From playing Jesus to a meta-human
Richard Ouzounian’s Saturday feature on the most intriguing names in entertainment Canadian actor has had a long and varied career, but lately TV is muscling out his stage work
You probably know Victor Garber as Jack Bristow ( Alias) or Dr. Martin Stein ( The Flash) but, on Sunday, he serves at the lynchpin for the Season 3 finale of Motive, where he’s playing enigmatic industrialist Neville Montgomery.
“I was intrigued when they offered me the role because I thought, ‘How do you do this when everybody knows what’s going to happen?’ ” laughed Garber over the phone from California, referencing Motive’s gimmick of introducing the audience to the victim and killer at the start of each episode.
“It’s so beautifully set up, you just have to pay attention. Little looks and subtle directorial things that show you just where to look. It’s a puzzle that is fun to put together.”
Born in London, Ont., Garber is 66 now, but you’d never know it from his still-boyish grin or the enthusiasm he radiates about the project.
“Motive is a really smart show and I was happy to do it. They treated me very, very well. Usually I’m the good guy, but I enjoy playing a character for a change that people might perceive as evil.
“Do I play a guy like that any differently? Not at all. My take on it is that even bad people think what they’re doing is justified.”
If Garber sounds like a man who’s very comfortable in his own skin, that might be because he’s been acting for a while.
He appeared as a child on the stage of London’s Grand Theatre, doing shows with his mother and father such as The King and I. When his parents saw how eagerly he took to it, they enrolled him in a children’s theatre program at the Grand “and that was that. I never looked back.”
By 16, he was working at a summer theatre program at Hart House on the University of Toronto campus, which only solidified his belief that “this was what I was meant to do with my life. Period.”
He started out as a folkie in those days when the strumming of guitars filled every basement in Yorkville, even winding up in a group called the Sugar Shoppe, but then Jesus called.
No, Garber didn’t have a profound religious experience; he was tapped to play the lead role in the legendary Toronto production of Godspell, which opened at the Royal Alexandra in 1972 and went on to a lengthy run at the Bayview Playhouse.
The cast included the likes of Andrea Martin, Martin Short, Paul Shaffer and Eugene Levy, “and I’m happy to say I number them among my close friends still today,” Garber says.
It also started him on an impressive stage career, which has included four Tony nominations and the creation of two important roles in Stephen Sondheim musicals: Anthony in Sweeney Todd and John Wilkes Booth in Assassins.
He also did tons of TV appearances, including two Emmy-nominated turns on Frasier and Will & Grace.
“But if you had to ask me what really shifted my career into high gear when I was nearly 50, it would be Titanic and Alias.”
In the 1997 James Cameron blockbuster about the doomed luxury liner, he grabbed everyone’s attention as Thomas Andrews, the ship’s architect, despondently swirling cognac in a snifter as his creation sank beneath the waves.
And for five seasons, starting in 2001, he played Jennifer Garner’s urbane “Spy Daddy” on Alias and suddenly enjoyed the rush of what it was like to be on a widely watched TV show.
“People would come up to me in the supermarket or at airports and start talking to me as if I were Jack Bristow. I guess because most of them hadn’t seen me in anything else, they thought I was that person. Crazy!”
Besides all the other perks of being in a hit series, Garber became great friends with co-star Garner and consequently with her husband, Ben Affleck, who turned to Garber when he was looking for someone to play ambassador Ken Taylor in his espionage drama Argo.
“I went to an event last week. My car pulled up to the hotel and I suddenly saw a mass of people rushing towards me. I’ve been acting for 50 years and that’s never happened to me before.” VICTOR GARBER
“From the beginning, when I read the script, I thought this would make a good movie,” says Garber. “And Ben is the real thing as a director. He can do it all. He’s truly fantastic. The man completely trusts the actor. He loves to play. We also did a fair bit of improvisation, which can be tricky but worked beautifully here. It’s a very tricky film, but he made it all work.”
Garber never got to meet Taylor but, as he jokingly says, “Hey, I played Liberace too and I never met him either. The important thing with playing any reallife character is to make it multi-dimensional and human and truthful.”
The only thing Garber didn’t like about Argo was “all the controversy in Canada about it. That was a little difficult to manage. When it got heated in some of the press conferences I just wanted to say, ‘Listen, this movie is really about Ben’s character and I didn’t feel I was shortchanged in any way.’ You can only do what’s in the script, after all.”
But the latest chapter in Garber’s life might prove to be the most star-studded, as well as the most fascinating.
Starting in 2014, he began making guest appearances as Stein on the superhero series The Flash. It was recently announced he’ll play the same role on a regular basis in the new series Legends of Tomorrow.
“At my age, to suddenly be playing a meta-human is incredible to me. I feel like the luckiest actor on the planet. Comic-Con is something I never thought I’d say, let alone go to.
“The offer truly came out of the blue, but I admire the work of Greg Berlanti (the series creator) so much that I said yes before I knew anything. We’d worked together on Eli Stone.
“And so many of the regulars, like Jesse Martin and Tom Cavanagh, are people I admire, so I just put my faith in everyone and said, ‘Let’s go.’ ”
The only downside is that the fans can be a little enthusiastic.
“I went to an event last week. My car pulled up to the hotel and I suddenly saw a mass of people rushing towards me. I’ve been acting for 50 years and that’s never happened to me before. It certainly floored me and it frightened me as well.”
All of this TV success means that Garber has been giving short shrift to his other love, the stage, where he hasn’t been in five years.
He attributes part of that to the illness and death of his close friend and frequent director, Nicholas Martin, “with whom I had such a wonderful shorthand. Whenever he asked me to do something, I’d try to say yes. But now he’s gone.”
Still, once his meta-human days are through, Garber would love to return to the stage again, maybe even at the Stratford Festival.
“I grew up only an hour from there and yet I’ve never acted there. It’s really something I have to do before the final curtain.”