Online Article: Vancouver Sun - 2000

Timely tirade launched a career
by Lynne McNamara
 

Film-maker Colin Cunningham owes a lot to a frustrated phone call.

When he was a kid, actor Colin Cunningham remembers, three was his lucky number. "When I realized that in the year 2000 I would be 33, I could hardly wait to get there."

Eight years ago, the Los Angeles actor, frustrated with the scene in Tinseltown, decided to give it all up and become a film-maker. He saw an ad for the Vancouver Film School and his mind was made up. He loaded up his Honda Civic and headed north.

"I didn't even realize Vancouver was on the water or anything. I was a typical L.A. guy - I had my parka and my gloves and all that stuff 'cause I figured northern California's freezing, so by the time you get into Oregon, it's polar ice caps. Washington's gotta be worse, and Canada - I don't even want to think about it."

The first week in Vancouver, he slept in his car in a park near Fourth and Alma and washed up in the park's washroom sink. With no work visa, he survived, making up to 40 bucks a day busking - playing his saxophone on Robson Street - while going to school.

One night, Ed Begley, Jr. tossed $20 into his hat. "I was like, 'oh, thanks, man.' " When the film-school courses ended and most students began heading home, Cunningham vowed, "I'm not ever going back to L.A., ever."

An under-the-table job in a little burrito joint in Kitsilano kept him fed. "I'd take two burritos home at night - one for dinner, the other for breakfast." And there was a horrific stint in telephone sales. And trying to get an agent here was nightmarish, he says. "They'd say, 'What, who are you?'"

One day in a phone booth outside Denny's restaurant on Broadway, he made a decision. "It was the last phone call I was ever, ever, going to make as an actor," he recalls. When the agent again tried to brush him off, Cunningham launched into a tirade.

"When I finished, I swear to God, there was this beat at the end of the line, and they said, 'What was your name again?' " The agent took him on.

The next day, he had an audition and landed a role in the TV movie For The Love of Nancy, starring Tracy Gold, and his acting career began in earnest. But he still loves getting behind the camera. In 1997, Cunningham directed and starred in Zacharia Farted, an indie film that is doing well in the U.S.

And this year, Cunningham turned 33. His childhood dream has come true - the year 2000 has been his luckiest so far.

He played a butcher in Christopher Guest's improvisational comedy Best in Show and had five months' work on Arnold Schwarzenegger's The 6th Day, playing Tripp, a snowboarding eco-terrorist.

In one scene, recalls Cunningham, he was grappling with Schwarzenegger, and to match a shot, had to climb on top of the musclebound actor. No problem.

"He just reached over and picked me up," says Cunningham, who weighs close to 180 pounds. "His shoulders never left the ground. Just picked me up, and phomf, just brought me right down. I thought, 'Oh, my God, this is a strong human being.'"

Cunningham also had roles in Antitrust, the pilot for Dark Angel, the NBC pilot Dead Last and the TV movie Northface.

He has three recurring roles: as Major Davis in Stargate SG-1, as rumour-mongering power agent Herb Kolodny in Beggars & Choosers, and as ambitious music manager Nick Keester in Big Sound, which debuts Monday night on Global Television.

Last month, Cunningham took his whole family to the L.A. premiere party for The 6th Day, and has bought the car he's dreamed of since the age of seven - a classic 1956 black Porsche Roadster 356. Things are going so well, he says, it's scary.

"I kinda joke that I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'm waiting to be diagnosed with some fatal disease or something, 'cause everything's just going way too good."