​Article by SANDRA COULSON
Published in the LONDON FREE PRESS
February 16, 1999

 

The London native has had a busy acting career,
but Power Play is one of the few ongoing roles he has taken on

It’s fitting that it is hockey that brought London-born actor Michael Riley back to Canada.

Riley had been working in Los Angeles for eight years before he came back last year for the lead role in Power Play, a CTV series about a fictional NHL team called the Hamilton Steelheads. 

“In a way, I miss the seasons,” says Riley from his Toronto apartment, not long after the megacity dug out from the January snow. 

“In L.A., it’s so perpetually nice, you kind of lose track of time. Eight years go by pretty fast. If I don’t see leaves change colour, I don’t feel like a full year has transpired.” 

Riley, 36, was born in London and lived here until he was in Grade 4, except for a couple of years when he was an infant. But it wasn’t until he was in high school in Burlington that he latched onto acting. 

A 1984 graduate of the National Theatre School in Montreal, he says, “One of the first professional theatre jobs I did was at the Grand when Martha Henry was there. I did You Can’t Take It with You with Heath Lamberts.” 

Riley’s career has been remarkable for the range of roles he has played, often in independent productions - “Everything from a dog to a serial rapist to a cross-dressing opera singer,” he jokes.   Critics have remarked that he changes so much in the dozens of roles he has taken on, viewers often don’t realize they’ve seen him before. 

One of his most recent roles was as the son in Win Again, a CBC movie starring Gordon Pinsent as a man returning home after being wrongfully accused of a crime. 

Besides breadth, Riley’s career also has depth. He has nine nominations or awards for his performances, most recently a nomination at last week’s Genie Awards for best supporting actor in the movie Pale Saints. 
“Every character I pick up is so exciting because it’s a totally different thing,” Riley says. 

Most of his acting experience has been in one-shot roles: a guest star, a movie, a play. An on-going role in a series is a rarity for him. 

“The idea of playing one guy over and over again for potentially a long time was a bit scary to me. So all the criteria about how well the writing was and the creative (side) -- all that had to be in place.” 

Riley’s Power Play alter ego, Brett Parker, may be the lead character of this comedy-drama, but he’s no hero. 
“He’s a pretty dysfunctional guy,” Riley cheerily admits. “That was my premise. I have to make him someone who can eke out interest over the long run.” 

Parker’s story is that he was a hot-shot sports agent in New York who was only too glad to leave behind his home town of Hamilton. But through an extraordinary series of circumstances, he finds himself as general manager of the Steelheads. 

Despite himself, Parker ends up using every weaselly manoeuvre he’s ever learned to keep others from moving the team to a richer market in Houston. 

“He’s so self-blind . . .,” Riley says. “He’s unaware that he has built this facade.”  But Parker’s good side keeps peeking out from behind the facade. “Ultimately, there has to be charm to him. That’s the trick.”

Despite the mania for hockey in Canada, there have been few TV series about the sport. 

Now that Riley has been on the inside, he thinks he knows why. 

Once a week, a crew and actors go to Copps Coliseum in Hamilton to film game footage. The “crowd” consists of about 50 extras who shuffle around the seats and are later multiplied into a crowd using computer graphics.

“There’s no way you could fill a hockey arena with 20,000 once a week,” Riley says. “It would just be way too cost prohibitive. It wasn’t until computer generation technology caught on that we could do it.” 

But he says there’s more to Power Play than hockey. “I think it’s where hockey is a backdrop.  It’s not about hockey; it’s set in hockey - a mythical backdrop for this guy’s slow and reluctant journey to redemption.”

Then Riley laughs at how pretentious this sounds for a series that pulls its cast of eccentric supporting characters right off the sports pages: the daft owner (Pinsent), the manipulative president (Kari Matchett), the home town hero team captain (Dean McDermott) and the flaky goalie (Normand Bissonnette). 

Riley is waiting to hear whether the series, which pulled in about 750,000 viewers a week, will be renewed for a second season. “It would be interesting to go again” with the character, he says.   If it does, Riley will be making a more permanent home in Toronto. 

But as he says, “The actor’s life is a fairly gypsy life. . . . I want the freedom to go where the work is.”