Geoffrey: Okay. I’ve been thinking about the willow speech—

Ellen: Oh no…

Geoffrey: You describe Ophelia’s death—

Ellen: Geoff—

Geoffrey: —in great detail, why?

Ellen:(exasperatedly) Geoffrey, please, you’re driving me insane!

Geoffrey: Why do you describe it in such detail?

Ellen: A young girl falls in the river and drowns. (turns to look at him) That kind of thing tends to stick with you.

Geoffrey: Why didn’t you save her?

Ellen: I don’t know, I didn’t want to ruin my dress— please don’t make me talk about this now—

Geoffrey: Ellen, come on. (slaps the dressing table top with his hand)

Ellen: (sighs) She was better off dead, she was suffering.

Geoffrey: Okay. (rises from his seat and walks across the dressing room) Let’s take this a little bit further. What if Ophelia didn’t drown? What if she killed herself?

Ellen:(twists in her chair to look at him) I say she was mad, she was incapable of her own distress.

Geoffrey: You could be lying.

Ellen: Oh, Jesus Christ!

Geoffrey: Ophelia drowns and you stand by and watch it happen. Why? Because you do believe that she’d be better off dead. You already feel responsible for her madness, and now you feel responsible for her death, so in a final act of mercy… (he sits back down) you lie about it. You disguise her apparent suicide so the poor thing can be buried in consecrated ground.

Ellen: (stares at him) Geoffrey, that is a completely different approach to the speech. 

Geoffrey: Yeah. (stands up again) I think it might be a bit stronger than your, “I didn’t wanna ruin my dress” subtext. 

Ellen:(shouts angrily) You can’t do this to me! This is the last performance!

Geoffrey:(pauses by the dressing room door) Well, think of it as your last chance to get it right. 

Ellen:(waits for him to leave, then screams incoherently)

- Slings & Arrows 2x01 Season’s End

Can I just talk a minute about how much I love this scene? Okay, well, I love all of the scenes, but this is indicative of Geoffrey and Ellen’s relationship at this point: he knows Ellen is capable of more, of better. He pushes her, openly challenging her. He knows she’s better than the performance she’s been giving and she won’t respond to coddling, so he pokes and prods at her, demanding she justify her motivations, knowing that she will rise to it in turn - and she does, magnificently.   

“I’m gonna have to downsize. Anna’s gonna kill me…”

“Richard. I agree with you.”

“Eh?”

“Yeah. This place is too big. We need a small company of good, solid actors. And a little fear; there’s not enough fear here… Actors should be frightened for their lives — that’s when they do their best work.”

“Really?”

“Mhmm.”

“That’s just like normal people.”

*ring ring*

“Hello? Yes. What? It’s fuckyeahpaulgross’ birthday today and they want to do what with me? Well hell, get me a seat on the next flight out of Toronto, because damn!”

When I say I love a man in uniform, what I really mean is this particular man in uniform. All the uniforms.

Paul Gross still writing his own Hollywood story

Eric Volmers, Calgary Herald

Published: Friday, May 18, 2012

It was a surreal end to a surreal experience.

In 2010, Calgary-born actor, producer, director and writer Paul Gross was tapped to do a rewrite of the massive Hollywood blockbuster Battleship by his friend, director and actor Peter Berg. Alongside fellow Albertan scribe John Krizanc, Gross took a run at revising a screenplay originally written by Jon and Erich Hoeber, which was based on the popular board game.

Gross never actually made it to the massive set. But, during the process, he attended gigantic “green light” meetings that featured 40 or more movie execs. He saw scale models and maquettes of space ships and aliens. He witnessed bizarre discussions about how a second-unit shoot was short $25 million, which happened to be exactly $5 million more than the entire budget of Gross’s decade-in-the-making First World War epic Passchendaele.

Paul Gross worked on the script for Battleship, but doesn’t appear in the credits.

Aaron Lynett

And then his Hollywood adventure came to an end, albeit in a somewhat passive-aggressive manner.

“I said to Pete, ‘Are we fired?’” says Gross, on the line from Princeton, N.J., where he’s currently starring in a play. “He said ‘No, no. The studio is just asking you to put down your pens for awhile.’ Hollywood can not bring itself to fire anybody. So they invent all these euphemisms for what’s happened.”

Directed by Berg and starring Liam Neeson and Rihanna, Battleship opened Friday to high expectations and generally scathing reviews . After arbitration by the Writers Guild of America, it was decided that only the Hoeber brothers would receive writing credits, Gross says. He hardly seems heartbroken by the ruling, although admits that the potential six-figure pay day he could have received if the film does well was certainly appealing. As it was, he was paid a scale salary for his work.

But he’s philosophical about it, chalking up his brief Hollywood sojourn as yet another curious side-step in what he cheerfully calls his “stupid career.”

In the past few years, Gross, best known for his starring role in the 1990s TV hit Due South, has flirted with the American mainstream on several fronts. In 2009, he starred in the short-lived ABC drama The Witches of Eastwick, in which he played the Devil opposite a trio of beautiful women that included Rebecca Romijn.

Last year, Gross was on Broadway opposite fellow Canuck Kim Cattrall in a revival of Noel Coward’s Private Lives. It had been a smash in Toronto, but fizzled in New York despite generally strong reviews.

And then there was Battleship. For a few months in 2010, he toiled away on the script at the behest of Berg, who first met Gross when they both starred in the forgettable 1993 Disney film Aspen Extreme.

Gross talks about all three of these experiences with detached mild amusement that suggests they were interesting if not really his thing.

“I think taking over a script is kind of complicated,” says Gross about working on Battleship. “The set pieces that were already in it, the action sequences that were laid out, although we modified them, they were the fixed pieces. This is what the film has to contain. So you’re writing in and around stuff that doesn’t necessarily make any sense but has to be there. It’s a weird exercise. It’s creative in the same way writing a limerick is. You have to come up with something but with very rigid boundaries. It was kind of fun. I don’t regret it, but it was weird. And it’s not what I would want to do for a living.”

It’s not like he doesn’t have enough on his plate. Gross founded the Toronto-based Whizbang Films more than a decade ago to help produce films that he and his partners thought have merit. Over the years this has included his own projects such as 2002’s Men with Brooms and 2008’s Passchendaele. But its roster is nothing if not eclectic. In the past year, this has included everything from the recently shot earnest TV movie Horses of McBride to the ultra-violent cult exploitation film Hobo With a Shotgun.

Gross says the reasons for his company to get behind a film are varied. Horses of McBride, based on the feel-good true tale of a B.C. town that helped save some starving horses, just felt like a “good little story” and the sturdy basis for a Christmas-timed family TV film. Hobo with a Shotgun had more to do with Gross’s admiration for young writer-director Jason Eisener than any personal connection to the film.

“This isn’t a genre I have any interest in at all,” he says. “I don’t even understand it. But I did meet with Jason and I was knocked out. The kid is obviously a filmmaker. For a young guy he has an amazing, almost encyclopedic knowledge of movies. It just seemed a great idea to back this emerging filmmaker even though I didn’t really get the script.”

At Princeton, Gross is starring in the first production of John Guare’s new play Are You There, McPhee? When the run finishes in June, he will be turning his attention to a modern war film called Hyena Road. It’s his followup to Passchendaele as a director. He is also writing, producing and starring in it. Set amid the backdrop of the war in Afghanistan, Gross will play an intelligence officer whose life intersects with a sniper and a veteran Afghani fighter. Gross first went to Afghanistan a year and a half ago and spent a week in the war zone. He returned with a camera crew and got 50 hours of raw footage by going out on foot patrols in the Horn of Panjwaii.

He hopes to start shooting the fictional story by the end of the summer. Jordan will sub in for Afghanistan, which is too unstable for a film production, Gross says.

“I didn’t think I’d do a war movie again,” he said. “…In the course of being there I would just talk to soldiers and slowly a story would emerge. So that’s what I’m going to shoot.”

FEELINGS, I HAVE THEM. Namely, on the kinds of films that he picks to produce for WhizBang films: He saw potential in the writer for one, and went with that, seeing someone who deserved a shot. There aren’t many production companies out there that would take such a risk at all and it just makes me <3 him all the more for just being genuinely awesome.

Also, dear Hollywood:  Paul Gross is too good for you.

….oh. 

<3

- Chasing Rainbows (1988) vs. Due South (1994)

While I’m on a Chasing Rainbows kick, have a few choice caps of Paul as Jake Kincaid, with a cigarette in hand. Or mouth. Just because.

I’m in an odd mood today, so have an adorkably young Paul Gross as Jake Kincaid in Chasing Rainbows (1988), wearing a fedora and a cardigan.

It’s Monday, and that’s reason enough to post a prostrate Geoffrey Tennant, and not just because his shirt is riding up.

tell me you don’t want to razz his tummy

No other man could evoke a scene half as well as Geoffrey does while holding a plunger and be taken seriously.