Little Mosque that could
Calgary actors talk about comedy’s final season
When you always see (Muslims) in a negative light it creates a stereotype. Little Mosque broke that stereotype MANOJ SOOD, WHO PLAYS BABER SIDDIQUI
“I’m so glad that it’s finally over,” says Brandon Firla dryly, on the phone from his new home in Los Angeles. “I’ve been trying to end this show for three seasons and I’ve finally succeeded.”
The lanky Calgarian is talking about Little Mosque on the Prairie, the gentle CBC satire about a Muslim community in the fictional small-town of Mercy, Saskatchewan, that will be entering its sixth and final season on Monday. He is, of course, joking — continuing perhaps to channel the spirit of his aptly named character Rev. William Thorne. Thorne is the Anglican priest who spent much of Season 4 attempting to bully the Muslims out of town. When Firla debuted in the role in 2009, he predicted the character would ruffle a few feathers among the show’s fan base.
He was right. Some of them, in fact, seemed to have trouble separating the actor from the character.
One Tv-centred blog that featured an interview with Firla at the time received numerous comments from viewers who appeared to possess a curious lack of understanding about the role of a TV antagonist. They didn’t like Thorne and wished he would leave.
“When the first episode of the season premiered, it set a record for comments on the site from people who were upset,” he says with a laugh. “It hit three digits. It was crazy.”
But, as with any long-running comedies, the villains cannot stay completely villainous or they become rather stale. After three seasons spent reluctantly morphing into a threedimensional character, the good reverend will forge an unlikely friendship with fellow hardliner Baber Sid- diqui in Season 6. As played by Manoj Sood, Baber is the extreme Islamic yin to Thorne’s fundamentalist Christian yang.
Coincidentally, these bookends of religious intolerance are played by Calgary actors who grew up in the same northwest neighbourhood. Turns out, they also have similarly philosophical views about Mosque coming to an end.
“We all know in this industry that every show has a lifespan,” Sood says. “For a show to last six seasons in the current business of television, that’s a really great thing. Not to mention that the show, depending on the time of year, is airing in about 70 different countries.”
Like Thorne, Baber is a bit of a “buffoon” who is meant to be the unyielding conservative thorn in the side of Mercy’s liberal imam, Amaar Rashid.
But while Baber and Rev. Thorne may represent the hardened edge of their respective religions, it’s unlikely Little Mosque will go down in history as an edgy comedy.
At a time when even bland sitcoms like Two and a Half Men have racy content, Mosque often seemed quintessentially Canadian in its ability to gently skewer stereotypes without the use of melodrama or dark humour.
“It’s popular around the world for two reasons,” says Sood. “The first was its timing. It was the first show of its kind, ever. More importantly, it grew out of the post 9/11 environment. Generally when you see Muslims on TV, you’re watching about some horrible event in the world, some terrorist event.
“The fact of the matter is, 99.99999 per cent of the Muslims in the world are not like those people. But when you always see them in a negative light it creates a stereotype. Little Mosque broke that stereotype.”
Sood, whose family background is actually Hindu, isn’t particularly worried about typecasting now that the show has ended. Neither is Firla, who showed he was nothing like his holierthan-thou character in 2010 by captaining the atheist team on CBC’S Test the Nation: IQ. (“I’m not a fan of God, but I’m a huge fan of irony,” he said at the time.)
While the two may have grown up in the same part of Calgary, they took very different roads to Little Mosque.
Firla is a classically trained actor who attended the prestigious London Academy of Musical and Dramatic Arts and had visions of trodding the boards at Shaw and Stratford before deciding comedy was his thing.
He now lives in Los An- geles, where he is trying out for American comedy and dramatic roles.
Sood, on the other hand, didn’t enter the business until he was in his 30s. He hoped to land a few commercials to make some extra money in Vancouver, but after nabbing his first audition for a movie-of-theweek has spent the past 20 years working steadily.
For now, he plans to stay in B.C. and develop his own TV projects.
As for having Little Mosque on the Prairie on their resume, both actors say it’s aa boon. It’s recognized worldwide, including the U.S, where it never did get a real airing but managed to attract a cult following.
“I don’t think America is ready for a sympathetic version of Islam on network TV,” Firla says. “Or not yet, anyway. But it’s definitely a known entity down here. If people haven’t seen it, they’ve heard of it or are immediately taken by the title. It’s good to have on the resume.”