An Evening with Graham Greene

Seeing Graham Greene being interviewed by Laurie Brown at the National Arts Centre this week was a little bit like watching the anti-Inside the Actor's Studio. While Greene is a vastly talented, versatile and prolific actor, he is also firmly grounded in his attitude to his life and work, and not at all prone to the idealistic philosophizing about "craft," as many Hollywood stars are.

When asked what advice he gives to young, prospective actors, he says, "First, get your cab-driver's license. Then learn to wait tables; and how to tend bar." Actors, even very successful ones, he points out, are not acting all the time. And his principal justification for choosing particular roles at particular times is admirably pragmatic: "I've got a mortgage."

Greene followed a curious path to the acting profession. During his high-school years, he says, he never thought about being an actor. Instead, he wanted to be a draughtsman - and he actually did that for a time in his youth, along with other construction-related and manual labour jobs. Eventually he found himself working as a tech guy in the music industry, touring around with bands. It was only when an acquaintance harrassed him incessantly to appear in a play he'd written - Greene even once turned out the lights to pretend he wasn't in when the man showed up at his office one day - that he got his first acting role.

Years of working in small-scale stage productions in Canada and Britain followed, until, one break leading to the next, Greene eventually found himself nominated for an Oscar for his work as Kicking Bird in Kevin Costner's epic Dances With Wolves.

Greene has never let any sort of acclaim or recognition slow him down, though, and has since appeared in a wide array of TV shows - Murder She Wrote, L.A. Law, Northern Exposure, North of 60, The Red Green Show - as well as films, including Maverick (with Mel Gibson, with whom he had fond memories of playing practical jokes together), Grey Owl, and The Green Mile. Greene's next big - huge? - role is in New Moon, the follow-up to Twilight, due out in the fall of 2009. (Greene was contractually obligated not to discuss this film during the interview.)

In spite of this long-running success, Green continues to takes frequent time off from acting. He loves to cook, and brings his knife set and an array of about thirty spices with him wherever he travels, so that he can cook in hotel suites. He also makes boats by hand - even once spending six months to research how to build a rowing shell for a neighbour who requested he make one during a wine-drinking session.

Greene has a very casual, easy-going demeanor. He took his time when answering questions, which sometimes resulted in fairly long pauses during the interview. These seemed a little awkward at first, but after a while - once the audience became accustomed to Greene's rhythm of speech - it became very pleasant, even a nice change from the usual hyperactive responses usually seen during celebrity interviews. Laurie Brown was a perfect interviewer for Greene, waiting for him to fully complete his thoughts before pressing on with subsequent questions. Greene would often toss off a flippant response to a particular question, and then pause for a while before launching into a more thorough answer, often involving humorous, well-polished anecdotes.

Greene's low-key personality hides a strong ambition to prove himself, though - not necessarily to audiences, but to himself. He spoke quite candidly about the crisis of confidence that led him to return to stage acting after a 16-year span in which he'd done only TV and film work. He did not start again at the bottom of the theatre ladder - instead, he played Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, and Lennie in Of Mice and Men, in the 2007 season at Stratford. It was a bold move to make for a man with no formal acting training - Merchant was his first ever Shakespearean role. He received rather mixed reviews, as did the rest of the production - but he had proved something to himself.

The other main theme that recurred throughout the interview, apart from Greene's plain-spokenness, was the sad condition of Canadian cinema. Greene frequently commented that he had not seen many of the films in which he acted, simply because they were Canadian productions, and had never seen wide release. Though Greene played this fact for laughs, it was nevertheless a rather sad depiction of the mess that is the Canadian film industry.

Fortunately, Greene seems able to maintain a relaxed equilibrium through everything, and he has a low-key, egoless charm that made it a pleasure to spend an evening in his company.

(The only disappointing part of the night was when the audience question period at the end of the interview revealed the presence of a few weirdos. One guy in the back row had the insolence to ask Greene, "Why do they call baloney 'Indian steak'?" Greene was gracious enough to humorously deflect the question, answering in an east Indian accent - yet another example of his easygoing charm.)

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