LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION
Sask. native returns home for film
Kim Coates wasn't feeling a very warm welcome as he stood in a downtown Regina wind tunnel on Thursday afternoon.
Between two apartment buildings near the set of his current film, Donkeyhead, Coates lamented the cold — and his reaction to it.
“Such a baby. Where'd my Saskatchewan go?” said Coates, who grew up in Saskatoon.
On Wednesday night, he shot a scene outdoors, “and you have to make yourself stop shivering” when they call “action.”
Shooting began Monday and Coates planned to leave Friday morning for warmer climes. A dual Canadian-american citizen, he usually lives in Los Angeles, but also has homes in Western Canada and Toronto.
“I'm going back to L.A. soon in February to do a big film down there, finally; it's been pushed and pushed and pushed because it's such a crazy world down in L.A. with the COVID thing,” said Coates.
“But Biden's in, I'm excited, I can breathe again, we can all sleep again, and I'm excited to get home to my home and my motorcycles and my buddies from six feet away.”
Coates was in Slovakia on set for the TV series Van Helsing in February 2020 when the pandemic began.
“The whole COVID thing was starting to explode in Italy and I got out of it just in time … Got back to L.A., was there for a couple of weeks and realized that `I'm going to come home for a while,' so I went to Western Canada where I've got a spot and I've been there ever since.” He hasn't been sitting idle. “This is my third movie plus a TV show,” said Coates, who is cast in and co-executive producing Donkeyhead.
He had a memorable experience on a recent shoot in Toronto for CBC series Pretty Hard Cases (which premieres Feb. 3): He got to be in the front seat of a van with
two other actors, masks off — after negative test results for COVID -19.
“We're all sitting there going, `This is weird, I get to be right beside you for four hours …' That kind of close quarters, that doesn't happen much anymore in film and television.”
It doesn't happen much among family, either. During a visit to Saskatoon, Coates didn't come within three metres of his mother.
“I couldn't even stay with Ma; I stayed at the James Hotel and visited mom, after my COVID test was of course negative, and I'm in the front of the house there and she's like 10 feet away and throwing me a beer, and my little brother was throwing me a beer and just sitting there 10 feet away,” said Coates.
“It's just weird, but you know what? That's just how it is right now. … We've got to get through this together, and if we don't do it correctly, it's just never going to go away for much longer than it should.”