Tom McCamus: Starlog interview, on Ground Control
Starlog April #297
White Hunter, Black Eckhart
Disfigured, deadly & drained of colour, Tom McCamus is simply wicked in white on Mutant X.
By Peter Bloch-Hansen
Tom McCamus is a highly respected classical actor whose success goes beyond the screen, having won praise for his stage performances at his native Canada's National Shakespeare and Shaw Festival theatres. But at heart, he's a science fiction fan, which explains why - in jeans, white wig and pale makeup - he is strolling down the Mutant X production office corridor looking like an albino stagehand having a very bad hair day.
McCamus is in makeup for his role as Mason Eckhart, the sinister head of the secretly government-funded Genetic Security Agency. His immune system destroyed, his body disfigured, Eckhart is the twisted result of the genetic experiments he supervises. "Eckhart just happens to look like Andy Warhol," McCamus grins. "It wasn't intentional. He wears a wig. The white colour is just his taste. It also creates a certain amount of fear. If you're a strange-looking person, you can control people and keep them at a distance. In the first few episodes, the wig was wilder, but they didn't like that. Initially, he was going to be visibly covered in plastic, but it looked like he was coated in K-Y jelly. There was also going to be some interesting stuff on my nose and ears, but I'm glad now we didn't do that. But Eckhart wears Gucci suits, too. He has taste. And from his look, I knew how I was going to enter the character. I sort of acted to the look.
"When you're playing someone like Eckhart, you don't necessarily go, 'OK, I'm going to play an evil guy.' Eckhart doesn't think he's an evil man. He thinks he's right. Even though Eckhart orders people to be killed, I try to do it with a certain amount of intelligence. He's a very smart man, and he doesn't have time for people who aren't that smart. He's unforgiving. People like Eckhart think that they're above the regular hoi polloi, so they can do whatever they want. He also has a certain kind of dark, sarcastic humour, and is fascinated by people's pain. Whether he enjoys it or not, I don't know. He likes to watch and see how they react to it. I think it's more of an intellectual response. He's fascinated with everything."
Bubble Boy
Beyond Eckhart's dialogue, McCamus is given little direct information about his alter-ego, so the actor surmises much, enjoying the freedom to invent his character. "We don't know exactly what happened," he points out. "Eckhart's a different man from the person he was before this [unknown event] happened, and it's the reason why he is the way he is. There's an episode that involves a woman with whom he obviously had some connection before, so you know that he had a social life at one time. Now, the face that you see is basically a mask that he puts makeup on. He lives in a bubble. His entire body is covered in a plastic film. He can't really touch people or talk to them. Adam [John Shea] was the cause of this, or at least he blames him for it. His war with Adam is very personal, and I think Adam is probably smarter than Eckhart. Adam is the only person who really rattles him. He never quite wins with Adam, so he has this huge, healthy respect for his adversary. It's like Marc Antony and Julius Caesar in Shakespeare.
"Eckhart doesn't normally trust anybody, though sometimes he does. I find myself wondering, 'Why does he trust this person?' Obviously, they're not going to be very good at their job, and he knows they're going to fail. He could probably do it better himself, but it's more interesting for him to watch somebody else screw up, more interesting to manipulate people; and if they can't do it, then he can kill them. It's really not that important to him, and I don't think he has a passion for ridding the world of new mutants, either. He just believes that it's the best way for him to keep the power that he has - or should have.
"When you're working with a character for a long time," he reveals, "you make up whole worlds for them that have nothing to do with what is really happening, but it's fun because it fleshes them out. For me, they're usually of a humorous bent, because if I'm going to play this guy, I have to have some sort of human thing for him. So I figure Eckhart has a closet filled with a thousand suits, all exactly the same. And he has about 25 wigs, all exactly the same. Maybe he has some kind of Flock of Seagulls wig. We try to put a bit of humour in here and there - throw in an extra line or two - just as we're shooting, and sometimes they keep it in the episode, which is nice. I keep thinking that maybe Eckhart has secret powers that we haven't seen yet. I would like Eckhart to be able to fly.
"We talked about how he maybe likes to get dressed up in black net hose, and discussed his preferences, about the fact that he likes mud wrestling. My big joke is, 'What kind of music does he like?' I think he's a big Hall & Oates fan; either that or he's dancing to Barry Manilow all alone late at night. I imagine that the audience figures his nature would be more toward Johann Sebastian Bach or something like that - or heavy metal. But no, it's the thing you would not suspect. It could be Three Dog Night. It's nice that you don't ever see it, but we can hint at it. There are little clues that they keep throwing in here and there about why Eckhart does the things he does."
Some actors have compared performing in science fiction to doing Shakespeare. For McCamus, the parallel is more than theoretical. This summer at Canada's Stratford Shakespearean Festival, he will play one of the bard's most notorious villains, Richard III - the seriously deformed English aristocrat who murders his way to the throne, then tyrannises the country.
"An acting teacher I once had said that in Richard III's soliloquies, he's really talking to a whole audience of other Richard IIIs, saying 'Look at that. Can you believe what I'm doing?' There's a kind of bitterness and anger that comes out of being deformed - or if the world sets you aside - so you want to get back at everybody by becoming the king," McCamus explains. "Eckhart has become the head of this security agency by killing off all the people ahead of him. He controls the whole thing. Eckhart is the king, or at least views himself as one - particularly with the way he's written. Eckhart seems to choose his words - odd, strange words - whereas the other mutants don't necessarily do that. I always get the biggest words, and if you're playing an arch kind of person, you can take it into theatricality - and sometimes that's what it feels like. There's a theatricality to science fiction, and there's a theatricality to Shakespeare.
"I'm not using an English accent, though; it's more generic. Also, Eckhart uses the ends of words, the 't's and the 'd's, to ponder what he's going to do next. John is playing more of a regular kind of guy with Adam, so he doesn't need to impress with his language. But Eckhart feels that he does. If you have anger or disdain for people, it comes out in the way you speak. When you use words like weapons, they take you somewhere else. It's fun to do, actually. There's a certain kind of spontaneity. When you're playing a guy like Eckhart, you have opportunities that you don't necessarily have when you're playing a good guy."
Evil Albino
Sealed in his sterile office, Eckhart's pursuit of Adam's new mutants affords McCamus few opportunities to act with the other regulars. He works mostly with the guest stars whom he dispatches to execute his various nefarious schemes. "I've only had a couple of scenes with the others," he points out. "I had one with John just the other day that was fun. The others [Victor Webster, Victoria Pratt, Forbes March, Lauren Lee Smith] all fight, and as soon as I see them fight, I run away. It would be a whole different thing if Eckhart was a fighting person, but he's not. I've personally done plenty of stage fighting. I've played Coriolanus, and I've played Peter Pan, so I've done wire work and all that kind of stuff. But it really takes a lot out of you, so I leave it to the younger people. I'm older than those guys. It's hard to shoot that stuff, and it's really painstaking because they shoot little bits at a time. With my scenes, I get to do the whole thing at once - a few reverses, a couple of different shots and I'm done. But what those guys are doing takes forever. I wouldn't want to do that. I wouldn't be anywhere near as good. I let those people who really know what they're doing do it well.
"When I first agreed to this, I didn't think I would be doing as much as I have. I've had episodes with plenty of interesting stuff to do, and I certainly don't have any desire for it to be any more. I've done a fair amount of guest work on TV shows and I enjoyed them, but I've never been involved with a show for longer than one episode, so this is interesting for me. I don't start rehearsing Richard III until the season finishes, so that works out OK. I was lucky on this, because they're a great group of people. I shoot maybe two days at the most for each episode, so I get to do other stuff - or just live my life, which is nice. While I've been doing this series, I've done all sorts of things. I did a show over in Europe. I went to Winnipeg and did stuff there. This is a nice place to work, though it is difficult sometimes, because Rocco [Matteo, production designer] uses Plexiglas and it makes a lot of noise. So there are certain things you have to work around. I love the hand props, the guns and stuff. You go, 'Wow, that's great!' and you look at it and it's just a common, everyday thing that they've made into something else. I love the imagination these guys have."
McCamus had another reason for signing on to chase the members of Mutant X. "I'm a big science fiction fan," he enthuses. "I've been reading it for a long time. I'm a big Isaac Asimov fan. I've never understood why they haven't made Foundation into a movie. I think it would be fantastic.
"I go to see any [SF movie] - good, bad, it doesn't matter. I love Blade Runner. I love Star Wars. ALIEN is my favourite, just because of its whole design, that kind of gritty SF. Outland was a neat film. I loved The Abyss. I watch Star Trek all the time. I've watched Enterprise maybe twice, and I liked it. I'll have to watch more of thsat because it goes back to the old style of Trek, and I like Scott Bakula. I loved Quantum Leap."
McCamus has worked in SF television before, most recently on William Shatner's series TekWar. "Shatner wasn't around," he comments. "The guy I played was pretty evil. I got to fight a clone of myself, so that was pretty interesting. When you play these kinds of characters, you're always being chased by the good guys, but you rarely see them on set. You're always dealing with henchmen, and almost always someone you've never worked with before.
"I did two episodes of Friday the 13th. In one, I played a vampire who goes back in time. He was more sympathetic, because he had a cloak on that made him a vampire; he didn't really want to be one. I had fun doing that. One of the whores that I killed was Emma Richler, [noted Canadian author] Mordecai Richler's daughter, so we would sit and discuss literature, and then they would say, 'OK, bite the whore on the neck,' and I would do it, and then we would talk more about literature. The other episode had me going back in time to the Civil War, where I killed about eight people. I had a good time on both shows."
McCamus also guest starred on The Secret Adventures Of Jules Verne ("The Black Glove Of Melchizedek"). "I played a very evil man in that," he recalls. "All he said was, 'Give me the glove.' I had a really long wig and was a spirit character. That was a beautiful set, and the episode was all shot in high-definition [video], too, so it had a really interesting look. They certainly put money into it."
More recently, McCamus appeared in the SF feature Possible Worlds. "A beautiful film," he praises. "We shot it a year and a half ago. The man who wrote it is a mathematician, so he wrote it from a mathematician's point-of-view. A man is found dead and his brain has been stolen. A detective tries to find out who did it, but [the killer] is a man with the ability to live in an infinite number of parallel worlds at exactly the same time."
Mutant Antagonist
Issues of science are also raised in his role on Mutant X. "Eckhart's focus," McCamus states, "is not so much technology for technology's sake, but what technology can do in terms of his ultimate purpose. Adam has quite a fascination for the actual process, for how things work. Eckhart just uses everybody else's knowledge to get somewhere. So I don't think I'm much more aware of biotechnology than I was before I started this show."
The ethical debates raging over what limits society should place on biotechnology concern him more. "There isn't an easy answer," he asserts. "Society makes very large, sweeping rules about what you can and can't do, but I think the best way would be to have the rules as guidelines and have decisions made for each individual situation. That's a very, very hard thing to do. For example, this stem-cell research; it seems to me that people who know what they're talking about should make the decisions. It would be a shame to lose what good that technology could do for humanity because of emotional or moral decisions based on misunderstandings of what it actually is. With a character like Eckhart, that doesn't mean anything. To him, the ends justify the means no matter what. In order to get what he wants, there's nothing he won't do.
"I really don't think that technology dehumanises us," McCamus adds. "Look at William Gibson's novels. The most fantastically wonderful, individual people have come out of his highly technical society. It wasn't that they became like machines; the machines freed them up to become more individualistic and human. Human nature is pretty strong."
As an artist, exploring human nature is of particular importance to McCamus. "In all my acting," he remarks, "I've either played really bad guys, or the nicest guys in the world. I don't know why I play villains. There's an awful lot there to explore, and I get to become somebody who I would never, never be. There's a charm to evil people. It's fascinating to find out what makes them work. Is it something that's in all of us? The more you play them, the more you find out. I couldn't do what they do, but why? Is it something that I'm just not supposed to do, or is it simply not in me? An evil man is a human being too, like everybody else, so there has to be a reason [why he's evil], and we've got to find it. And he's not necessarily aware of the reason, either. He just does it. Then there are the people who don't know they're evil. But you can't play them all the time. That drives you crazy."
Like the actors of Shakespeare's time, McCamus is a wanderer - at least artistically. "I'm not a person who likes to stay in one thing for a long time," Tom McCamus confesses. "Television is really fast, so you have to figure out what you're going to do quickly, and you're going to make some mistakes. In film, it takes a long time to shoot a scene, so you can get lost in it and lose sight of the story. Simply for the craft of acting, the stage is much better.
"With the stage, you get more time, you can develop more, deeper levels, but you have to work harder and you don't get paid as well. If you're going to make a living at it, you have to do it all the time and you don't get a chance to have a life. In television, you get to go home and see your work over a period of time, and to realise what is good and what not to do again. You get to have a life, so you've got something to bring to the work. I've always said that stage work was my favourite, but one lacks the other has. I've got to do them all, and that's my favourite - doing them all."
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