May 6, 2013
The GazetteMay 4, 2013
By Pat Donnelly
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A Pipe Dream for Jay Baruchel
Playing Sherlock Holmes allows the Montreal actor to reacquaint himself with the stage, and to have the home advantage.
MONTREAL - No sleuthing is required to detect why it’s almost impossible to snag a ticket to Sherlock Holmes at the Segal Centre. Everyone familiar with the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is eager to see what our homegrown film star Jay Baruchel will do with the starring role.
As for Baruchel, noted for his work in films like She’s Out of My League, Million Dollar Baby, The Trotsky and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, he’s delighted to be working within easy commuting distance from his NDG home. In Hollywood, he’s fair game for gossip columnists, autograph hunters and photographers seeking a candid shot. But at the Segal Centre in Montreal, he’s just one of the gang preparing for the premiere of a new play about an iconic detective.
The Ottawa-born, NDG-raised Baruchel, a proud Canadian who insists he’s happy to pay his taxes in Quebec, made time for a quick interview this week while wolfing down a veal sandwich and fries during his lunch hour.
The last time Baruchel performed live on stage was “a while back”, he recalled. He was a 17-year-old student at FACE high school at the time. His professional career, which began at the age of 12 with youth-appeal TV shows like Are You Afraid of the Dark?, then Popular Mechanics for Kids, took off quickly. Now, at 31, Baruchel’s substantive resume includes screenwriting (Goon) as well as acting. (And yes, he’s single again, having recently broken up with fiancée and fellow actor Alison Pill.)
Given that Baruchel’s latest, soon-to-be-released film, This Is the End, is about a group of celebrities bonding as they face the apocalypse and their own imminent deaths, it was unsettling for him to discover, on his first day of rehearsal at the Segal, that the playwright Greg Kramer had just died.
“It was a strange foot to start off on, I’ll tell you that much,” Baruchel said. “But it just gave us that much more reason to be as good as we could because this was sort of his last hurrah. It was an unpleasant, morbid way to start things. But I think it has informed things in a pretty good way. I think there’s a sense of importance that permeates the whole thing, because of that.”
Looking back, there was something uncanny about the project from the get go. Baruchel cited “a strange kind of synchronicity” that struck when he first met with Segal Centre artistic producer Paul Flicker two years ago.
“When I went to meet him for our first preliminary talk, I happened to be, coincidentally, reading a bunch of Sherlock stories,” Baruchel said. “I had found this great old play from the turn of the century by this guy (William) Gillette, which was the first Sherlock play, in the 1890s (co-written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it premiered in 1899). When I met with Paul, I said, ‘What do you think of doing a play about Sherlock Holmes?’ And he said that’s really weird, ‘I’ve literally just today commissioned Greg Kramer to write a Sherlock play.’ ”
From that moment on, it was clear to both of that Baruchel should play the title role – even though the casting was definitely not to type, or not to old-school type.
Dressed for our interview in a black Nirvana T-shirt that revealed the tattoo (of his mother’s maiden name) on his right arm, Baruchel bore no resemblance to Basil Rathbone or William Gillette or any other actor who has portrayed the classically defined fictional British detective in films, but fell in nicely with the modern interpretations by Robert Downey Jr. in the film reboot, as well as by Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller in PBS’s Sherlock and CBS’s Elementary, respectively.
Still, a fictional character is a fictional character. “I’m on the younger end,” Baruchel admitted. “But it’s kind of neat because it’s informed the whole cast. The whole cast is now late 20s, early 30s. So it’s a younger Moriarity, it’s a younger Moran, it’s a younger Watson, it’s a younger everyone.”
And just about all of them, except for Karl Graboshas, as Watson, whom Baruchel met on the set of Goon, are members of the Sidemart Theatrical Grocery company as its artistic director, Andrew Shaver is directing.
Baruchel admires Shaver’s edgy style: “He’s incredible. One of the best directors I’ve ever worked for in any capacity.
Since Baruchel and Graboshas have been hanging out together since Goon, “One of the appeals of doing this was getting a chance to work together again,” Baruchel said. “Both he and I had fears about what it’s like to enter into someone else’s thing. Because they’re all accustomed to working together and they have their own shorthand and stuff. But it’s actually one of the things that served us the best. Because they accepted us the day we showed up. And then it was only the positive aspects of working with a group of friends.”
Baruchel did not read the entire Conan Doyle canon in order to prepare: “Oh God, no. That’s lunacy,” he exclaimed. But he did a lot of research and reading of the stories because, “I wanted to get his voice in my head as much as I could. He talked a very specific language. And I wanted those words to make sense in my mouth. I took inspiration from all sorts of different places. I had my work cut out for me because I haven’t been on stage for a very long time. So it requires flexing different muscles than one uses in TV or movies.”
But that was part of the attraction. “I knew that it would force me to relearn stuff. Or to learn I’d never learned in the first place. And so I played around with this character in my head for the better part of the last two years. And I thought that I knew who he was. Then we got to rehearsal. And that’s when this whole other dude came out of me completely. And so, it’s a work in progress now and it will be until the play is over.”
One thing that made it easier was that Baruchel felt a “strange affinity” to Sherlock: “We’re both sort of odd birds who go to the beat of our drum. I’m a homebody and he’s a homebody. My mother calls me the absent-minded professor. There are certain things that I excel at and there are certain things that I’m just piss-poor at, pathologically, not unlike Sherlock.”
He said Kramer’s script isn’t based on any single Conan Doyle book. Rather, it’s “an amalgam of the stories but also trying to weave in the actual through-currents of the society at that time. Opium figures into our play a great deal: the opium debate, the opium bills — all those different things which were very much part and parcel of being in London at that time. There’s references to Jack the Ripper as well. ”
Is there a mystery to be solved? “Oh, very much so,” he replied. That’s elementary.
Sherlock Holmes, by Greg Kramer, based on the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, begins previews May 5 (Sunday), opens May 9 at the Segal Centre, 5170 Cote Ste. Catherine Rd. Ends May 28. Tickets, $39 to $61. Call 514-739-7944 or visit www.segalcentre.org