THE ROLE — OR EIGHT — OF HIS CAREER
Film by veteran Montreal actor explores collateral damage of mass shootings
Veteran Montreal actor Al Goulem tackles one of the most challenging roles of his career in his new film. Make that eight challenging roles.
Goulem takes on eight distinct characters in Thoughts and Prayers, a most compelling offering about the impact of mass gun violence on the various people affected by the tragedies. Its Montreal debut is Sunday at the Canadian Independent Film Festival.
Based on his stage play First Person Shooter — first presented at the 2018 Montreal Fringe fest — Goulem wrote and co-produced the film. Romy Goulem, Al's older brother, served as director.
“I had actually written a oneman show about how stupid oneman shows are, and then there was this mass killing in Toronto. And every morning I'd be reading in the paper about how the father of the shooter was being savagely yelled at by everyone,” Goulem recalls. “What do you do when your kid does something like that? It's not you.”
Goulem's wife, Montreal playwright Alexandra Haber, quickly stepped in with some advice about his undertaking of the oneman show.
“She is a much more experienced writer than I am. She said, `That's what you have to write about instead.' So, the next day, I said, `Yes, I am.'”
Over the next month, he wrote all the play's pieces, including one from a story he read in the Gazette about Montreal-born, Nashville-based trauma surgeon Rick Miller trying to deal with three mass shootings.
The eight characters Goulem portrays are a trauma surgeon; a father of the shooter; a father of a victim; an investigative journalist; a right-wing shock-radio jock; a first-responder police officer; a witness to a shooting; and a character “who is essentially me,” the Everyman, a father who can't get his head around all the violence and fears for the future of his son.
“The toughest part was the witness being interviewed 20 years after the shooting he experienced. It's the first time he's talking about the tragedy. He thinks he's over it, but he's not — he's suffering with survivor's guilt,” Goulem says.
“It's the peripheral people you don't really hear about and all the damage they deal with that I wanted to deal with. People are obsessed with why the killer did what he did and how horrible it was that so many innocents died. I read another story about the mom of the Columbine killer and how she had to live being treated like such a monster, being ostracized by her community and knowing she would have to live her whole life with this as her legacy.”
That became the backbone of the play, with Goulem writing monologues for those who were connected to the shootings. Rather than focus the piece on one specific tragedy, it is based on an amalgam of actual mass shootings across the continent, including the 2006 Dawson College tragedy, which claimed the life of student Anastasia De Sousa.
“Romy had come to see the play and said we have to make this into a film. At first, I was dubious. Then the pandemic hit, and there wasn't much going on for me (on the acting front). So we did it, shooting here and in London, Ont., where Romy lives and teaches filmmaking at Fanshawe College.”
The film's title came about from listening to a conservative American politician, who, in lieu of advocating for more gun control, would simply react to the rash of shootings by offering only his “thoughts and prayers” to families of victims.
Playing the eight different characters, Goulem not only had to assume different stories and accents, but also different hair styles and colours.
“We did two characters each weekend. So I would undergo a radical hair change-up from one day to the next. I was able to grow a big, bushy beard for one character, then shave it off to a moustache for the next one. Then dye my hair black for yet another.”
This is the fourth film — including the feature The Drive, based on another Al play — in which the Goulem brothers have joined forces. They shot Thoughts and Prayers for the whopping sum of $7,000, which wouldn't cover the cost of coffee on most productions.
“And almost all of that was spent on travel between here and Montreal — and my hair,” Goulem cracks.
Goulem, 58, has spent much of his life on sets. He began young in the 1979 disaster flick City on Fire with Henry Fonda and Ava Gardner and appeared with Lee Majors in the 1980 thriller The Agency. “What a thrill for a kid working with Majors, The Six Million Dollar Man. That was the best couple of days of my youth.”
Apart from dozens of stage roles here and at Ontario's Stratford, Goulem was the series lead on such CBC-TV comedies as the much acclaimed 18 to Life and The Tournament, as well as on such franco series as Sauve-quipeut and Le Negociateur. He has additional credits on numerous TV shows, including The Boys of St. Vincent and Transplant. On the big screen, he appeared in Brooklyn, Brian De Palma's Snake Eyes starring Nicolas Cage, and Denys Arcand's Stardom and La Chute de l'empire américain. Plus he will soon be caught in the Sundance festival hit My Old Ass, produced by Margot Robbie.
And that's Goulem's voice on such video-game series as Guardians of the Galaxy and Assassin's Creed.
“And now I get to play a grandfather for the first time in my career in an upcoming film tentatively called All I Want for Christmas,” Goulem quips. “It's only fitting.”
That it is. Goulem's second grandchild was born Wednesday.