Mutant X Interviews: Tom McCamus (9/02 Ground Control)


Tom McCamus: Ground Control Exclusive 9/8/02 *Property of Ground Control.

Tom McCamus Interview
Balzac’s, Stratford, Ontario, Canada
Sunday 8th September 2002
The GC Crew: Fiona McKenzie, Rosario Holsen, Robert Kyde & Henry The Bear

Ground Control: Height?

Tom McCamus: Height? I’m 5’10. I think I’m 5’10. Oh, I’m 5’10, 5’11. 5’11 I think. I’m almost six feet. I haven’t measured myself in a long time.

Ground Control: Taller than us! How do you feel about us interviewing you? About having fans? You looked moderately startled when we started mobbing you at the stage door!

Tom: (laughs) Yes. Well, I don’t do a lot of television. That’s the first time I’ve done it. Mostly I do theatre, and I do some film stuff. When you work at a place like this you have fans, but usually they’re a lot older, in their sixties or something, and people who have seen a lot of theatre will come up and say how much they’ve enjoyed you over the years and stuff. But to have younger fans is a different kind of thing. Classical theatre doesn’t make a lot of younger fans. A lot of films I do don’t have any, but television’s a different thing. So it’s a new thing for me.

GC: Two other people that we know from the Mutant X forum have been to see your plays. One guy went to see Richard III and another person went to see both of the plays you’re doing, and we got very good reviews from both of them. You were asking me “why the website?” well most people interested in your work at the moment that I know of have just seen you in Mutant X.

Tom: Right.

GC: But they’re saying “OK, we’re interested in this guy – what else can we go see about him? But all your films are a tad obscure, especially if you’re not in Canada.

Tom: They’re obscure in Canada too! Any Canadian film is obscure.

GC: This is true. So basically there wasn’t a lot about you online, or there were sentences about you in various different websites, so we just pulled it all together. And we got a lot of positive feedback about the website.

Tom: My family really likes your website a lot.

GC: We heard that! Paul was supposed to give you prior warning that we were going to assault you at the theatre.

Tom: Who? Oh, my nephew, Paul, yeah. Oh, I see, because he wrote into it, didn’t he?

GC: He wrote into my guestbook.

Tom: Well I think it’s a good idea. It’s something a lot of people do. People say “do you know there’s a website on you?” and you go “oh, that’s interesting”, and I don’t have a website, so it’s interesting and I check it out.

GC: That’s the great thing about the web. You can compile information without having to go to the library and sifting through pages and pages of microfiche or news or whatever, and then we get to the point where we’re sitting here and talking to you. Trying to figure out what on the website is complete lies, but I don’t think anything is.

Tom: No, it doesn’t seem to be. The stuff that I’ve seen. My brother tells me it’s how he figures out where I am, by going to your website.

GC: OK – idols. People you try to emulate, or admire? Anyone?

Tom: Who do I emulate? Martha Henry who’s directing Richard III is someone I admire both as an actress and a director. I have a lot of friends that I work with that I admire – Stephen Ouimette who’s directing the Threepenny Opera, Brent Carver another actor here who you saw in Shadows. A lot of Canadian guys. I’m a Canadian person. I like to see all these people. I like a lot of actors that I watch in movies – Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, John Hurt, Helen Mirren – people like that who I’ve always admired. Most of my inspiration comes from the people that I work with and the people I know in my community.

GC: What about Olivier? If you’re doing a role like Richard III which has a definitive version – even Alec Guinness did it here; Stephen Ouimette did it here. Do you look at what they’ve done or just ignore them?

Tom: No, you don’t ignore them. I saw Stephen do it, I saw Alan Bates do it when I was a kid. I saw Brian Bedford do it, a wonderful actor and director. So you can’t ignore those, but I don’t go and get the movie to figure out how to do it. You do that afterwards, after you’ve found your own thing and deal with it and afterwards you can watch other people on television or film or something.

GC: When I was watching Richard III on Thursday, during the interval someone came up to the usher who was standing next to me and asked the usher to explain who the hell everyone was!

Tom: (laughs) Well I guess you know the good way to do it here is that you see the Henry VI part one and part two, so if you see those you get the history of it. It’s a good opportunity. A lot of people have done that. But yeah, it’s pretty complicated and political.

GC: And they all have the same names!

Tom: I know. They all have the same names. And then they change the names depending on… Richard is called Gloucester and everybody has about three or four different names.

GC: Can I ask my weird action figure question?

Tom: Yup!

GC: If there was a Tom McCamus action figure, what would it be wearing and what accessories would it have?

Tom: I don’t know. Uh… I guess it would have to be a Mutant X figure so it could have a wig – maybe it would have interchangeable wigs, interchangeable glasses. He doesn’t do a lot of action, Eckhart, he’s not an action kind of guy. Everybody else has all that stuff.

GC: Special glare eyes?

Tom: He’d probably have a desk that he sat behind. That could be his thing. And getting punched.

GC: I was really impressed by that. When Emma punches you and you go straight back. It’s everybody’s favourite scene! There’s a thread on the Mutant X forum “What’s your favourite scene?” It keeps coming up.

Tom: My favourite scene is the spaghetti scene, you know where he’s eating spaghetti? That’s one of my favourite scenes.

GC: Ad-libs! There’s a scene where you’re lying back there with your eyes closed and an agent comes in and you just say, “I’m busy”. It’s the height of arrogance! Was that an ad-lib or was it scripted?

Tom: I can’t remember. I ad-lib some things. The one where the lights go black and I go to the woman “Keep your hands to yourself” or whatever it is, that was an ad-lib. It was at the end of a scene and they kept it in. But I think the other one was scripted. Who knows? I don’t do a lot of ad-libs, but every once in a while you do it just to try and make people laugh and they decide to keep it in.

GC: We wanted to ask you about the episode you did with Chick. I don’t know if this is true, but we were watching it and thinking that you guys are definitely cracking up.

Tom: We didn’t crack up too much. I had a good time. It was great to do that with her. There was a couple of times where she would do something and on the other side I would look like I was laughing because I could see that she’d made a mistake or I’d made a mistake or something like that, but no, we weren’t laughing.

GC: How did that happen? Was it just coincidence?

Tom: Well, a bit of both. They’re always looking for new people and Chick’s an actress in the city and they brought her in. She auditioned for it and they liked her, and they thought it would be fun to have the husband and wife do something.

GC: It was definitely interesting to see someone who could stand up to Eckhart and not get thrown in a stasis pod.

Tom: I know, she doesn’t get that. She was hoping that maybe she could get a job as maybe the person who cleans up around the place.

GC: You had to play at one point Emma playing Eckhart, and then in the dreams episode the guy Henry playing Eckhart, so how do you deal with that?

Tom: You do it a bit differently. You’re a little bit aware of it. There’s a couple of other ones too, where Adam plays Eckhart. So you put a little bit of their personality in, or you maybe play… I mean, he’s not exactly a subtle character Mason Eckhart anyway, but maybe you play him a little less subtle. There’s just a subtle awareness, just a look or something. I know when I played with the kid, when I was being Adam, that there would be a point where Mason had a little bit of concern for the kid which Mason never would but Adam would, so you just pick up on one thing.

GC: How was it being in a TV show for more than one episode?

Tom: I like it, it doesn’t have to be boring. I had a good time. It was a great crew of people to work with. I didn’t get to play a lot with the other actors because all my stuff was in the evil guys’ place.

GC: Do you actually know who Forbes March is?

Tom: (laughs) Yes, I do. They’re around sometimes when I’m shooting, they’ll be shooting other scenes. But I didn’t get to know them the way that they all got to know each other. They were all really nice. I saw Victor – he came down to see the shows here. But yeah, I enjoyed doing it, and it was mainly because of the people that I worked with that I enjoyed doing it. It was a lot of fun. Playing an evil guy’s a great thing to do.

GC: Were you disappointed you didn’t get to do any action with all the wirework and special effects?

Tom: It’s pretty tedious when they shoot that stuff because they have to shoot it in really small little bits. It takes forever to do it. It looks great when it’s done but while you’re doing it it’s boring. I got to be there at the beginning of a fight or the end of a fight so I got to watch them do it, which was fine by me. But it’s fun to watch. The wire stuff is neat. I did a bit in the last episode, and that was a bit of wire.

GC: Speaking of special effects, I wrote an essay on Possible Worlds, because I study Film, and I ended up doing an essay on surrealism. So I did it on the dream sequence in the lighthouse. There was a shot in it that I just don’t know how it was done, and I’d love to know. You’re standing inside the lighthouse and there’s a pan across into what looks like a mirror and then you’re in a black room with holes in the walls and then you walk out.

Tom: It starts off when I come through the door, right? And then it pans, and as it pans off me, and pans on those kids, and all of a sudden you’re in the other room?

GC: Yeah.

Tom: I just ran. As soon as I knew the camera was off me, I ran (around the back) to that spot. He’s fantastic – Robert Lepage who made that film. If you’ve ever seen his theatre stuff, he is an incredible man. His sense of illusion and his sense of… He does a one-man show that’s filled with that stuff.

GC: You just did another film with him, didn’t you?

Tom: I’ve been working on a script with him. I’ve been back and forth in Quebec City for the past year. We’re improvising a new film that we were going to shoot in the winter but that didn’t happen, so hopefully we’re going to shoot in the spring. But he’s an incredible man.

GC: I need to catch up on his French-language films.

Tom: Yeah, they’re fabulous. Nô is wonderful. He’s a wonderful filmmaker. And Tilda Swinton, she’s a Scot.

GC: Yeah, I’m seeing one of her films at the Toronto Film Festival. A new one called Teknolust which looked like being interesting.

Tom: Oh yeah? She’s a wonderful, lovely lady. I really liked her. But yeah, she’s Scottish.

GC: I didn’t realise that. I didn’t even know who she was until I saw Possible Worlds, and I saw her in The Deep End. I watched that with my boyfriend. He didn’t get it.

Tom: No? (laughs)

GC: We have to ask him about the Amish thing. In “Ayn Rand” there’s a scene when you’re taking your girlfriend into the apartment and you’re saying “this is my closet, this is my bed”. She says “can you dance to this” and you say “unless you’re Amish”.

Tom: Oh yeah. That was a while ago. Well, I think the Amish don’t dance, right? You know the Amish? Do you know what the Amish are? It’s a very strict religion. And I think that part of the religion is you don’t dance. I think that’s the reference, what it was intended to mean. Like, this is music that anyone can dance to, and the only people who can’t are the Amish who have a religious thing so you’re not allowed to dance.

GC: Next time we watch that, we will appreciate it more! I have to ask you about Norman’s Awesome Experience. Was it? You never talk about it.

Tom: Well, I was in Argentina for two months so that was fantastic. It was the first film I’d ever been in so I didn’t know an awful lot about making films. It was not a great film, but there’s not a lot of great films. It keeps getting shown all over the place because it was a Canadian film at one time so it has Canadian content. Normally you do a film like that and you never see it again, but this film keeps getting shown. But it’s not a great film. However, I had a great time making it.

GC: You looked like you were having a good time.

Tom: It was a lot of fun. It didn’t work, the whole thing. It should’ve been more of a cartoon than it was. Who knows why that is? There’s so many things that go into making a film that it’s amazing when anything comes up that’s good at all.

GC: I read that the director was fired?

Tom: Well, yeah. When he came back and had something to do, and the film was taken away from him. But I’m not too sure about all the politics at work. We were going to do reshoots and they didn’t want to do the reshoots and got somebody else in to make it something else other than what he wanted it to be. Who knows? I’m only one of the actors so I have no idea what the politics are. But it was fun to make. Argentina – what a beautiful country.

GC: I Love A Man In Uniform. Was it odd doing that, playing an actor who’s rapidly on a downward spiral?

Tom: Oh, it was great. David Wellington, who made the film, he wrote it too, he’s fantastic. He’s a fantastic director. That was, for me, when I actually started to enjoy making movies. Before I didn’t like making them at all because I’d rather do theatre. He made me like making movies because he made me see the whole journey. We didn’t shoot it in sequence, but we kind of did. We kind of started at the beginning, then once in a while we’d do a scene later on and then we’d go back and forth but for the most part we finished with the end and started with the beginning. So it was a really interesting journey. We created the guy as we went along. It was a great one.

GC: How did you get involved with that? Did you audition?

Tom: Yeah, I just auditioned. The woman who was the casting director read the script and thought that I’d be great for it so she introduced me and we met at David’s house and I guess he just liked me right off. I read for him a couple of times.

GC: You didn’t have to audition by doing the audition scene, did you?

Tom: No (laughs). I enjoyed that movie. I still like it. We shot it like ten years ago now. I watched it a little while ago. David made a really nice movie.

GC: I’m a writer, so I was fascinated by the script. You’re in pretty much every scene and I tried to replicate that for an exercise and it’s so, so hard. Was it hard not having anyone else around, just talking to yourself?

Tom: We would do a lot of those all in one day, like all the stuff in his apartment we shot over a series of a couple of days. In fact, we probably did four days during the day and four days during the night. Another day you do the bank stuff. So every day there’d be a new person and then we’d go to when he’s just by himself, so you get intense like that.

GC: So that was your best film making experience?

Tom: Yeah, that was my favourite because, like I say, it was the first time I liked doing it. Some I’ve liked better than others, but that taught me how to enjoy making films.

GC: I thought it was interesting that after playing Henry playing a cop you played a couple of other cops. How do you get the cop roles?

Tom: Well I think some people do that. They see you playing a cop and they cast you as another cop.

GC: You seem to get cast as very very good people or very very bad people. Like cops, or the gangster in The Spreading Ground.

Tom: Yeah, the gangster. I haven’t seen that one actually.

GC: It’s good. There’s this really good actor in it called Tom… something. It was interesting that they used the filtration plant they use for the Genomex exteriors in that film.

Tom: Yeah. A lot of people in Toronto use it because it’s such an incredible building. It’s really interesting inside too.

GC: I wanted to go and see it, but they’re not letting people in it after September 11th in case we blow it up.

Tom: Ahhh. But it’s a beautiful building. You can walk down there. Just go down to the beach and walk along and you can see it from the outside. And there’s a great book about the building by Michael Ondaatje. Great book.

GC: What was your very first acting job? In school?

Tom: Well, not a job you get paid for, but I grew up in London and there was a guy called James Rainey who’s a wonderful director and he had a - we called it the Alpha Centre where he would put on plays and he did a lot for kids. I did a play with him. I think I played the taps of a sink or something.

GC: So you were acting from day one?

Tom: Well I didn’t want to be an actor, I wanted to be a writer actually. When I was in high school I did a lot of theatre stuff but I always wanted to become a writer. So it wasn’t until after high school that I decided I wanted to study acting. I wrote science fiction – I was a big sci-fi fan. I always tried to write a science fiction novel. It never worked. And then I wrote some poetry. I still write plays and stuff like that.

GC: Do you think you’ll ever do one of your plays?

Tom: I don’t know. We’ll see what happens. I’ve got a lot of plays that I’ve written. But I write really great characters but there’s really no reason for the whole play because it’s a different thing when you’re an actor. You go moment to moment. You don’t necessarily look at the overall of something. And that’s what it requires to be a writer.

GC: What other jobs have you had other than acting?

Tom: Not very many. I worked in a bookstore. I loved that. That was when I left high school. And then I worked for the post office. And I was a dishwasher in a restaurant. That’s all the jobs I’ve ever had in my life. I’ve been lucky.

GC: What blocked you from writing? You just didn’t think you were any good?

Tom: I just got involved in acting and right now that takes up all my time. But I think that’s what it’s about. You have to be able to commit yourself to say for so many hours I’m going to do this, and if you don’t get into that routine then it goes. And I just haven’t been able to get myself a scheduled time of writing. I think that’s what stopped me. Also I thought I was never very good at it. I would read someone who was very good and say “who am I kidding, I can’t write”. So I do write for my own hobby.

GC: Would you ever do directing? Like Stephen’s doing it this year.

Tom: No, I don’t have any desire to direct. I don’t think that way.

GC: You don’t need the power?

Tom: I don’t think people do it for power. I don’t really know why, but I don’t have the need to do it. People want to do it because they want to control something. If you’re an actor and you’re in a play you could think that this play could be so good but it’s not because there are so many problems. If you’re a director you figure that you could control the vision of it. But I don’t believe enough in my vision to want to do it.

GC: If you could play any character, who would you play?

Tom: I’ve always wanted to do a Thomas Pinchon book on film. But I don’t think that would ever be allowed. Usually what happens is when they give me the character that’s when I find out how much I like them. I never say I want to play them. Well, I did for Richard III. It’s a great play, but you don’t realise how great it is until you start to play it.

GC: I saw one of the Stratford books which had a passage on you and Stephen. It said that you were at a weird age because you’re too old to play Hamlet but not old enough to play Prospero or King Lear. Would something like Lear be an ambition?

Tom: It depends whether I continue to do Shakespeare. I never wanted to do Shakespeare when I was younger. That wasn’t what I wanted to be at that point, but I find myself acting in it because here in Canada we have these two major festivals where you get to work so you learn about doing the classics. I’m as surprised as a lot of people are that I’m playing all these big Shakespeare parts. So if I continue to play, yeah, you want to play the Prosperos and the Lears. But I can’t tell what’s going to happen. Maybe I’ll quit acting and just live on my farm and be a farmer.

GC: Nah. We would haul you back in front of the camera. We found in your portrayal of Richard that there was a lot of black humour, but also a vulnerability about him. We wanted to give him a hug.

Tom: The thing with Richard is he’s a cripple. And there’s a whole thing about people who have disabilities in how they cope with society and some of them get very angry, but some of them create that self-deprecating thing because they figure that if people are going to say bad things about them they’ll say more bad things about themselves and try to protect themselves. I figure that’s a good way to do it. It also means that by the time he gets to be King, it’s a surprise. How did he get to be king? Nobody really takes him seriously until he’s there. And then – pow – things start to come out.

GC: The thing I really liked about this production was that Richard really came across as being the pesky little brother.

Tom: Well he is, he was the younger one, so he had to get rid of everyone else so he could become king.

GC: We were discussing that because of the fact that Richard is the youngest of three brothers, and everyone has children, it’s so hard for him to become king that in the end it isn’t about Richard, but the people who help him.

Tom: But he’s smart enough to know how to do that. As he says to Buckingham, “I’ll go by you.” As soon as Buckingham’s there you notice he doesn’t say very much. He’s in the back but he lets Buckingham do all the work until he gets to be king and it takes off. He’s a very smart man.

GC: Threepenny. How do you feel about the singing in that?

Tom: Well I’m not a big singer. I’ve never been a big singer.

GC: The only other time I’ve heard you singing was in Norman’s Awesome Experience.

Tom: (laughs) And that was really bad! No, I played King Arthur in Camelot here a number of years ago. That was the first time I’d ever done a musical and I enjoyed it. We’d intended in this production to do it with more people who were in my position, like they can kind of sing but basically are actors. But because of the situation in this place we ended up having all people who could sing beautifully. So I end up feeling… Like Susan Gilmour. What am I doing in this play with someone who can sing like that? But I enjoyed it, it’s different. It’s not supposed to be beautifully sung. It’s more about the story and the intent of it. So I didn’t mind doing that.

GC: What kind of knife did you use? A butterfly knife?

Tom: A flipknife, yeah. It’s not a butterfly knife but it’s based on the same thing. It’s got three pieces.

GC: There have been a lot of scandals around the Threepenny Opera. Were there discussions about toning down the play?

Tom: No, we tried to do it as best we could. When he wrote it, when it was done in the thirties, there was a lot of political stuff in it, but it was a reaction against a certain type of theatre. So if you’re going to do that, it’s now an accepted thing. How do you do something that’s accepted but the reason that it was done was to go against something? So Stephen tried to find different ways to make it different than it was expected and he seems to have achieved that. We got good reviews – a lot of people really like it and a lot of people really hate it so I think it’s achieved what it set out to do. If you’re doing something that was revolutionary which has now become part of the canon then it’s a real thing to be able to shake someone.

GC: How do you feel about playing morally ambiguous roles like in The Sweet Hereafter?

Tom: I just play the guys I play. It’s better to play people you don’t agree with so you can stand on the edge and see them, and you can create them. If you’re playing something that’s closer to yourself, it’s harder to see all the elements of it because it’s too much you. When you’re playing somebody that totally isn’t you, it’s easier to do all the shades of him.

GC: I have another question about Possible Worlds. There’s a scene when you’re underwater, tangled up in ropes. How did you do that?

Tom: It was in a swimming pool. I had to learn how to scuba dive. So I went for a couple of weekends and they gave me a crash course in scuba diving. And then what I do is I go into a big diving tank. I go to the bottom with the tanks on, wait, and they had a viewing window in the tank and that’s where they shot. And then at a certain point I take off the tanks and the mask and just swim to a certain part and stay there. And we did that for a whole morning. But when I come out of the water, it was at the end of October, November, so everyone else was wearing Parkas, it was that cold, and I was in the water. And Tilda and I had to shoot that whole scene. It took the whole day to shoot that scene. And the whole scene is I’ve just come out of the water, and I’m dripping wet, right? Everybody’s freezing, and before every scene they’d (throw water over him) so I’d be soaking wet. So we’d be freezing, do the scene, as soon as we’d finished we’d stick our feet in hot water just to keep us warm. So I drank a bottle of brandy at the end of that.

GC: (much discussion of how excited we are to be meeting Tom)

Tom: I’m that way with authors too. Authors I go ga-ga for. I’d never met Michael Ondaatje before. He’s a lovely man. Chick worked in Louisville, Kentucky. She had a great time. And there’s just that echelon of actors that has to do with the whole Hollywood thing and that’s a whole other thing. But in the United States there’s a whole group of people that just work in the regional theatres. They just do their job and they’re really good at what they do. A lot of the time they’re much better actors than a lot of the people that are stars. That’s a different thing. That’s someone putting their personality on film. A lot of their privacy is taken away from them. Some people believe that because you are that way you don’t have any right to personal privacy. So I think that’s where they become guarded and that’s understandable, because there’s no reason why anybody in the public eye should not have the right to their own privacy.

GC: How do you feel about working with people like Dennis Hopper and Rob Lowe and folk like that who are Hollywood stars?

Tom: It’s not so much them. It’s more the way that other people treat them. That’s what I find a lot. Especially in Canada you get a lot of American stars. A lot of American stars no one’s ever heard of! They do a couple of television shows, but they come in here and they’re treated better than anybody else. It’s not necessarily them who demand it, but other people do, and that’s the problem, instead of people treating them like regular human beings, and if they can’t take it that’s their problem. But Dennis Hopper was great. People were saying “oh, he’s going to change that”. Before we did it people were saying “oh, he’s going to change your lines” but it wasn’t a great script, so it was fine and the changes he made weren’t wrong. I had a good time with him, actually. He was fine. Rob Lowe was good. I spent a lot of time with him actually, we’d go to restaurants.

GC: I really liked that movie.

Tom: It’s not a great movie, but it could’ve been. The problem you see is you know who did it too early, I think. I think you shouldn’t know until the end, until my character tells him. Then it would have been interesting.

GC: I didn’t get it at all the first time around because I thought the scene which reveals everything was a dream sequence, because he’s reading the book his friend gave him, and I thought it was just that his friend thought he had done it.

Tom: That’s interesting. Yeah, that’s okay.

GC: I have to say I really loved Amos Turzo’s name.

Tom: They called me Amos Turd-zo. That’s what Rob called me. You know I haven’t seen the guy who played the part of the young guy, he went out and became a private investigator, he was great.

GC: Joseph Griffin?

Tom: Yeah, he was great. I never see him. I don’t know if he’s doing anything else, but I thought he was a really good actor and a nice guy, so I don’t know what he’s doing now. I’m not usually on a day off I usually go back to my farm but we have to go to Shaw. Christopher Newton ran the Festival for years. I was there for eight years and this is his last year and they’re having a great big… everyone who’s ever worked at the Shaw Festival is going there to hang out tomorrow for a picnic.

GC: So what’s your next project after Stratford?

Tom: I’ve doing a film, a dance film, Death and the Maiden. The Schubert Death and the Maiden. I’m playing Death in that. It’s not something I’ve done before. It’ll be very hard to film, I guess. I don’t know what she’s going to do. But we’re shooting that for a couple of weeks. And then I don’t know. I’m trying to get Novecento up so I can do a longer run than three or four days. I’m hoping to do Robert’s film. And a couple of other people are talking to me about some film scripts. I’ve spent a year doing theatre so I want to do some more film now for a while.

GC: You did an amazing amount of stuff while you were doing Mutant X.

Tom: Yeah, that was the great thing about doing Mutant X. Because when they asked me to do it I said “I can’t… well, if you allow me to do all my other things.” So they worked around my schedule which was great. It was easy. Sometimes I’d just go in and shoot all my stuff in a day or two days at the most.

GC: In Richard III, you know when you’re pricking your hand with your knife? That’s a total Blade Runner moment! (Roy Batty putting a nail through his hand).

Tom: Is it? Oh yeah. I hadn’t even thought of that. I love that movie. I just tried to figure that the way that he stopped it was by pain. It’s kind of a metaphor for… something. I also wanted to find a way to keep that knife. Because with the fight scene we figured that that was how they were going to kill him, with that knife, so I had to make sure that they knew that the knife was in the boot. So every time I had an opportunity I’d take it out to set it up.

GC: This is a weird one, but what’s your full name?

Tom: John Thomas McCamus. John Thomas is a toilet or something, isn’t it?

GC: What’s your family background?

Tom: My Mum was a university professor. My Dad was an accountant, and my brother works for the government. But they’re great. They’ve always supported me in everything I did. They come and see all the plays I do. So, a good family background.

GC: Where do you get your blood from? I was looking at the picture of you in the programme and you looked Roman.

Tom: I’ve got Irish from my father’s side, but that’s a long time ago. My mother’s American from New York. So there’s nothing exotic or anything.

GC: You know the big Shakespeare poster with all the photos? We were staring at that for ages and there were pictures of you as, I think it was Coriolanus? You were in military fatigues.

Tom: Yeah, that’s Coriolanus. I had really really really short hair. I didn’t know that’s in that. I only saw one. I saw one with Martha. I’d better check.

GC: The film Trinity – was that in London England? Because I assumed it was in London Ontario?

Tom: No, London England. I stayed in downtown London and we shot it in an outskirt of London. Really low budget. It’s how I got the Mutant X part because the people who had money in that film Trinity were CanWest Global. In order to do it they had to have certain Canadian contacts, so I was a Canadian contact. Because of that, the people when the Mutant X people were looking for an evil guy, said look at this guy because I looked kind of the same. My hair was really short and blond and then they coloured it white. And he was an evil doctor so they said this is the guy we want for Mutant X so that’s how I got the part.

GC: Trinity hasn’t been released yet?

Tom: No, it hasn’t. I don’t know what’s going to happen to it. There’s all sorts of different versions of it. I just saw the girl that was in it to try to find out what was going to happen with it. It’s a weird film.

GC: Did you know there’s a cut version of Man In Uniform running around?

Tom: Yeah, when he blows his head off you don’t see that. I think it’s an American thing. Also, it’s not called I Love A Man In Uniform, it’s called A Man In Uniform because they didn’t like the homosexual connotations to I Love A Man In Uniform.
(Tom finally makes his escape)
Well, it’s been great meeting you. Have a good trip!

GC: (finally let him go) Thanks!!!

© Ground Control