Making fun of the neighbours
Colm Feore and Patrick Huard are happy to throw a little shade south of the border in Bon Cop, Bad Cop sequel
How thoughtful it was of President Donald J. Trump to make the FBI a news story the same week that Patrick Huard and Colm Feore are releasing Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2.
The FBI figures prominently into the sequel of their bilingual hit 2006 buddy-cop thriller, which reunites Quebec’s Huard and Ontario’s Feore as policemen divided by culture and personality but united as crimebusters. This time they cross national borders and mix it up with FBI sleuths — who were led by James Comey until Trump abruptly and clumsily fired him this week in major news event that’s still unfolding.
“Donald Trump is now president, and it resonates with the whole thing,” says actor/writer/producer Huard, marvelling at how the Bon Cop 2 script he penned three years ago suddenly seems like reality.
“He did us an enormous service yesterday (by firing Comey),” actor Feore chips in, only partly in jest. “It’s like Patrick wrote this!”
“It’s crazy,” Huard says. “All of this was basically put on paper three years ago. It’s like they’re trying to catch up.”
Huard, 48, and Feore, 58, two of Canada’s most popular actors, are speaking to the Star during a Toronto stopover while barnstorming the country to promote the film. They can tell you all about the havoc that runway renovations at Pearson Airport are causing to flight schedules nationwide, because they’re living through them.
They’re both a little road weary — Feore jokes about how they had to “act like rock stars” to deal with a pesky Moncton flight delay — and Huard seems to be fighting a cold. They’re also noticeably greyer than in their previous teaming. On the plus side, Feore’s French and Huard’s English have gotten much better over the past decade.
But they’d rather talk about how much they enjoyed making the movie — especially the parts where they have wicked fun at the expense of Americans, who come off looking as dumb as Hollywood usually makes Canadians look.
“I really don’t understand how come we’re not making fun of them more often, because they don’t care,” Huard says. “I don’t know how many movies I’ve seen that have Canadian references, as well as standup comedians and TV shows.”
“South Park alone — ‘Blame Canada’!” Feore agrees.
“Exactly!” Huard continues. “So I was like, why not us? And we came up with a little theory that maybe some movie producers always secretly dream of having their movie distributed in the States and they’re afraid of offending Americans.
“Me, I wanted to do a movie that resonated with my people. For the Canadians. For the Québécois. That’s what I wanted to do. I don’t want to conquer the world with Bon Cop, Bad Cop.
“I want my people to go (to the theatre) because we did it for them, thinking of them while doing it, so that’s all that matters to me. And since now the two characters are friends, we needed a common enemy.
“I just looked at the list of the people I haven’t offended yet and the Americans were left!”
I suggest to them that Trump probably wouldn’t like the movie very much. He’d probably tweet something like, “Bon Cop 2 is BAD! (SAD!) Canadians aren’t funny!”
Huard and Feore are ready for it. They’d be delighted if Trump tweeted.
“I’m guessing he’s not going to understand our jokes,” Feore says. “So we have that going for us for a while, until we try to export it on Air Canada.”
The really funny thing about Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2 is how long it took to be made. The first film, released in the summer of 2006, was that rarest of birds: a genuine Canadian hit from coast to coast, especially in Quebec. It made nearly $13 million at the box office, a big deal. Yet the sequel was never a sure thing.
Huard and Feore, who are good friends off camera even if they still squabble on it, insist they never even talked about making a sequel until a few years ago.
That’s when Huard presented Feore with the script he’d spent a year writing, working solo this time (he had three co-writers for the first film).
The two were also extremely busy, to say the least and to name just a few. Huard had film and TV commitments ( Starbuck, Mommy, Quebec TV’s Taxi 0-22) and Feore had film, TV and stage assignments ( The Amazing Spider-Man 2, TV’s The Borgias and House of Cards, Stratford’s King Lear and Macbeth).
“I didn’t want to call Colm and say, ‘OK, do you want to do a second one? If you do, I’m going to write it,’ ” Huard recalls.
“That’s not how it works. I took a year of my life, I wrote a script and somebody went and met him at his home in Stratford and said, ‘Here is the script.’ ”
Bon Cop 2 promotes Feore’s upright OPP lawman Martin Ward to the RCMP and gives him family and personal issues that deepen the role. Huard’s irreverent character David Bouchard is still a detective for the Sûreté du Québec, but now he’s working undercover to crack an auto-theft ring and his family life has also become more involving.
Feore instantly knew he had to sign on for the sequel, although it wasn’t like he’d been resisting the idea.
“Patrick wrote it for me,” Feore says, obviously impressed.
“And that’s really how it works,” Huard says. “When you know who you’re writing for, it’s totally a different process. Because you can push. You know he’s going to pull it off; Colm’s going to sell it.
“As much as I wanted to have a good script, also in order to seduce him to do the sequel, I wanted him to have a good part as well.”
“Because that’s how actors look at scripts,” Feore agrees. “BS, BS, BS, my part, BS, BS, BS, my part ...”
But ultimately they both discovered that they had no choice but to make a Bon Cop sequel. Their fans demanded one.
Huard would be walking the streets of Paris and somebody would come up and ask him when it would be happening. Feore would be strolling through an airport and answering the same question from fellow travellers.
“It’s been a very peculiar experience to have people really ask for it,” Feore says. “We’re back by popular demand.”
Those are words that any actor wants to hear, no matter which side of a provincial or international boundary they happen to be on. Peter Howell is the Star’s movie critic. His column usually runs Fridays.