Q & A
Article by SANDRA COULSON
Published in the LONDON FREE PRESS
February 16, 1999
The London
native has had a busy acting career,
but Power Play is one of the few ongoing roles he has taken on
It’s fitting that it is hockey that brought London-born actor Michael Riley
back to Canada.
Riley had been working in Los Angeles for eight years before he came back
last year for the lead role in Power Play, a CTV series about a fictional
NHL team called the Hamilton Steelheads.
“In a way, I miss the seasons,” says Riley from his Toronto apartment, not
long after the megacity dug out from the January snow.
“In L.A., it’s so perpetually nice, you kind of lose track of time. Eight
years go by pretty fast. If I don’t see leaves change colour, I don’t feel
like a full year has transpired.”
Riley, 36, was born in London and lived here until he was in Grade 4, except
for a couple of years when he was an infant. But it wasn’t until he was in
high school in Burlington that he latched onto acting.
A 1984 graduate of the National Theatre School in Montreal, he says, “One
of the first professional theatre jobs I did was at the Grand when Martha
Henry was there. I did You Can’t Take It with You with Heath Lamberts.”
Riley’s career has been remarkable for the range of roles he has played,
often in independent productions - “Everything from a dog to a serial rapist
to a cross-dressing opera singer,” he jokes. Critics have remarked
that he changes so much in the dozens of roles he has taken on, viewers often
don’t realize they’ve seen him before.
One of his most recent roles was as the son in Win Again, a CBC movie starring
Gordon Pinsent as a man returning home after being wrongfully accused of a
crime.
Besides breadth, Riley’s career also has depth. He has nine nominations
or awards for his performances, most recently a nomination at last week’s
Genie Awards for best supporting actor in the movie Pale Saints.
“Every character I pick up is so exciting because it’s a totally different
thing,” Riley says.
Most of his acting experience has been in one-shot roles: a guest star,
a movie, a play. An on-going role in a series is a rarity for him.
“The idea of playing one guy over and over again for potentially a long
time was a bit scary to me. So all the criteria about how well the writing
was and the creative (side) -- all that had to be in place.”
Riley’s Power Play alter ego, Brett Parker, may be the lead character of
this comedy-drama, but he’s no hero.
“He’s a pretty dysfunctional guy,” Riley cheerily admits. “That was my premise.
I have to make him someone who can eke out interest over the long run.”
Parker’s story is that he was a hot-shot sports agent in New York who was
only too glad to leave behind his home town of Hamilton. But through an extraordinary
series of circumstances, he finds himself as general manager of the Steelheads.
Despite himself, Parker ends up using every weaselly manoeuvre he’s ever
learned to keep others from moving the team to a richer market in Houston.
“He’s so self-blind . . .,” Riley says. “He’s unaware that he has built
this facade.” But Parker’s good side keeps peeking out from behind
the facade. “Ultimately, there has to be charm to him. That’s the trick.”
Despite the mania for hockey in Canada, there have been few TV series about
the sport.
Now that Riley has been on the inside, he thinks he knows why.
Once a week, a crew and actors go to Copps Coliseum in Hamilton to film
game footage. The “crowd” consists of about 50 extras who shuffle around
the seats and are later multiplied into a crowd using computer graphics.
“There’s no way you could fill a hockey arena with 20,000 once a week,”
Riley says. “It would just be way too cost prohibitive. It wasn’t until computer
generation technology caught on that we could do it.”
But he says there’s more to Power Play than hockey. “I think it’s where
hockey is a backdrop. It’s not about hockey; it’s set in hockey - a
mythical backdrop for this guy’s slow and reluctant journey to redemption.”
Then Riley laughs at how pretentious this sounds for a series that pulls
its cast of eccentric supporting characters right off the sports pages: the
daft owner (Pinsent), the manipulative president (Kari Matchett), the home
town hero team captain (Dean McDermott) and the flaky goalie (Normand Bissonnette).
Riley is waiting to hear whether the series, which pulled in about 750,000
viewers a week, will be renewed for a second season. “It would be interesting
to go again” with the character, he says. If it does, Riley will be
making a more permanent home in Toronto.
But as he says, “The actor’s life is a fairly gypsy life. . . . I want the
freedom to go where the work is.”