Few better suited for conventions than affable and well-grounded Fillion
Edmonton native brings his vast resume of fan favourites to Calgary Comic Expo
Nathan Fillion does his best to prepare for fan conventions.
But there is a lot of ground to cover. Few actors come to the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo with a history as chock full of fanfavourite, genre and cult projects for devotees to geek over: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Desperate Housewives, the animated Green Lantern, Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog, Modern Family, Castle and — perhaps the grandaddy of all cult shows — Firefly.
“It doesn't matter how many 8 x 10s you have lined up for them to collect, they'll say ‘ What about the one from this project?'” says Fillion, in an interview from his home in Los Angeles. “I forgot I did that project. How do you remember I did that project?”
The Edmonton native's impressive resume has made him royalty at fan conventions and his status is not likely to fade anytime soon. ABC's Castle, a comedic police procedural that had Fillion playing a famous mystery novelist solving crimes, may have ended last year after an eight-season run, but that doesn't mean the actor has disappeared from water-cooler chatter.
A few days after this interview, the hit sitcom Modern Family made headlines with an episode that found Fillion's wonderfully named weatherman Rainer Shine's marriage proposal being turned down by Hayley Dunphy (Sarah Hyland). What this means for the future of Mr. Shine is unclear, but Fillion said the recurring role was exactly the sort of thing he was looking for after an eight-year run playing the same character.
“Vanity is something I've played before,” he says. “But the level of vanity and the vacuousness of this Rainer Shine was really, really appealing. To be so vacuous and not know it, I just found it so easy to laugh at that guy.”
These days, there are plenty of factors that go into Fillion's choice of roles. Some are chosen for the project, some for the character, some for the director and co-stars and some for the location and “the adventure it will be.”
And other times, it's simply because a friend asks him. That was the case when director James Gunn, who first worked with Fillion on the 2006 cult comedyhorror Slither, enlisted him for a cameo in Guardians of the Galaxy 2. The fact that Gunn has recently ascended to A-list filmmaker and the sequel is one of the most anticipated blockbusters of the year was just gravy. Nothing has been officially confirmed, although some early reports had Fillion playing a character named Simon Williams, which happens to be the secret identity of Marvel's Wonder Man. Fillion actually made an uncredited appearance in the first Guardians, or at least his voice did, as a monstrous inmate who terrorizes Star-Lord (Chris Pratt.)
“You know your friend, you love your friend, you admire your friend's talent and you can't wait to work with your friend again,” Fillion says. “That little thing you want to do happens to be the sequel to Guardians of the Galaxy, a major motion picture. The guy is on top of the world, he has stars in his eyes and clouds at his feet. He's on top of it and still laughing and nudging his buddies and saying, ‘Come on, come do this for an afternoon.' We're having a ball. I'm truly blessed to have people in my life like James.”
If Fillion never expected to be making cameos in mega-budgeted blockbusters, that's probably because he never really expected to make acting his career. It was not the sort of thing you considered when growing up in Edmonton, he says.
“My plan was to be a high school teacher, my plan was to teach dra- ma and my plan was to continue to do things on the side to satisfy the need (to act,)" he says. “I was really having a lot of fun. It had an affect on me. It fulfilled me. I was having a good time. Then I got a job. So I took off. I didn't know that it was possible. Whenever I looked at the TV and saw montages of Hollywood and Los Angeles and the palm trees and the sun and the beach and the weather, I always picture that as a window into a fantasy world that didn't really exist. So I didn't think of it as a possibility. But I always dreamed about it.”
Small roles turned into larger ones, and Fillion eventually landed a lead on the second season of the sitcom Two Guys and a Girl opposite Ryan Reynolds. Within a few years, he firmly established his geekdom bona fides by playing both a misogynistic serial killer and defrocked priest named Caleb in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Captain Mal Reynolds in Joss Whedon's Firefly.
Firefly was a quirky “space western” series that came out in 2002, lasted one season and inspired a low-budget offshoot film called Serenity in 2005. But it still commands cultlike adoration from its fans, who remain eternally optimistic that a reunion is imminent.
“Although it's set in a spaceship in the distant future with a frontiersmen kind of mentality with horses and farmers and wagons, it's about a ragtag group of people who have decided to make a family out of their group, who have each other's backs, who have made the choice to be together and be for one another,” Fillion says about the show's lasting appeal. “I think that's a very attractive quality and something we search for, that sense of: I belong with this group, I'll do anything for this group and they'll do anything for me. It's a feeling that we all want.”
So, how about that reunion? “I was the guy who, once we were cancelled, said 'That's it, it's over. It will never happen again,'” he says. “And then we had Serenity. You need to talk to a smarter guy than me.”
Nathan Fillion appears at the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo from April 28 to 30 at Stampede Park. Visit calgaryexpo.com.