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Forbes March: Canoe JAM! TV 10/19/01
Superman minus the tights: Halifax actor transforms from soap star to 'mutant'
By PAT LEE
Women in the viewing audience might be somewhat disapppointed, but Forbes March is not a super hero who wears tights and sports a cape. Instead, as a genetic-experiment-gone-wonderfully awry in the new sci-fi series Mutant X. He gets to zip around town in flashy cars wearing what seem to be regular-guy pants, albeit with spiffy leather jackets.
"You got me to a T. I really wanted to stand in front of the world in tight biker pants and show my assets to the world," the Halifax-born actor says, laughing. "We're trying to get some scenes in there where we're all working out in biker shorts."
A girl can dream, can't she?
The hunky March - who has worked as a model and used his good looks as a regular on the soap All My Children - is one of four comely "mutants" in the new series, debuting Saturday at 8 p.m. on Global.
The catch is that the four genetically designed young adults each have a special power. Jessie Kilmartin, played by March, for example, is able to change the density of his body, while others have animal strength or electrical power.
John Shea is the fugitive leader of the team - and the one who headed the experiment that created them. His job is to keep the government from destroying his creations, while they seek out more of their kind. The group's main enemy is an Andy Warhol-like dude named Mason Eckhart (Tom McManus), who has a real hate-on for the mutants and their ilk.
Are you with me so far?
March thinks it's the everyman - or woman - aspect of the high-tech show that will appeal to viewers.
"I liked the idea that this was going to be a super hero show but where the characters aren't necessarily super heroes. It's not sort of a Spandex kind of deal. It's ordinary people who wake up and discover they have super-hero powers. I thought that was really appealing," he said.
His fellow Canadian actor mutant heros include Lauren Lee Smith as Emma deLauro, a telepath who's new to the group; Victoria Pratt as Shalimar Fox (yep, that's right), a "feral beauty" with both animal and human DNA; and Victor Webster as Brennan Mulwray, a street-wise rebel.
March said the F/X-heavy series, being filmed on a sound stage in north Toronto, was a tad complicated to work on in the beginning since none of the actors could visualize how their "powers" would be realized on the screen.
"I had no idea where I was supposed to be acting. I mean what does it look like when a person becomes very dense?," he said earlier this week in an interview from Toronto, which is now home for the Halifax-raised actor.
"I don't know. Is it heavy or just hard? And does my character know this? It's called imagination da-hhling."
March, 28, almost didn't even get that far into the production because he was initially reluctant to audition for the role.
"The character was originally supposed to split into three different people and the audition piece was these three different people having a conversation between themselves," he said.
"But in an audition sitting in a white empty office on a collapsible metal chair, having a conversation between three people by yourself was a little daunting."
March obviously got over the fear and landed the role, which was altered to become someone who can make their body as hard as a wall or pliable as water, which comes in handy if someone wants to, say, drive a car through you.
The syndicated series has the green light for two seasons, which equals 44 episodes, to be seen here and throughout the U.S. There was an initial legal challenge to the title of the series with Fox, owners of the X-Men franchise, suing over use of the similar-sounding name. A court subsequently denied Fox's petition to ban the use of the Mutant X title, although all press material makes it clear that the two are in no way related.
March, who left All My Children about a year ago after being on the series for about a year and a half, said the daytime soap job was demanding but educational.
"It was fantastic. It was also very difficult, but overall fantastic. It gets more fantastic the further away I get from it. It's a tough medium," he said. "You go to school for year and work your tush off and you realize that no matter how much you studied you can only learn about 10 per cent of what there is to learn before you step on a set."
As for Mutant X, the actor thinks it's got everything in place to be a successful series, including stylish sets by the designer of La Femme Nikita and fight sequences taught by a colleague of Jackie Chan.
"They've really put a really complete package together. I think the fact that they already had 44 episodes sold gave them a chance to really invest in the show, without having to say, 'Oh let's see what happens with it first.' "
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