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May 2009 

Return to Table of Contents May 2009

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Interview: Scott Speedman
Speedy Comes Home

Toronto’s Scott Speedman fought for a role in Atom Egoyan’s Adoration — and not just because he’d be able to hang out with old friends after shooting had wrapped


By Marni Weisz

Scott Speedman didn’t wait for Atom Egoyan to offer him a role in Adoration. Instead the Toronto-born star of Underworld and TV’s Felicity chased down the script and convinced Egoyan to strip 15 years off one of the central characters so that he could play the role.

 

Why? “He’s one of the guys I really wanted to work with,” says the 33-year-old actor during an interview at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

 

Adoration tells the tangled story of Simon (Devon Bostick), a sensitive teen who’s been living with his uncle Tom (Speedman) since losing his parents. Exactly how Simon lost those parents is the film’s central riddle, and the narrative jumps back and forth in time trying to solve it. When Simon writes an essay claiming his father was a terrorist who packed a bomb in his mother’s suitcase it sparks a controversy that quickly gets away from the teen thanks to his suspiciously motivated French teacher (Arsinée Khanjian). Meanwhile, Tom, a well meaning but weary tow-truck driver, struggles to be a father figure.

 

Dressed casually and sporting a beard like the one he wears in Adoration, Speedman is listening to a message on his cellphone when he arrives for our interview. “It’s my mother,” he says sheepishly. “She saw me on Canada AM and is very excited.”

 


Scott Speedman (left), Arsinée Khanjian and Devon Bostick

Atom Egoyan loves it when the audience is confused, and this movie’s no exception. Was it the same for you as an actor?

“I had to read the script three or four or five or six times and fill in major gaps. As an actor I had to do the whole history. One scene’s here, the beginning of the movie, but it actually takes place five years before the next scene, you never know that in the script, so it’s the same as for the audience…. You have to give over to the feel of the movie rather than it being spelled out for you at all times, which I like, but it’s not comfortable all the time and some people just don’t take to it, some people want to be spoon fed. Some of the story structure stuff confuses people and leaves them with a bad feeling therefore they don’t like it [laughs].”


What’s your take on your character, Tom?

“I saw my character as a pretty damaged man, a man with a lot of secrets, a man with a lot of guilt, a man whose life, in a way, is over before it really gets started. And not just because he becomes a father at such a young age to this kid, I mean because of whatever abuse he had put on his shoulders at a young age with his father.”

 

You went after this role, rather than waiting to be approached.

“That happens, I get offered a fair amount of things and most of them aren’t any good. Anything that I like, I usually have to fight for on some level. There are a lot of good actors, a lot of well-known people who are all sort of feeding for good parts. I got the script, it was written for an older man, it was written to be played by a 45-year-old. I really thought it would be interesting if he was 20 when he inherited this kid instead of 30 or 35, I thought it would be more dramatic and then I got to convince Atom that that was the case.”

 

Does it feel different to shoot at home in Toronto?

“Yeah, absolutely. It was actually really nice. Making movies is always stressful. It’s really fun to be in Berlin or something making a movie, but it can also be pretty isolating. My best friends are still in Toronto, so it was nice, when you’re done with the day to be able to walk off the set and walk to see my friends…. I’d rented a loft apartment on the west side, on Queen Street, Queen and Ossington area.”


Do you live in L.A. fulltime?

“Yeah, I live outside of Hollywood, I don’t live in Hollywood, I live on the East Side of town in an area called Silver Lake, which is, you could say, like the Lower East Side of New York. Not a lot of actors in my neighbourhood, which is really nice.”

 

You came to Toronto early to work on the character with your very first acting teacher, David Rotenberg. Tell me what that was like and what sort of exercises you did together.

“I flew up here probably three weeks before we started shooting. I wanted to hang out with the kid [Bostick], and get to know the kid because I’m about as far away from a father as you can get [laughs], and then I wanted to learn how to be a tow-truck driver. And I was studying with [Rotenberg] privately on a daily basis.”


So he taught you how to be a tow-truck driver?

“No, he has a warehouse where he has a couple of cameras and we would work on the character and do the scenes.”

 

Do you often work with a coach for a movie?

“Yeah, if the material demands it, I like to be prepared. You know, in these movies you don’t get a lot of time, everything’s moving pretty fast so you have to be on it, you can’t be finding the character on set. You can be exploring but you have to be ready to go.”  


Marni Weisz is the editor of Famous.

 


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