Up Close and Personal with the Extraordinary Mackenzie Gray

Last week I had the great pleasure of talking with one of Canada's most colorful and talented artists, Mackenzie Gray.

MH: So Mackenzie, can you tell us a little bit about yourself.

MG: all right, I'm an actor, a director, a writer, a producer, a musician, a composer, but mainly I'm an actor. I do all those other things because I can and because I like to. I started acting in high school. I didn't take theatre arts, instead I formed my own company because I wanted to do it my own way. I left school in 1976 and went right to England to study drama because I felt that was where I should go.

I was given some great help to become an actor, when I was a teenager, from two great people; Christopher Plummer and Sir John Gielgud. My dad was friends with Gielgud, and my uncle was the founder of the director's guild of Canada, had been in the theatre through the 40s, and knew Chris Plummer.

Christopher Plummer was doing Cyrano de Bergerac and I went to see it. I had a letter of introduction and he took me back stage at the end of the show and made all these other people wait. I had a poster of him as the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo and I wanted to get him to sign it. He was really generous, lovely and fun.

He looked at me and said “So I understand you want to become an actor. From the letter I've been given it says you're very serious about it. Tell me this...” and he looked me right in the eye and said, “do you need to be an actor?” I said, “I don't know if I need to be an actor, but that's all I want to do” and he said, “Well that's a start. Because it's a calling, a profession, and it's a life...”
and he'd committed to all of those things earnestly and fully, “...and if it's a hobby you like to do once in a while because it's fun, go into community theatre and have another life and don't crowd a very tight space unless you're serious about it and really want to do it. You'll find that out over time, but if you want to do it and you're serious about it you've got to commit wholeheartedly to the highs and the lows and you'll have to do many other things, other jobs to support yourself. There's no point doing it unless you need to do it and it's in your blood, in your veins and you can't really live without doing it. Are you prepared to make that commitment?” and I said, “I think I am.” and he said, “I look forward to sharing a stage with you some day.” He shook my hand and he held my hand really tightly and said, “you're going to do very well.”

He was quite terrifying, because I was only 14 or 15. I asked him to sign the poster and so he signed it for me, wished me luck, and off I went. That changed my life. The fact that he looked at me with these intense eyes and dared me and challenged me to become an actor and be serious about it. I was hell bent for leather, I was all over it, and I told my parents, who were very excited for me.

I kept that poster and still have it. I framed it and it's up on my wall. It reminds me of a huge kick start to becoming an actor.

A few years later when I was 18 John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson came to Toronto to do Harold Pinter's No Man's Land. My dad knew Gielgud and wrote me a letter of introduction and so I got taken back stage. I was stunned by the play. I'd never seen Pinter on stage before. It's weird and it's odd and it's challenging.

Ralph came out and was very theatrical and signed my book. He couldn't get the pen to work because he was used to fountain pens. He said, “this is a wonderful pen but it's no good.”
And he'd ask for another pen but nobody wanted to give them their pens because he kept throwing them away.
John came out and he asked me which picture I wanted him to sign and I said Hamlet.

He said, “So I hear you're going to go to RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art)” and I told him I was doing my audition in a couple of months. He asked me if I'd picked my thesis yet and I told him I'd picked my Shakespeare but not my contemporary pieces yet. He said, “You should do a piece from this play. It won't be done. It hasn't been done. It's just been published.” He said hang on a second went away and came back with his copy of the play and gave it to me. I still have it.

Then he asked me what Shakespeare I was going to do. I said Hamlet. And he said, “Very bold. Well, let's have a look at it.” I said, “Here?” He said, “Yes, I'll have a look and give you some pointers. That's what your father asked me to do.”
I can't believe my dad asked him to help me. I just wanted to meet him.
I said, “Well, I don't know...” and he said, “My dear boy, if somebody asks you to act and you are an actor, you should act. I'm willing to look at it.”

So we're back stage in the Royal Alexandra Theatre and I started doing Hamlet. I was so nervous I have no idea how it came out, but he stopped me and he said, “My dear boy, Hamlet doesn't have a skull facing him the whole time.” Then he went through the whole speech, from memory, line by line, giving me pointers. He just gave me this incredible direction.

I went away high as a kite, just out of my mind with this direction.
So from the age of 14 to 18 I had two of the greatest actors in the world, through pure privilege, give me a kick in the ass to become an actor.

When I went to RADA I did No Man's Land and they laughed. They thought it was funny and I was so unprepared for it I stumbled and I got lost and had to call for a line. It was ok. And then I did Hamlet and there was this silence after I did it and they asked me if I'd played Hamlet before. And like an idiot, instead of saying “No, but John Gielgud coached me,” (I'd probably have gone straight into the school), I said, “No, I just read it in school.” They took me aside and said, “We think you're very good but you're not ready to be here yet. You need to go and live some life. Do some plays, come back and give us something to mold.”

MH: What was the first job you got?

MG: Acting job? I did a film for a friend but it was just for fun. It wasn't a real gig. But I got a gig with the BBC. They were training young directors and they got actors to work with them. Then I got into a company called the Irish Circle Players. I played a stalk Englishman in an Irish play in an Irish Theatre company in London. That was my first real gig, doing I Know Where You're Going.

MH: So you've had a cross culture of film and theatre from the very beginning.

MG: yes, the film was a glorified student film but the BBC and the Irish Circle Players were real gigs.

I didn't get into RADA. I auditioned two more times but the auditions didn't go well. I spent the next three years kicking around London doing plays with small companies or training, and living a life. I packed about ten years into four. I worked in Harrods, went on crazy trips, just soaked up life. But I felt like I wasn't getting anywhere, so I got a job at the Royal Court Theatre.

I was so frustrated that I walked in and said, “I want a job. I need to work in the theatre or I'm going to kill myself.” They started to laugh and I said, “I'm serious!” and they said, “Is it desperate?” and I said, “No, I mean I'm just, I'm dying. I'll do anything. I'll sell icecreams, I don't care.”

They said they had a young company and that I could join but I'd have to work in the theatre as well. “We'll get you into plays and while there are plays being rehearsed you're allowed to attend the rehearsals and watch what's going on.” I said sign me up.
I had many great experiences there. I got to watch Samuel Beckett direct a play. Peter O'Toole and Ian McKellen were there one night.

When I came back to Canada it was to make money to go back to London. But when I got here I ended up going to the University of Toronto to get properly trained. It was an amazing place to train. You were always acting because all the student directors could only use you for their plays, so I think in three years I was in 21 plays. And in my fourth year I directed.

While I was in Toronto I got a call to audition, on tape for a series that was shooting in Vancouver, and that they needed someone who was versatile. So I went to a studio and took a hockey bag full of costumes and did each line with a different costume. I did this crazy audition where I did twenty characters in a minute and a half. I sent in my demo tape and this audition tape, and they hired me. They ended up casting Tim Curry as the character I'd auditioned for but they had this role for a hit man so they dropped all the actors and they hired me.

For about a week I didn't know, I didn't breathe, I didn't know what was going to go on. I was doing a thing with the Director's Guild for fifty dollars, and that was my last fifty dollars. Then my pager went off and they told me I had booked the lead on the series.

It was Monday and my agent said I was to start the coming Wednesday and would be getting $17,500.00 a week, a $5,000.00 signing bonus, a relocation fee, and five percent of the merchandizing. My life changed literally in that ten seconds.

I'd been doing a play in Toronto just before that, Bloody Poetry playing Lord Byron, and then here I was, a lead on a US series. It was a great way to hit town. Vancouver was at its height.

I was invited to be a guest star in other shows when I had a hiatus. I did a show with Larry Sugar and ended up being in almost every series he did.

I just started to make a career in Vancouver. Largely a television career, very little film. I really missed doing theatre, but theatre was a closed shop. I did small productions with friends but I wasn't getting to audition at the Playhouse or at the Arts Club.
The Studio 58, the University of Victoria, it's a very tight family and they have been together for years , and there's nothing wrong with it, but it's not open to new people.

There's a point where you get niched in Vancouver. It was healthy in one way because I was making a lot of money doing well with all these shows, but I really missed doing theatre and I missed doing feature films.

Television was satisfactory to a point and it's really rewarding financially, but even that started to change after September 11th, and after the threat of the SAG (Screen Actors Guild) strike. Everything shut down in 2002 and it was devastating for many many people.

The industry came back but it changed fundamentally. There were no more Canadian guest stars and there were more Americans coming up to satisfy SAG and keep them happy. We were not being strident about our things and so we lost our way, lost our directors, we lost a lot in that period between 2002 and 2004, 2005 when the industry kind of picked back up.

For a lot of actors their whole income just changed and went down and it was a very difficult time.

So some years later, Michael Scholar Jr. called me and asked me if I wanted to take part in The Black Rider, directed by Ron Jenkins a Canadian genius director. I was very honoured to be asked so I jumped in. It changed my life.

It was the most demanding, hard, crazy, creative, thing I ever had to do. I had eight days to learn the whole part and go in. When we opened at the Arts Club I was so nervous my legs were like jello. I love that feeling. I love being nervous and feeling scared. And I love when you conquer it and you get through it and you have that great success. There's nothing like it.

So that brought me back to the stage and it got me to the Arts Club, which had been a closed place to me, through the back door. That's really how you do it in Vancouver I guess.

Then The Black Rider took me back to Toronto where we did the Tarragon Theatre. It was a massive success. In Toronto you can mix film, theatre, and television because all three are equally represented.
When I left Toronto a month ago there were sixty plays on the go.

MH: what was your favourite role to play?

MG: I have a few favourites. Stage favourites, film favourites, and TV. I loved playing Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show. It was like being a rock star for four months.And I loved playing Lord Byron in Bloody Poetry. But I think my favourite stage experience was doing The Black Rider. It was demanding on every level.

As far as television, I loved being a hit man on The Net. I love a thing I did called Welcome to Paradox. It was a wonderful role. And I loved playing Skotos in Voyage of the Unicorn. He was the king of the trolls. He was like a belligerent coward and he was great fun to play. The director told me once “think of him as Mick Jagger and Mussolini crossed together with a coward inside.” I had so much fun doing that role.On film I had a wonderful role called Strip Search. The character was called Lawrence Durrell. I based Lawrence a little on Tom Waits and various other character, but it was a beautiful role to play and it launched my career in Hollywood. The film was uneven, but the role was glorious to play.MH: Let's talk about the industry in Vancouver.

MG: What we don't have in Vancouver is a domestic film industry. We have webisodes coming up which are being made, we have a service industry from the Americans but that's all changing. We don't have our own films. We have tons of indy filmmakers coming up but they have nowhere to go. There's no infrastructure to let them develop what we need to keep us all working.

Certainly the industry has changed with all these pretty twenty-somethings getting all the jobs all the time. It's been a great time to be a pretty twenty-something. It's not been a great time to be a talented seasoned fifty year old or forty year old even. There's been a lot of that going on, and god bless them they need to work those kids, but now even that's changing and they're out of work.

Actors don't know what to take anymore. I took two lines in a Terry Gilliam film because it was Terry Gilliam. I'd have walked across with a bullhorn, I'd have done anything. I ended up having five days.
They were special effects days.

I got to work with Terry, Christopher Plumber, Tom Waits, Jude Law, Verne Troyer. I got to direct the extras because Terry was having a hard time with them. And because I had just done The Black Rider, I was able to talk to Tom Waits. It was a glorious experience. Two lines,
and I made thousands and thousands of bucks.

I did a major lead part opposite Daryl Hannah. It was reduced money, I had twenty pages of dialogue, fifteen scenes, and we shot it in one day. It was an insane day. It was all expositional dialogue and half the things I was saying were all the same and it was enough to drive you nuts. It was a crazy day.

Twenty pages, fifteen scenes, lead role, one day. Versus two lines, Terry Gilliam film, five days, and I had the time of my life.

You don't know what to take so now you take everything. For actors the choices have changed. Some actors can ride through it. There are many Vancouver actors doing well, like John Cassini who's very popular in many things. He's riding that wave.
But for a lot of actors, you don't know what to take so you just take everything. Choice is no longer an issue. You've got to take it because you've got to work.

There's very little work. For three months before the Olympics where there will be no shooting whatsoever, and when it comes back it's going to be sporadic to begin with, and you're going to have thousands of actors all available. So a lead actor like me, or whomever, when we're available and they're offering principle roles, we'll take those.
That means the guys who are the principals have to move down to the day players, the day players move down to extras. It trickles down.
It's not good. No one's moving up and there's no room to move up.

The question is, how do we protect our industry. How do we make it open up again so we're not dependent on the Americans. God bless them they still come here and they give us work, but they're not giving us the same work they used to. They're bringing up more Americans because they can get them on cheaper contracts. Even putting them up at the Sutton Place Hotel they're getting them cheaper than we are.

There are no rules anymore. It used to be you could only have so many, and below a certain amount of lines you couldn't have an American. That's all gone. It all got changed to appease SAG and keep everyone happy, so we need to develop our industry but we can't when there're budget cuts.

The BC government is now doing this 92% budget cuts. They're cutting all of the arts so there'll be no theatre, no music, no dance, no film work, no development. They're freezing the tax credits for the film industry so no one will advance here because they can get better tax credits in Ontario where there's a full strata of actors, crews, and new studios.

Manitoba has a better tax credit than B.C.. Toronto matched Montreal. And now the provinces are saying you have to pay taxes in that province a year prior if you want to work there. I was born in Toronto and maintained a home there but I hadn't paid taxes there so I wasn't eligible for certain projects. I had to have filed my taxes in Ontario.

Everyone's tightening the belts so there are fewer places that actors can go. We used to be able to travel and move back and forth. Not anymore.

They're tightening the screws so there's less work so we have to create our own work where we say those rules don't apply. In order for that to happen we need to think, we are giving our money to the tax credits and the tax credits are being awarded and yet actors aren't tied into that.

Actors should be tied in to the tax credit. If you want the tax credit, if you want all that money back, you've got to have this many principles roles, this many guest star roles, this many supporting leads in the film, and they have to be Canadian.

It's not like we're offering them dreck. We're the best actors in the world. We're trained thoroughly here. We're trained fully because of our universities and our drama schools. The Americans come up here and they're always knocked out at how much training we have.
We have terrific actors who are honest and they know how to act. There're beautiful girls and wonderful handsome guys and interesting actors and we have everything they could possibly want.

For years it took even beating our own people into submission. The MPIA (Motion Picture Industry Association) used to go down to L.A. and they talked about the locations and the great studios and the post production facilities in Canada, and they never ever mentioned the actors.

We had to lobby and fight with them and say “Why didn't you mention the actors? Are you afraid of SAG? What is it? You've got to say we're part of it, we're as important as the mountains and the rivers and oceans and the post production facilities and the studios, and all of that. The actors are one of the biggest selling points here.” We don't do it. At least we don't say it enough.

We need to create our own stories. People say Canadian films aren't commercial. They're all about dysfunctional families and weird things. Well think of all the films that aren't getting made that could be getting made if we had the means. There are hundreds of comedies, light dramas, romantic comedies, there's every film imaginable right here in B.C., Ontario, wherever.

We don't have the structure to let them be made. We've got to find that way and everybody will start working again. If it means that we have to take less money to keep working then I guess we'll do that. We've done it for the Americans, why not do it for ourselves.

UBCP had a waver program for years and they cut it. Indy filmmakers used to be able to get a waver to use union actors. It took us a year and a half of fighting our own union, lobbying, having committees, and fights and arguments, and finally they brought back the waver. And they worked out a way to make it reasonable and where they could protect the membership, which was what their goal was.

I've had a great career, and I continue hopefully to have a great career, but this year has been my worst. I've been an actor for 33 years, and I worked three days this year. That's scandalous. It's not because I've done anything wrong or am any less of an actor, it's what the industry is demanding. There're more actors out of work, looking for work. It's a dwindling pool and there're a hundred million people trying to get in that pool. So it's tough for a lot of people right now.

As an actor, for me personally and I think I speak for many actors my age, just when you think you finally get it, that you know how to act, you've got your chops, you've got your professional skill, you know how to use the camera and keep your camera and know how to deliver, and you're at the height of your powers, and you can't get work, it's a really devastating feeling.

You have to remain positive. If you give in to the doom and gloom and think you'll never get work, you never will. You have to accept that every job is a job and you can make it worthwhile, and you should make it worthwhile, if you have two lines or two thousand lines. The thing is to start accepting the change and through that good things will come. It's a bit of going back to square one.

We need to ask the government to make these tax credits linked to acting. Go to the union to ask them to push for that because the union has the means to do it. But I also think we should demand of the union to make it possible to do as much acting as possible and to encourage people to write and to get in on projects with people who say “I want to make a film,” and find a way to make it.

Things can change.

Half of what's on TV right now, to many people, is crap. There's great TV like HBO and Showtime and things like that. How do we make more of those shows. I don't know how actors can affect that or change that except to say we don't want to be in those things and we don't want to watch them. But no actor right now can afford to say they don't want to be in them. If they can then god bless them because they're doing better than everybody else.

moot or hooey?
Mackenzie used to write for Sesame Street

Paul Lazenby and the MMA in Vancouver

Today I had the great pleasure of sitting down with former Canadian Mixed Martial Arts champion, undisputed Canadian Muay Thai champion, stuntman, actor, pro wrestler and broadcast journalist Paul Lazenby, to get the scoop on Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), and what they could mean to a city like Vancouver, soon to be in the spotlight of the world.
MH: Could you tell us a bit about yourself and what you're involved in at the moment.
PL: For the past nine years I've been a professional stuntman and actor in Vancouver. I'm currently working on The A-Team, and stunt doubling for former wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin on his movie. It's something I kind of fell over backward into after leaving a career in pro-wrestling and it's been a hell of a lot of fun. It's beat the hell out of me at times, but it's been a lot of fun.
MH: Could you tell us about your fighting background.
PL: I actually went into fighting with no intention whatsoever of being a fighter and I got into it extremely late. I originally wanted to be a professional wrestler.

When I was 23 I was a competitive power lifter and a strongman and I loved pro wrestling so I wanted to do that, so I kind of hammered away at that. I went to Calgary and learned how to be a pro wrestler at the Hart Brother's Pro Wrestling school and did that for a few years and got to travel around the world.

I always wanted to wrestle in Japan and a couple of times it almost happened but it fell through. Then I met an agent in Detroit in 1996 when I was wrestling on a show there and she said she wasn't booking wrestlers but she was booking real fighters.

I'd been watching bootlegs of mixed martial arts shows from Japan. MMA at the time was much more advanced over there than it was over here so I knew a lot of the names and faces and recognized the organization she was talking about. I lied to her and told her I was an experienced fighter and didn't really think much about it. I filled out the application form and thought that they'd look at it, laugh at it, and throw it in the garbage because they'd never accepted a Canadian before.
A month later I got a call from the same agent saying pack your bags you're going to Tokyo.

Without any prior experience in wrestling, martial arts or anything, at the age of 28 I had my very first fight in front of 10,000 people in Tokyo. And I guess I lost in an entertaining fashion because they immediately invited me back the next month to stay at their school in Yokohama for a six week training camp, contingent on me fighting the world champion four days after I got there. I kind of jumped in the deep end as a fighter.
MH: What was that experience like for you.
PL: I loved going to Japan. It was fantastic but at the same time it was frustrating because I developed physically a lot faster than I did mentally. I don't really have the same mind set as a lot of the other fighters. It takes a lot more for me to gear myself up mentally to go into a fight and I was fighting world class guys right out of the gate. As a result, I lost my first six fights in the process of learning how to be a fighter. I finally got into the right mind set just after moving to Vancouver from Ontario where I'm originally from. Then I got into kick boxing as a world mixed martial arts and started winning fights after that.
MH: How young were you when you first realized you wanted to be a wrestler.
PL: I was always a wrestling fan as a kid. I wasn't allowed to watch it so I'd sneak out of my parents' place to watch it. I always loved pro wrestling as a kid. I always say I had my mid-life crisis at an extremely early age because at 23 I remember I was working as an assistant manager in a department store and really hated my life. Aside from power lifting, from which you make no money, I didn't enjoy anything about what I was doing, and was thinking “I don't want to be here in ten years.”

Then I saw an ad for a pro wrestling school, The Hart Brothers' pro wrestling school, in the back of a wrestling magazine and a couple of very good friends of mine, Carlos Leal and Kristel Vines, actually lent me the money because I was completely flat broke. Carlos even drove me from Ontario to Calgary. That's how I got off the ground as a wrestler. That was all I wanted to do. I never wanted to fight for real.
MH: Can you describe some of the styles of fighting you do now.
PL: The two styles that I focus on now are pankration and muay thai kick boxing. Pankration is the original name for mixed martial arts, the name under which it was contested in the ancient Greek olympics. That's the style that my trainer Chris Franco teaches. I combine that with muay thai training, which I also do with Chris, and that's Thai style kick boxing which, in addition to punches and kicks, also involves the elbows, knees, and standing throws.
MH: What styles of fighting are within pankration?
PL: The word pankration loosely translates as all powers which basically means that you use every weapon at your body's disposal. Pankration fighters in the old days were allowed to do pretty much what we're allowed to do in MMA today: punch, kick, elbow, knee, take-downs, and grappling techniques on the ground.

MMA or pankration, has kind of become a style in and of itself. In the old days of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) one guy would stick to the rules of karate, one guy would stick to the rules of boxing, one guy would stick to the rules of wrestling, but that style versus style stuff has kind of fallen by the way side. Everybody is now a true mixed martial artist, they mix techniques from all of the martial arts together, to one style that's kind of a stand alone.
MH: Right now, who would you most like to fight... besides Aleks Paunovic?
PL: That wouldn't be a fight, that'd be an ass whooping! Aleks is a wimp (laughs).

Who'd I like to fight? That's easy. Shortly after I won the NFC (National Fighting Championship) mixed martial arts championship I found out that the knee pain that I'd been suffering from for the past few years was due to having no ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) in the knee at all. I'd had no idea.

So I scheduled knee surgery, and about a month before the surgery I went to another NFC event and a guy named Dominic “the Nightmare” Richard knocked his opponent out in six seconds and then grabbed the microphone and called me out. It made me seethe.

I couldn't fight this guy because I had to get this surgery and it would be a year turn around time afterwards. I've been sitting on that for a few years and I'm getting to the point where I think my next fight will probably be my last, so if I've got to pick one guy to fight it would be Dominic. I want to put that one to bed. He might knock me out, I might knock him out, but we've got to settle that.
MH: What do you think of the bid to include the MMA in Vancouver?
PL: I've been at the forefront of that fight actually. I was one of the delegation who spoke to City Council when they were considering banning it in 2007. Unfortunately they'd made up their minds before we even got there. And ever since the ban was enacted I've been fighting to get it brought back.

I'm a huge proponent of having MMA brought back to Vancouver, especially considering the fact that the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) have displayed a strong interest in holding events here.

In Montreal they've set the precedent for what the UFC can do for a major Canadian city. They make roughly 50 million dollars long term, every time UFC comes to town. Nobody needs to tell them that Vancouver needs money, with all the money they're spending on the Olympics, so to turn down a cash cow like this with all the facts being in on how relatively safe MMA is as a combat sport, it would be unconscionable and I can't see city council under the mounting pressure doing anything but approving it, and doing that soon.
MH: Could you please elaborate on the safety of the sport in comparison to other contact sports.
PL: Absolutely. MMA gets a bad rap because when it was first introduced to North America it was marketed as a blood sport and it had far fewer rules than it does today. In it's current incarnation as a sport that's sanctioned by athletic commissions, and with a very ridged rule structure, it's safer than a lot of the other major sports out there.

A couple of years ago Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine held a study that concluded that it was more than twice as safe as professional boxing and that the injury rates, while roughly equivalent, showed that most of MMA injuries were hand injuries and most boxing injuries were brain injuries.

And the fatality rates speak for themselves. I'm a big fan of boxing, but the boxing fatality rates are astronomical, and in MMA sanctioned competitions I believe there have been two or three in the last decade. MMA is safer than horse racing, car racing, football, and boxing. As contact sports go, it's one of the safest sports out there.

moot or hooey?
If Vancouver opted to hold the MMA, they'd balance out their Olympic debt in three days of matches.