by Peg Hill

It might be OK to call Maury Chaykin a character (I didn't put it to the test), but you open a lengthy debate if you inquire whether it is accurate to call him a character actor.

“I don't know,” he says while photos are taken of him in my sister's backyard in Toronto. “Would it be accurate to call me a leading man? Or would it be accurate to call me a leading character actor? I don't know. That's all so involved in ego stuff. Some people really get involved in it.”

He seems to shrug off the issue but then turns it around and lobs the question back at me. “If you can accurately define 'character actor,' I can answer your question.” I suggest it is someone who is in several films playing a supporting role, but who does not carry the film.

“Well, in that case I am a character actor in those films that I play a supporting role and I am a leading actor in those films that I play the leading roles. My question would be, `Are you a character actor more than a leading actor?' And I'd have to say that if you count the films that I've done in which I've played supporting roles and count the films in which I play the leading role, then there are more character roles.

“But then, you know, it's just words.”

Chaykin concedes that my line of work is all about words, but he continues: “It's a question that brings up categories and slots -- I don't perceive myself as having a career, so I certainly don't perceive myself as a character actor.”

So how does he perceive himself? “I perceive myself as someone who is an actor by profession and is asked to do various things and makes choices based on different things in different times in my life. And if that equals a career, you know to call it a career that's something for other people to do, nothing for the way I see it. `My career' -- it makes me shudder. The whole idea.”

DIDN'T UNDERSTAND THE ART OF WAR

Whether or not his body of work comprises a career, at age 51 he has racked up a long string of eclectic choices over the years, including a decent lawyer in Mystery, Alaska with Russell Crowe; brief appearances in The Mask of Zorro and Dances With Wolves; an unforgettable starring role in Whale Music; and the title character in Canada's Sweetheart: The Saga of Hal C. Banks.

Most recently, he was in this summer's Hollywood thriller The Art of War, starring Wesley Snipes. He hadn't seen the completed film when we met but he asks me whether I've seen it, which I had. “And you had no idea what's going on?” he asks in his deadpan way of speaking. “Because I really didn't. And I told (director Christian Duguay), `I love the character but I don't understand the script.' So he tried to explain it to me and I still didn't understand it.” Chaykin laughs. “But I said I'll do it and I'll have a good time.”

He says he didn't relate strongly to the political thriller aspects of the film -- and it is a challenge to follow the trade politics between the U.S. and China -- but he did like the director very much “and he really wanted me to play this part. And I thought this character (of Capella, the New York police detective) was wonderful because he's very much outside the realm of the political thriller. He's just a cop.”

The quirky mannerisms of Capella were set in the first shot of Chaykin, when he dumps several packs of sweetener into his coffee and stirs the hot liquid with his finger without flinching. The audience cracked up, and I tell him so. “Really? I should see it.” Another funny scene has the super-fit Snipes questioning how Chaykin's character is still on the police force when he's not “regulation weight,” to which Chaykin replies he's “on probation.” It was an amusing way to explain how the overweight actor could be cast in such a role. Told that his character was entertaining, he says: “Good, that's all I wanted.”

Of working with Snipes, Chaykin doesn't fall into the Hollywood habit of gushing about how close all the actors became on set. He found him to be “very professional and very pleasant to me. (But) not the kind of person who I connected with other than on a professional level.”

To cover more ground in the hour that we had for the interview, I asked him for reaction to various films and television shows he's been on. Here's an edited version of his responses (see Our Picks for reviews of some of the films Chaykin has been in):

THE ADJUSTER

“The Adjuster was one of my favourite film experiences. (Director Atom Egoyan) and I had such a wonderful collaboration with that character. One of the amazing things about Atom is that he inhabits his characters. He also lives inside of them the way an actor would so that when he speaks to you about the character, whispers something, it's almost as if his voice is inside of you as the character as opposed to less-inspired directors who whisper things that completely throw you off right before you do the take.

“One of my favourite scenes that I've ever done on camera is in that film. The character I'm playing poses as a (film) locations manager and he's taking pictures (in the main characters' home) and they want to know what the film is about, so he sits down and tries to be extremely cordial and polite but he's actually someone who's planning his own suicide and the demise of his sister.

“It's very much my sensibility.”

*****

LEXX: THE SERIES

Chaykin played a cannibalistic, oversexed hillbilly called Pa and his sadistic twin called Daddy. “Ironically, I found that Susannah was pregnant and I was going to be a pa (of a now toddler daughter, Rose) right when I was doing that show.”

The Halifax-made show's cartoonish characters and excessive sexual innuendo make it pretty silly. Having grown accustomed to seeing him in quality, independent films and strong supporting roles in Hollywood movies, I tell Chaykin I was surprised he bothered to appear in it, especially as such an over-the-top character.

“I don't have any dignity. It's too much to hold dignity. .... You know we're not always dignified. I think that as an actor and as a person ... I'm happy that I did it and I had fun doing it. ... If I can have fun doing something, that's more important than preserving the dignity that I feel Maury Chaykin should always have with his roles. I think in fact that dignity is not something that serves an actor. There are actors that I watch and they are always very dignified and they always play dignified roles and they always keep their cool and I don't find that particularly interesting.”

Paul Donovan, the executive producer, “is an old friend of mine from Halifax who I started doing independent films in the early `80s with in Nova Scotia, which is how I was introduced to Nova Scotia, that beautiful province.

“The role got me to Nova Scotia. It has nostalgic value for me to go back and work with Paul and work in Halifax and to work on something light, silly.”

****

DUE SOUTH

The two characters he appeared as “were a bit misconceived. ... Well, the first one (Pike) was a character that they kind of wanted to be a regular character. In actual fact I don't know the politics of what happened, nor do I care. But I had a contract to do two of them (episodes) and for whatever reasons -- and I really doubt it had anything to do with me -- they chose not to continue that character. ... I worked just one day, just that scene in the car ... talking non-stop ... posing as a cab driver but he's really an FBI agent or something and he knows everything about both characters (Fraser and Ray). And then after a three-minute tirade with each of them he dumps them out of the car. It was quite amusing. ... And then they came up with this other episode, this Mojo Rising thing, which was interesting because I learned a bit about voodoo. ... The shooting of it was kind of uninspired. I forget who the director was. ... I enjoyed the voodoo chanting and apparently did them quite well.”

****

COLD COMFORT

As the interview gets under way, Chaykin mentions the 1989 Canadian film Cold Comfort in which he plays a tow-truck driver with a teenage daughter and Paul Gross plays a travelling salesman who becomes stranded and is entrapped in their strange relationship.

“The director had a very different vision of the material than Paul and myself. It was a bit of a struggle in terms of interpretation of the whole character of the film. We very much saw it as a comedy-drama and the director saw it much more as a melodrama.”

Despite the differences, he's pleased with the end result. “I think it was beautifully shot. The director, much to his credit, was a very, very fine cinematographer. So the film looked wonderful. It's just that when there's a struggle like that sometimes interesting things come out of it -- something kind of brilliantly flawed. I think that film in some ways is a real cult classic.”

*****

STARS IN NERO WOLFE MYSTERIES

Chaykin is working through the winter in Toronto, where he and his family live, on the Nero Wolfe series of mysteries for A&E. The first one, Golden Spiders, aired this year and co-starred Timothy Hutton, who will be returning as Archie and directing some episodes. Chaykin hadn't read any of the books by Rex Stout when he was approached by A&E for the role of Wolfe, but he was won over after reading a couple of them and because he respects A&E as “prestigious, intelligent producers of television.”

As we close the interview I ask Chaykin whether there is anything he wanted to talk about that we hadn't touched on. After his candid, insightful and wide-ranging discussions in the past hour, he suddenly becomes lost for words. “I have nothing to say.” He laughs as he gets the words out. “I just answer questions. I have no brilliant things to say about the Canadian film industry or anything like that.”

Northern Stars Magazine