Blood, truth, memory and tears
Drama of ’80s blood scandal drew actors to new series — but show’s creator lived it
“I started thinking about the story a little more as a storyteller and less as a victim.” ROBERT C. COOPER WRITER, PRODUCER, DIRECTOR
To say that the miniseries Unspeakable is a passion project for Robert C. Cooper understates his dedication to telling the tale of Canada’s tainted-blood scandal.
For one thing, the Toronto-born writer, producer and director is part of the story. He’s one of thousands of hemophiliacs who contracted hepatitis C from tainted blood in the 1980s.
“That’s why you’re the right person to tell it,” says actress Sarah Wayne Callies, who plays the mother of a hemophiliac boy in the miniseries, debuting Jan. 9 at 9 p.m. on CBC. “It’s not a sort of outside historical view; it’s one person who’s so angry that you can write a 20-page rant
and that passion is what drives the story.” But Cooper’s passion isn’t just about himself; it’s also about the responsibility he feels to many people caught uup in the scandal whose histories became part of the series. Cooper — known for his work on the series Stargate
SG- 1, Stargate: Atlantis and SGU Stargate Universe — a approached the CBC about the show around 2014. A third round of treatment for his hep C had finally made him
feel better and “I started thinking about the story a little more as a storyteller and less as a victim.”
When it was green-lighted, “my goal was to then set about doing a ton of research, talking to as many people on all sides, because it was very important that this feel real and truthful,” he says during an interview at CBC’s Canadian Broadcasting Centre.
“At some point, I was (thinking), ‘What the hell have I gotten myself into?’ because it was so huge and so emotional to people. So many people had lost loved ones; cchildren … had been through just hell and back, some- times not back.
“And I realized I have the weight of telling this story on mmy shoulders, of how do I do this without feeling I’m exploiting e them, and how do I pay tribute to them and to wwhat their experience was, and also how do we get it right?”
Based on the two episodes available to media, Cooper aand his team have done an admirable job of weaving the tragedy’s many threads into a compelling drama.
It begins, like the real story, with reports out of the U.S.
about a new disease affecting gay men. In the series, a Toronto teacher named Margaret Sanders (played by Callies and loosely based on Cooper’s mother) sees a story in the New York Times about what came to be known as AIDS. She switches her son off a blood coagulant sourced from multiple donors to a safer product — against the advice of her condescending doctor. Meanwhile, her husband, a public health official (Michael Shanks of Saving Hope and Stargate SG-1), tries unsuccessfully to have officials from the Canadian Red Cross and Hemophilia Society issue public warnings.
In Vancouver, a similarly frustrating battle plays out with newspaper reporter Ben Landry (Shawn Doyle) and wife Alice (Camille Sullivan), who also have a hemophiliac son. They find officials unwilling to admit that Canada’s blood system could be affected, let alone take action — even as their son and others they know are infected. Cooper says the Landrys and Sanders are “composites of many real people. Everything is based on some truth, some reality.”
Besides doing many interviews, Cooper and his team drew on two books in their research — André Picard’s The Gift of Death: Confronting Canada’s Tainted Blood Tragedy and Vic Parsons’ Bad Blood: The Tragedy of the Canadian Tainted Blood Scandal — as well as the report of the public inquiry launched in 1993.
The Krever Inquiry found that at least 1,000 people contracted HIV from blood and blood products, and another 30,000 were infected with hepatitis C. The death toll was 3,000 in 1997 when the report was issued. Justice Horace Krever also found that governments and institutions failed to take measures that could have saved Canadians from illness and death, often because of an unwillingness to spend money — although the federal government eventually paid out more than $2 billion in compensation.
Canadian actor Doyle, whose long list of credits includes series like Big Love, House of Cards and Frontier, said he was “oblivious” to the scandal as it was happening, although he later realized his mother could have easily been a victim since she fell ill in the 1980s and had many blood transfusions.
“But that’s one of the things that emotionally drew me to the story was the fact that I didn’t know anything about it and that there are generations out there who don’t know anything about it,” he said. “Aside from the kind of human challenge that the character presented, the idea of being part of something that was going to be able to tell a story that we all need to hear again was really important to me.” American-born Callies, known for TV series like Prison Break, Colony and The Walking Dead, said everyone who worked on the series — “from production to design to hair and makeup and catering” — felt personally invested in it. The actress, who moved to Canada 12 years ago, was affected firsthand by the AIDS crisis when someone she loved died of the disease.
“This is a disease that initially people put in the corner of ‘It’s the gay people dying and it’s the hemophiliacs dying and that’s not me,’ and then it comes for the entire population,” she said. “Maybe one of the take-aways is we stand up for people who aren’t like us.”
Cooper is well aware that he’s one of the lucky ones. He says that 90 per cent of the young hemophiliacs who stayed on the more risky blood product got AIDS and died.
“You know, facts are interesting but, at the end of the day, they can be a little boring to some people. In this case, I don’t think so. I think people will be shocked by what they learn,” he said.
“What we never lost sight of was that, with all of these facts, we were trying to capture that passion and that emotion and … make people feel what it was like to live through it.”
He also hopes that viewers take away the idea that truth is worth fighting for. Callies adds that we have to keep an eye on the institutions that serve us.
“If we put our feet up and go, ‘Oh, they got this,’ we may end up in a situation where our best interests are not being met.”