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| Paul Gross in his dressing room at the Music Box Theater, preparing for a matinee performance of Noël Coward’s Private Lives. Photo: Hal Drucker. |
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| Kim Catrall and Paul Gross are the past and future Amanda and Elyot in the Richard Eyre-directed revival of Noël Coward’s famed comedy, Private Lives. Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann |
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| Gross wrote, directed and played the role of Canadian infantryman Michael Dunne in the powerful 2008 movie Passchendale, which depicts one of the bloodiest conflicts of WW I . ©Alliance Films. |
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| Gross as Hamlet in the 2000 Stratford Ont. Festival production. Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann |
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Gross tackles Canada’s major contact sport(?) curling in the 2002 feature film Men Without Brooms which featured the late Leslie Nielsen (one of the funniest men I ever knew). It later became a TV series beginning in 2010. ©Alliance Films.
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“The battlefield took months to build.”
Curious words from the urbane and debonair male lead of the revival of Noël Coward’s Private Lives in which he was making his Broadway debut opposite Kim Catrall after a successful run in Toronto. Paul Gross spoke the words in the confines of the Music Box Theater dressing room, just one hour before a Sunday matinee performance.
I have done a number of “dressing room interviews” over the years, but I cannot recall one that was more intellectually enriching, to the point that when my promised half-hour was up each of us could not believe that we covered so much ground.
Back to that Battlefield reference. No, he wasn’t alluding to the pyrotechnical derring-do between the divorced husband and wife Amanda and Elyot who meet accidentally on adjoining balconies of Riviera rooms with their second set of partners. He was alluding to the making of Passchendaele, a 2008 movie, shot entirely in Western Canada which he wrote, directed and starred in. The film was inspired by Gross's relationship with his maternal grandfather, Michael Joseph Dunne, who fought in the First World War and was disinclined to share his experiences with his family. It included bayoneting a young German soldier in a way that haunted him the rest of his life. Thanks to Netflix, I viewed Passchedaele prior to our meeting and suggested to Gross, that there were elements that reminded me of two other historic WWI movies: Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Kubrick’s Paths of Glory. Passchendaele was the highest grossing Canadian film of the year and won five Genie awards, including Best Picture.
Given your preparation for roles as diverse as Royal Canadian Mounted Police Constable Benton Fraser in“Due South,” Chris Cutter, a Curling player in “Men With a Broom” and Hamlet, how, I asked, did you prepare for your role as Elyot?
“I rambled through a lot of Coward’s diaries which I found fascinating. A very acerbic guy, albeit a really interesting character. Fantastically talented and pretty angry about conventions that everyone else clung to. He was hypocritically angry about marriage and his closet homosexuality. Yet he presented it all in hilarious, pound for pound, screamingly funny writing. I found that increasingly – the underbelly of this show is quite anarchic. And I think Elyot kind of embodies or gives voice to Coward’s actual feelings, ergo, Nobody knows what’s actually going on after. It’s all nonsense. So just enjoy the party.”
I advised that Gross was the third Canadian actor of note I have been privileged to profile, the others being Michael Ball, a perennial of the Shaw Festival in Niagara on the Lake and the great Christopher Plummer.
“Michael, he is amazing. And Christopher Plummer, yes he’s really something. I loved him as King Lear. I saw it when it was first mounted at Stratford, (Ont.) before it came to Lincoln Center in New York. He’s getting stronger and stronger and better and better as he ages. The man who had the most influence on me was William Hutt. He was at Stratford from the beginning and did several Lears during the course of his career. The first Lear I ever saw was his, when I was about 11. My mother took me up to Stratford. Although I remember almost nothing about the production – I knew I would like to be part of that world, whatever that world is. I came to know Bill as I got older and began acting in theater. We never worked together until we did the TV series Slings and Arrows which takes place in a theater company. My character was Geoffrey Tenant. Each year was built around a play or theme: First year, Hamlet, second year Macbeth, third year King Lear. Bill came in to do Lear and at the time he was there I believe he realized he was dying. He was not in great shape, but he performed fantastically. The part itself was about a man who’s dying and who wants to play Lear one last time. Bill was the guy who made me want to do this job in the first place. I don’t know if it has so much to do with acting style as much as it is just something about the love of performing, the love of acting. It was the last part I did on stage until this one – a renewed shock to get back in the theater again. I’ve been around Stratford almost all of my life. It was kind of the theater center of Canada, but not so much now. And my wife Martha Burns worked there. [Gross had the title role in the 2000 Stratford Festival production of Romeo and Juliet.]
We discussed various Lears and Hamlets we had seen over the years. My favorite Lear was Plummer, but my favorite production was John Houseman’s mounting in 1950 with such stellar actors as Joseph Wiseman as Edmund, Martin Gabel as Kent, Norman Lloyd as the Fool, Jo Van Fleet as Regan, Wesley Addey as Edgar and Nina Foch as Cordelia. Unfortunately Louis Calhern in the title role was not quite up to the task.
Plummer told me, “I think the greatest part ever written was probably Hamlet and the problem is that no one can play it properly at the age that it’s supposed to be played. I know I could make a wonderful Hamlet now,” he said as clinically as Louis Pasteur analyzing a Petri Dish, “because I know so much more about things.”
Gross nodded and said, “Isn’t it extraordinary, that those two giant parts Lear and Hamlet, can’t really be done unless you piece together all the Lears and Hamlets you’ve seen over the years. As an audience member you clip them altogether and determine, that’s who Lear is, he’s all of those people. And I found that when I did Hamlet, it was extraordinarily liberating. You know every night when you go out there, you think, I’m not going to be able to do the Melancholy Prince. The corollary to that is I can’t actually fail. I think it’s amazing to watch other actors and their Lears, it kind of spurs them to be crude. They all seem sort of loose, an uninhibited kind of freedom of acting. A power comes from that kind of liberty. I would have loved to see Ian Holm as Lear in the National Theater production directed by Richard Eyre, who staged Private Lives.” I maintained that the finest stage production of Hamlet, was performed by Richard Burton with Canadian Hume Cronyn as Polonius, while my favorite of all Hamlets was Olivier in the first movie version.
“The interesting thing to me about Shakespeare,” said Gross, “is that science has spent a good deal of time trying to unify two fields of physics … and failed. I think with Shakespeare you actually have Einstein’s Cosmology embodied in Lear and the Subatomic Particle theory in Hamlet. They are polar opposites. He’s unified them all in his work, as a single writer.”
In discussing his preference for his next Shakespearian role, (Richard III) I volunteered that since he had already done Romeo, he would in my view be ideally suited to Romeo’s star-crossed friend, Mercutio.
Did he recall his first playlet or oral interpretation in Grade School.
“I kind of remember in Grade 3 being in a play that was probably written by the teacher. I played the King of No-No Land. I wore a cardboard crown with gold foil candies stuck to it, which I ate while we were on stage. It was a little school, gymnasium stage. But I do have a clear memory of liking it.” The elder of two brothers, Paul was born in Calgary, Alberta but has lived all over the world, the consequences of being an army brat. His father Bob Gross, was a tank commander in the Canadian army. Every 18 months, the family moved from Canada, to England to Germany, to the U.S. and back to Canada. At the age of 14 he was doing TV commercials. Another move ended up with the Gross family in Toronto, and Paul graduating from the Earl Haig Secondary School.
The continuation of TV commercials enabled young Gross to pay for higher education. He studied acting at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and graduated with a degree in Drama.
“We were in Washington DC for a while and I went to this tremendous school called Yorktown, and there was a teacher, Tim Jecko who taught drama and he was fantastic And that’s where it was cemented. There was a theater club that I joined. We did crazy things that I look back on, Dr. Faustus and Canterbury Tales. Extraordinary plays. Pretty rare to find on a high school set. We read aloud from Chaucer: Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote. Such rich pronunciation. I was very fortunate to have had a guy who was so adventurous.” Gross studied acting at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. He appeared in such stage productions, as Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It.
We were in Toronto for six or eight weeks with Private Lives. It’s not like Broadway or the West End where you have 30-odd theaters. I love doing it here. It’s like freemasonry. We could be in Bogota or Bratislava and the theaters are terrific. But the atmosphere, the state of mind of Broadway is very different from what I’m used to. I love this theater, It’s a jewel. I love playing here (and soak in the notion that Irving Berlin helped build it).
His next project?
It’s to finish doing a movie in Afghanistan. It concerns Canadians and our involvement there. I’ve already been over there a couple of times and took the camera, down to Kandahar Province, where there were full scale combat operations. I’ve got about 50 hours in the can. The Canadians had pulled out of there and are now returning some advisors to Kabul. It’s a rough neighborhood and like being completely on another planet. When you visit some of the villages, it’s not stepping back just a few hundred years, but more like 5000. Our working title is Hyena Road; it’s the name of a road that we built. I think it will be out in 2013. Getting distribution for independents is getting more and more difficult. The whole business is in such a state of instability it’s going to take a while to sort it out.
Aside from your wife and children, what are you proudest of?
That I’m still doing it, that I love it and still find it enriching. More than anything, I’m just proud that I’m able to do this for my life’s work. I feel it virtually every night I walk into this theater. I’m very privileged to get to do this and it’s a humbling experience to recognize that lots of people have spent sums of money to go and watch a play and it’s your responsibility to deliver for them. |
