MAJOR ROLE
Acting “The Only Game In Town” for Mortimer.
A lot can happen in three years.
That will be brought home on Thursday evening when Glace Bay native David Mortimer, now 24, attends the premiere screening of his first major film role in “The Only Game In Town.”
The film, along with the launch of a book about the film, will be shown at an invitationonly event at Pictou’s deCoste Centre, beginning at 6:30 p.m.
Mortimer, who will be attending the event with friends and family, says he can hardly wait.
“It was one of my very first acting gigs — we filmed it back in 2015,” said Mortimer on Tuesday. “I ended up living in Tatamagouche for over a month which was a lot of fun. They had a lot of local actors and stuff like that up there. All of the crew was pretty much from Nova Scotia besides the cinematographer and the director who were both from the U.K.”
Mortimer was 21, and still working on his environmental engineering technology degree at Cape Breton University, when he was cast as Alastair Ramsey, a high school hockey star unimpressed with another student’s attempt to woo his cheerleader girlfriend.
With a budget of a quarter of a million dollars, Mortimer said he thought it was going to be a huge movie but soon learned how far money really goes in the film industry.
“The movie itself was built off of really hardworking people and everyone was really, really passionate,” he said. “I was driving from Glace Bay all the way to Tatamagouche for a lot of the rehearsals that we did — which was absolutely insane because I was in university at the time. I’d have to skip class a lot of the time to go up and go to these auditions.”
Now that three years have passed, he says he’s interested to see how everything pans out in the film.
“It’s going to be exciting to look back on this because it was one of my first acting gigs and I’ve seen some of the footage and so much has changed since then,” he said. “My family is going to come, some of my friends are going to come and we’re going to sit down and laugh at how awesome and how long ago it was.”
For Mortimer, family is important. He came home earlier in the year when his father was
sick, but now that he’s recovering well, Mortimer feels it will soon be time to move back to Toronto and eventually south of the border.
“I want to keep working at it, raise the chances and raise the stakes and hopefully find myself in L.A. with the next year and really start pumping out some films,” he said.
His hard work appears to be paying off. Mortimer and his cousin Andrew Mortimer have just completed a short film, “Nicotine,” which has been picked up by a film festival in North Carolina and he’s been auditioning for East Coast roles. He’s in negotiations with management in Los Angeles and Miami, important for
someone who intends to build a career and he’s been doing some modelling.
“You gotta work,” he laughs. “I’m excited to be honing in on my skills and I’ve been taking a lot of acting classes. You’ll never be the best unless you train every day.”