapped production on Murder at the Cannes Film Festival, an mow that he says is ‘one of my biggest works so far,’ and which also stars French Stewart and Bo Derek.

Predictably, people acquainted with Ganeev who knew only the name of the film assumed the worst: that his character, ‘a chain-smoking movie director who thinks that he’s a genius,’ was the murderer ‘because you’re Russian and you have a goatee.’ (He’s not the murderer).

Ganeev snagged the role through a casting director he had met on other auditions, and is proud that the part was then altered to include a Russian aspect, rather than Ganeev finding himself selected for a Russian part, which is more typical.

Another big project in the offing is the Robert Simonds-produced Freddie Prinze Jr. vehicle Head Over Heels, set for a Valentine’s Day release next year, in which Ganeev has a large supporting role as – ahem – a Russian Mafia henchman. ‘I’ve seen a lot of these mean Mafia guys for real and it’s a kick to play one of them in a comedic setting…from a safe distance.’ Fiona MacDonald

*Michael George

When Michael George has nightmares, they usually involve Elizabeth Berkeley. Several years ago, in his very early 20s, George went to l.a. to work, only to return to his native Toronto, fearful of finding fame too fast and ending up like Elizabeth Berkeley in Showgirls: dead-eyed and ‘looking like she was reading off a cue-card.’

Finding fame too fast is a problem many would like to have so early in their career.

George himself admits his early success came fast. After only a year of stand-up, a performance at Montreal’s Just for Laughs Festival led to an nbc deal and a hasty relocation to l.a., where he lived next to Beverly Hills, drove a Mustang and decided the city was like ‘[outer Toronto suburb] Scarborough with palm trees.’

Of his return to Toronto he says, ‘It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. The Toronto entertainment scene is the best place to get a grounding, the best place to learn. I wanted to be more solid as a performer. I didn’t want to learn on tv. Look at Elizabeth Berkeley [in Showgirls]. That movie scared me.’

His Toronto homecoming culminated in a year-long interlude that provided him with the material for his new show, Stuck in My Mother’s Basement.

The one-man show includes eight characters – one of them a girl – all of them ‘in ruts, in some way not meeting their full potential. They’re all based on people I’ve actually met. I might have taken liberties with them, but I’ve got the essence of them. It’s my way of venting [about difficult people]. There are some people you just say ‘you’ve got to meet her, you wouldn’t believe it otherwise.’ It’s about understanding what makes that person different or odd and pointing that out and expanding it times 10.’

‘I’m feeling like I’m at a place where I’m pretty much ready to rock. I don’t feel like you could put me in a position where I’d feel out of control now. I don’t regret anything. If I choose to go back [to l.a.], I’d understand the game.’

Our Hero, his series set and shot in Toronto ‘about a stand-up who sucks at it,’ starts soon on the cbc.

www.mikegeorge.com Fiona MacDonald

*David Hirsh

‘The best actors are liars.’

In 1995, just a credit shy of finishing his u of t pre-law criminology degree, Toronto actor David Hirsh, who by his own claim must be a pretty good liar, took off for New York City where he stayed for three years and still maintains an apartment.

‘I said ‘fuck it.’ My poor parents were like ‘get your degree,’ but I really don’t need the degree hanging on my wall. I got what I needed from it, I just wanted to learn. I was sick of people going to university for professions. I just wanted general knowledge.’

Moving to New York was pivotal in his development as a performer. He says, ‘I moved to New York City and I fell in love with the world of acting.’

He also ‘lucked into’ a job assisting Kelly and Calvin Klein, which involved bringing Calvin up to 10 cappuccinos of exactly the right shade daily and ‘making sure people had a good time at the fashion shows.’

When not partying, Hirsh built a pretty impressive theatrical career and even tried his hand at producing, culminating in last year’s doc The Age of Dorian…in Workshop, which looks at a theatrical production from many sides.

And now he is behind another project in development, Love Letters to Hitler, which has its origin in actual letters sent to Hitler during the Second World War. ‘When the Russians came into Berlin, an American soldier recovered [the letters] and sent them home and sat on them ’til the 1990s. We found this guy on the Internet.’

When Rhombus Media expressed interest in optioning the letters, Hirsh traveled to Toronto to ‘work things out.’ Back in his old hometown, David realized ‘the amount of work [available in Toronto]. I realized there’s a lot I could do here.’

Since then he was done episodic work – on Nikita, Once a Thief and a Heritage Minute – a play, Love in a Thirsty Land, (in nyc) and an episode of Twice in a Lifetime, where to his delight he got to kiss Lesley Anne Warren.

‘I’ve had more success in New York, but this is my home country, my family’s here. I feel like if I can make it in Toronto, I can make it anywhere,’ says Hirsh.

‘There’s no real star system in Toronto. You have to really earn a place in this business before you get recognized, versus in America where they love new talent. Part of me wants to make it here. It’s a playground right now if I can take advantage of the things going on here.’

Hirsh has also just secured the rights to the Toronto staging of a play called Old Wicked Songs – a big hit in nyc and London. Fiona MacDonald

*Erik Knudsen

‘I’m coming soon to a theatre near you,’ says 12-year-old Erik Knudsen. Perhaps if the young actor had plowed back a couple of extra cases of creampuffs, he’d already be there.

Knudsen was the only Canadian chosen to audition with Bruce Willis in Los Angeles for the current big-screen, feel-good flick The Kid. In fact, Knudsen made it down to a ‘him or me’ showdown with the current star of the picture, Spencer Breslin.

According to Knudsen, the director was ready to cast him. ‘Every page is about a chubby kid,’ Knudsen begins. ‘The director liked me and wanted me, but the writer didn’t want to change every single page.’

Despite acting being a difficult business for a preteen, Knudsen has a surprisingly long performance history. Says the well-dressed actor: ‘When I was little I always used to perform. I used to dance like Michael Jackson when I was three years old. And every teacher I had always said I should get into acting, until, in grade five, my teacher phoned my parents and said, ‘You should really get him into acting classes.’ ‘

Knudsen’s mother, an aspiring actor herself, registered the young thespian in The Second City acting classes in Toronto. It was there that Knudsen was introduced to his agent, Faith Halman of the Sloan Talent Group. With Sloan, Knudsen’s career began to take off.

Over the past year, Knudsen has landed lead roles in several commercials, an mow called Blackout with Jane Seymour, and the television series Real Kids Real Adventures. He’s also had parts in the cable feature Common Ground, the series I Was A Sixth Grade Alien and the feature film Tribulation.

Articulate beyond his years, Knudsen informed Playback that he is no longer interested in auditioning for commercials. For him, movies are the most exciting.

‘Movies are fun because you get to meet a lot of people and stay with them longer.’

Apparently, Seymour was very impressed with the young actor during the Blackout shoot. As well, Knudsen describes Willis as ‘really nice. He’s just like a kid.’

Knudsen is aware that sometimes child actors’ careers peak before their voices change. With confidence, and an understanding beyond many actors twice his age, Knudsen hopes for the best and prepares for the worst.

‘Hopefully, I’ll stick. But for backup I like behind the camera, also. I have my own camcorder and video enhancer for sound and everything. Every day I film my [big] sister and [other] troubled teens,’ he says with the sly smile of a sibling rival.

Currently, Knudsen is trying to land a role in Ogopogo, a $25-million sea-monster movie to be shot in Winnipeg. Dave Lazar

*Asja Pavlovic

Canadians might not know Asja Pavlovic, but the Bosnian actress has been acting for years. After fleeing Bosnia for Vancouver in the early nineties, her acting career was at an end, she thought, and her first Canadian film role – in the award-winning My Father’s Angel – almost didn’t happen.

The role, which earned her a Leo, was pretty close to home – too close, Asja thought initially, concerning as it did the plight of a Bosnian refugee in Vancouver.

‘At first I thought I would not be able to deal with that, I would not go into the past. The script overwhelmed me. And I’d never auditioned for anything in my life; we never had auditions in Bosnia, so I didn’t feel comfortable about auditioning.

‘But the most important thing was whether I would be capable of dealing emotionally with things the movie deals with. It brought up memories from the war and I was not sure I would be able to dig into that. But I thought it could be something I should do to heal myself.

‘I’m very happy now that I decided to take that part.

‘My character was devastated by the war, mentally, physically, by all means. She’d been raped and tortured and couldn’t respond anymore with anybody else but herself. She stopped talking, stopped communicating with people. You can feel her pain by reading the script. You can feel how much is there that she can’t deal with. She’s deeply traumatized by what happened in the war.

‘I lived her life at that very moment. Even now it’s hard to talk over. When you start living that character, you feel what that character feels and she was there for me.’

Certainly Pavlovic’s life is close to that of the character’s – at one time a securely middle-class family, she and her daughter and husband arrived in Vancouver in 1993 with nothing, their money and possessions lost to the war.

‘Things have been unpredictable for us,’ she says. ‘We didn’t expect things in Bosnia to develop that way, so everything that came after that is something we hadn’t thought about at all, [like] moving to a new country and starting a different life.

‘I thought I would never be in any connection with my profession whatsoever [when I came to Canada]. I wanted to play a different role. It just happened, almost like magic. I met some people who knew people I used to work with in Bosnia. It was magic for me, because I didn’t expect them to know those people. So connections happened like that.’

Currently working as an associate director at the Carousel theatre in Vancouver, where she has worked since arriving in Vancouver, Pavlovic is not optimistic about working more as an actress.

‘I thought I gave everything I could in my mother tongue, and to express yourself in another language….Acting is very connected with the language, and to teach what I used to know is enough for me.’

She also feels the dearth of parts for accented actresses will stand in her way, although since My Father’s Angel she has done the movie Echo Lake. But as she says, those who have been through the war say, ‘If it is meant to be, it will be.’ Fiona MacDonald

*Alison Pill

When we speak, Alison Pill has just had a drama exam at school – which she has probably aced, given her prior experience. Not every 15-year-old schoolgirl has played the lead in nine film or television projects.

Pill, who has been dancing since she was three and working professionally since she was 10, attends a regular school that includes a program for ‘people with outside commitments,’ as she phrases it. Including those working 10-hour days on movie sets.

The Disney mow Pill is making now, The Other Me, has cost her so much school time she is in danger of failing gym, although the production’s sartorial payoffs seem to make it worthwhile: ‘I play the older sister of the lead character, her name is Allana. She dresses in a semi-gothic style, very creative, lots of clunky jewelry. It’s a lot of fun for everyone. Wardrobe is having a blast.’

And things are likely to get crazier from here: last March break was spent in l.a. running between meetings and auditions, including one for a Jodie Foster project that got down to three finalists before Pill was eliminated.

‘I’m really starting to work hard at getting more noticed and doing more features and getting more interesting parts. It’s very exciting. It’s great experience and I’ll always appreciate that training and pressure.’

Not that the pressure was too great: ‘I had so much fun because my sister was there; the pressure kinds of leaves when you think ‘Oh, I can go shopping.’ ‘

As for the future: ‘I have no idea, I’m kind of playing it by ear. I’m going to try whatever I can with whatever chances I’m given. I’m having the best time trying new things and playing new roles. What I’m really interested in is going full cycle round anything; working with totally different roles every time. I’ve been really lucky with the roles I’ve been given so far. I’ve played an autistic girl, a blind girl, a dancer, a singer.

‘I love playing emotional roles, a role with lots of different layers.’ Fiona MacDonald