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Calgary Herald

Brennan Elliott takes his craft seriously.

It’s not that the friendly Calgary native is overly precious when discussing his work as an actor. But it doesn’t take long into a conversation to suspect he may find hidden depths in virtually every character he plays, regardless of genre.

Take Ian, for instance. He’s one of the lead roles in the upcoming direct-to-video flick The Curse of Chucky.

For the uninitiated, Curse is the sixth entry in the horror-comedy Chucky franchise about a freckle-faced, red-headed doll that becomes possessed with the spirit of a serial killer.

Nevertheless, Elliott’s description of his character’s backstory makes him sound like he sprang from a Ken Loach or John Sayles film.

“It’s really kind of a moving tribute to men that have worked hard and want to provide for their family but are stuck in an economy where they can’t get that job,” he said. “There’s a lot of people who were like that during the ’08,’09 crash — lots of people, with doctorates and stuff, that just couldn’t get work. They are not losers or people who are lazy, they are trying their best. This is a story of a guy really trying, trying to provide.”

Wait a minute, isn’t the Chucky franchise about a sinister doll hacking people to pieces?

Well, yeah.

“Basically all hell ensues,” Elliott adds with a chuckle. “Certainly it’s a different type of sensibility than Cedar Cove, I’ll tell you that.”

Cedar Cover is the new series on the W Network that stars Andie Macdowell. It’s a gentle, small-town drama based on the bestselling books by Debbie Macomber. Macdowell plays Judge Olivia Lockhart, who oversees the daily drama at Cedar Cove’s municipal courts. In the pilot, which airs Sunday, she is offered a spot as a federal judge in Seattle just as she starts a relationship with the new editor of the town’s tiny paper. Meanwhile, daughter Justine is in a relationship with an older man that Lockhart has major reservations about. That would be Warren Saget, played by Elliott as a slick and wealthy entrepreneur who may or may not be engaged in some murky business dealings.

Given his knack for finding nuance in his characters, it’s not surprising that Elliott rejects the notion that Warren is a villain, or in the very least the closest to a villain that Cedar Cove has.

“I don’t see him as a villain at all, actually,” Elliott said. “When you play these characters that I guess have a little bit of anti-social behaviour — is that a polite way to say ‘villain’? — who do things that obviously people aren’t respecting, they are not coming from a place of being villainous or evil or selfish. It’s the way he thinks and the way he was raised. He might have his priorities in a different place than others on the island.”

As the Fort Langley, B.C.-shot series progresses, Warren will as well, Elliott promises. Eventually, he will become someone the audience will want to root for.

“I see him as a very insecure, lonely driven man who has since found love but it not really mature enough to deal with it,” he says. “I love playing roles that are complex and I love playing roles that have a lot of depth. He’s actually turning into the comic relief of the show as it continues on. There’s a lot of comedy stuff going on.”

But one gets the impression that even when he acts as comic relief, Elliott plums the depths of his character with a certain intensity. Of course, actors taking their work seriously is hardly novel. But Elliott’s devotion to developing his skills does seem above and beyond. Despite having more than 160 credits to his name dating back to the 1990s — including a lead role in Lifetime’s medical drama Strong Medicine — Elliott only gave up his training with famed acting coach Eric Morris last year.

Morris, who also worked with Johnny Depp and Jack Nicholson, developed a system that sprang from Lee Strasberg’s Method Acting. Elliott, who lives in L.A., has been studying with Morris since 1998. But he also put in time at Juilliard, the Actor’s Studio, New York’s Neighbourhood Playhouse and Vancouver’s Studio 58, all of which is dutifully listed in his biography from the W Network.

“I love the process and you are always growing and learning and I really love the idea that it’s a 24-hour-a-day involvement to be an artist,” he said. “You want to keep growing and dealing with your instrument and understanding the craft and getting better and getting simpler. I felt like there were things I wanted to learn and keep growing. It was a safe place to work on my craft.”

His body of work includes recurring characters on series such as Cold Case and The 4400 and guest shots on Grey’s Anatomy and Desperate Housewives, among other series.

Born in Calgary, Elliott caught the acting bug while attending William Aberhart High School. After starring in a play, he became interested in the sort of New York style of method acting popularized by Marlon Brando, James Dean and Robert De Niro.

“My parents wanted me to play hockey but I wasn’t much of a jock and I wasn’t the smartest cat in the litter and I didn’t really enjoy the academics of it all,” he said. “But I was really good at music and playing the piano and playing the accordion and I loved drama and I was really passionate about The Method and Strasberg and a lot of the stuff from New York: Brando, Monty Clift. I was really enjoying the art of it all, the real craft. I started to really enjoy trying to find the process.”

Ecrit par Misty 

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Ecrit par Misty 
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