Acting bug infected Calgary native years before landing Helix role
It was not the most auspicious start to an acting career.
Calgary native Mark Ghanime’s official introduction to the wonderful world of show business came when playing an Afghani villager in the somewhat forgettable 2003 TV movie Chasing Freedom with Juliette Lewis.
It was shot in an industrial park in Calgary, which had been transformed into a bombedout village in Afghanistan. Working with a six-year-old photo, casting agents thought he might be good as an extra for the shoot.
“I guess my Lebanese heritage, my last name, piqued their interest,” says Ghanime, one of the stars of the upcoming sci-fi series Helix. “The next day, I was on set.”
It was his first role and it took him six years to land.
Which is not to say the 36-yearold actor was pounding the pavement the whole time. He had no real interest in becoming an actor. In 1997, he was studying business and finance at the University of Calgary and working toward getting a real estate licence when he saw a call for extras for the western Open Range with Kevin Costner and Robert Duvall. He signed up as a lark, had his photo taken, gave his phone number and essentially forgot all about it after he didn’t land a job.
Six years later, his life changed with a strange phone call.
“They said, ‘Do you still look the same?’” says Ghanime. “I said, ‘Well, I’m six years older and my beard is thicker, but effectively yes, I’m the same looking person.’ They said, ‘We need you tomorrow on set to play an Afghani villager.’”
So the role of “villager” appears on Ghanime’s Internet Movie Database’s entry as his first part. It was not particularly high-profile, but Ghanime was immediately bitten by the acting bug. The next day he arrived at Calgary’s Company of Rogues Actors’ Studio and announced he wanted to become an actor.
A decade later, Ghanime is doing publicity for what is his biggest role to date. Helix, a dark sci-fi thriller about mutant viruses, is a hotly-anticipated mid-season entry with a strong pedigree.
It stars Billy Campbell (The Killing) and Hiroyuki Sanada (47 Ronin, Lost) and comes from the fertile imagination of Ronald D. Moore, the producer and writer behind the Battlestar Galactica reboot.
So Ghanime is understandably excited about it. But, unfortunately, he is also honour-bound not to reveal all that much about the plot or his character, an army engineer named Major Sergio Balleseros.
Even the series publicist is appealing to journalists not to offer any hint of a spoiler before the Montreal-shot series debuts Friday on Showcase.
“The thing with our show is that you quickly see around episode five or six, which I can’t really talk about, it takes a complete turn and you realize the show is no longer about what you thought it was about,” Ghanime says.
The season opener finds a team of scientists from the Centers for Disease Control being taken by Balleseros to a remote high-tech facility in the Arctic to investigate a disease outbreak. Arctic Biosystems is run by the mysterious Dr. Hiroshi Hatake (Sanada), who appears to know more than he is letting on about the retrovirus that has infected three people, turning two of them into black-blood-oozing mush.
The first season will unfold over 13 intense days on the dark base — with each episode covering a 24hour period. While the show occasionally recalls John Carpenter’s The Thing and even Ridley Scott’s Alien in conjuring up a creepy sense of claustrophobic horror, Ghanime said the true terror lies in the fact that Helix is more or less based on science.
“It is true science fiction,” he says. “It’s fiction based on a science that really exists. A lot of time, the science-fiction fantastical stuff takes you on a journey that is outside of what could really happen in the world. Everything we do in the show could actually happen. And that was interesting to me.”
As for his character, it becomes clear early on that the seemingly earnest, squeaky-clean and oddly non-militaristic Major Balleseros has his own agenda.
“Sergio Balleseros grew up with a bit of a tough life himself,” says Ghanime. “There was orphanages involved and he was someone who was very opportunistic and did whatever it took to survive. He was a survivalist and would put himself in the right position at the right time and align himself with the right people. He’s a bit of a chameleon and will make you believe what you need to believe. But he also has a heart. The journey my character goes through in the 13 episodes is quite drastic and a lot of fun to play.”
Born in Calgary, Ghanime spent most of his youth in Montreal before returning here to finish his last year of high school at Western. He studied finance and business at the University of Calgary with the intention of following his Lebaneseborn father into real estate. Since 2006, he has lived in Vancouver.
“I like a lot of the doctor roles, the soldier roles, lawyers,” Ghanime says. “Just a lot of characters that have that an intelligence to them but can also be deceptive. They can be unlikely heroes, but you often don’t know what to make of them.”