April 09, 1999

By Sid Adilman

Toronto Star

TORONTO (CP) _ There were gasps at the TV Gemini Awards last fall when unknown Kris Lemche, looking younger than his 20 years, beat out heavyweights including Gordon Pinsent to win the best supporting actor award for a weekly series.

Lemche (pronounced Lem-key) won for his role as Perry, the farmhand with the slow-drawl and supposedly back-country Prince Edward Island accent, on Emily Of NewMoon. ``Who's this kid from P.E.I.?'' surprised Gemini attendees whispered.

In fact, he's the hottest young actor in Canada, with two of thecountry's most respected movie directors, David Cronenberg and Bruce McDonald, raving about him. ``He has a real star quality,'' says Cronenberg, who cast Lemche in a small but showy role in his latest movie, eXistenZ, which opens April 26.

``He's a really great actor,'' says McDonald, Lemche's director in Emily Of New Moon and new episodes of the offbeat Twitch City, now being shot in Toronto for airing next season on CBC. ``He's technically excellent, remarkable for somebody that young.''

Lemche looks like a teen with his peach-fuzz face and slight build (five foot six, 130 pounds) and he's not from Prince Edward Island. In fact, he'd never been east of Scarborough until Emily began filming in P.E.I. in the fall of 1996.

And he still lives with his parents _ his father owns a heating business, his mother is a public school teacher _ and his younger brother and sister in Brampton, northwest of Toronto, where he was born. Cronenberg, who had not seen Lemche's TV work, called him in for an interview after viewing>his audition tape for eXistenZ.

``He just leaped off the screen. He had this great jittery, naturalistic thing. Just a lovely performance.'' Once he was filming, Cronenberg says, ``he got even better, which is also a sign of a pro.''

It was Lemche's first movie role and he admits he was intimidated just meeting Cronenberg, never mind trying to impress the internationally renowned director. ``He was very excited, for sure,'' Cronenberg recalls. ``But he never lost sight of what the scene was about and that's hard to do, especially for a young, inexperienced actor.''

McDonald says Lemche ``understands how the camera sees him and he's comfortable in that arena.'' Marlene Matthews, the creator and former producer of Emily Of New Moon, joins the chorus of praise for Lemche.

``I saw electricity in his audition tape and fortunately for us that proved to be right. The camera absolutely adores him. He has star potential.'' Lemche was to be in only five Emily episodes, but after Matthews and company saw his rushes, they made him a regular.

The same thing happened to the young actor in what was to have been a one-shot appearance in the Nikita series. His character, a computer geek, was to be killed. But halfway through shooting the episode, the producers decided not only to keep his character alive but to bring him back for most of the season now being taped in Toronto.

Despite their admiration, Cronenberg and McDonald do Lemche someserious harm in their productions. In eXistenZ, he gets killed or so the audience will think. In Twitch City, Lemche's character is pushed out a window and later down stairs.

Rough stuff. And though Lemche says working with the two directors was a dream, ``it was hell, too, because I'm an insecure person.'' Lemche, who says he has always ``lived in my own fantasy world,'' dropped out of Grade 12 when he was 17.

``I was living in a totally different head space,'' he says, ``and I thought acting would be great for a living.'' His mother, concerned about his future, called his attention to newspaper ads placed by talent scouts. Through one of these scouts, he landed his first professional acting job as a regular on Fast Forward, a Toronto-produced youth comedy-drama series.

From that show, he acquired an agent who helped win him a role in one episode of the kids show Goosebumps. Then came Emily Of New Moon, for which Lemche developed a P.E.I. accent producer Matthews admits ``no one in Prince Edward Island recognized but it works.''

Lemche won his Gemini for Emily's first season, after playing in eXistenZ. He was so stunned when his name was called that his seat mate, Don McKellar, who also appears in eXistenZ and headlines Twitch City, had to jab him in the ribs to get him moving to the stage.

``Even after I'd won, no one recognized me,'' Lemche says. ``At the party afterward, photographers saw me dancing and asked what I was doing there, had I come with my parents who might have been nominated?''

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