For posterity: Q&A with Adrian Hough of "The Engineers"

[Frank Moher]

Here's the Q&A I did with Adrian Hough of "The Engineers," our March 09 production. This was originally posted on the top of the site.

Q: Tell us about the character you’re playing – The Pope.

Adrian: The Pope is the leader of the Vatican 200 years in the future. The Vatican is now a place of human engineering and genetic engineering, and basically he’s the scientific and political leader of the world. He’s a man who’s very alone – he’s lived a very solitary life. He finds this young man, Adn, who helps him awaken his spiritual side. And so rather than be just a cold scientific, political leader, he starts to find a desire to want to lead the world spiritually in a new direction.

Q: Is it a challenging role to take on?

Adrian: It’s hugely challenging. A big challenge with any role of size is to create a journey for the character throughout the play so that he doesn’t start in the same place he finishes, so that the audience have a personal story to follow as well as an epic story. The play’s quite epic. I feel like my job as an actor is to make the character real and personal so that the audience feel like they have something to relate to.

Q: You’re a busy guy, but you’ve said you try to once a year take on a role in theatre in this community. Why?

Adrian: It started a few years ago, when I was asked to play Frank Ney, who’s a famous Nanaimo mayor, and I had a few months to prepare that so I went around the community and every single person I talked to had a Frank Ney story. And it really connected me to the place that I’d been living for the past, at that time, five years. I’ve been here seven, nearly eight years now. And having done that, I really felt I had started to become part of a community here, in the arts. And I teach here, so I meet a lot of very talented youngsters, a lot of very talented students and talented people here.
And having been doing this for a good 25 years now, I guess I could be called a veteran, and I like to take part in something that’s local and that’s real and allows me to get on a stage with other people. Because television and film, wonderful as it is, and as much as I enjoy it, there’s an extra dynamic to being onstage, live, having to do that play from beginning to end every night, without stopping and saying “I’m just going to go do that take again. I blew my line, I think we’ll just do that take again,” and fixing it, which is a luxury you have on film. It’s a sort of thing which I think keeps an actor honest and keeps an actor strong.

Q: Why are you in Nanaimo, as opposed to over in Vancouver where much of your work is?

Adrian: That’s a long story –

Q: Sometimes you wonder?

Adrian: (Laughs) Yeah, sometimes I do wonder. I think I should own shares in B.C. Ferries at this point. The short version is that my wife and I came over about eight years ago on holiday. We’d been living in Toronto for 11 years, which is also where I’d been born and brought up. And in between being born and brought up in Toronto, I spent eight years in London, England, and learned my craft there and worked a fair bit, and didn’t work a fair bit, and worked a fair bit, and didn’t work a fair bit. And came back to Toronto and was there for 11 years, and we had two young children at the time and the air was really polluted where we lived. There were at least 20 days out of the year when we couldn’t breathe. We came out here on holiday, we looked around and thought it was beautiful. We found that we could breathe wonderfully, and that there was ocean and there were mountains and there was blue sky. And I looked across the water and saw Vancouver, and I went across and got an agent in Vancouver. Before the holiday was over we had rented an apartment -- we had to go back and unrent our apartment in Toronto – and we just decided that we couldn’t think of a good reason to ever go back to Toronto or ever be anywhere else.

Q: Finally, what is the TV pilot you’re working on?

Adrian: It’s called “Human Target.” It’s starring Mark Valley from “Boston Legal” and Jackie Earle Haley who is in The Watchmen currently. I’m not supposed to talk too much about it because I’ve signed away my children’s kidneys and things like that in a privacy statement, but it’s basically about a man who sets himself up as a bodyguard by making himself the target, and changing identities to protect the people who come to hire him. It’s for Fox Network.