by CLAIRE BICKLEY

THE LONDON FREE PRESS
October 10th, 1998​

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Michael Riley made two U.S. TV movies back-to-back last year. In the first, he played a wild-haired serial rapist.

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"During that shoot, people would come to me and say, 'Wow, you know, my dog is on set and you scared my dog. Do you ever do comedy?'" he recalls.

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Soon after it wrapped, he moved on to a wacky Disney comedy and the role of man who becomes a dog.

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"People there, of course, said, 'Have you ever done drama? You're so funny.'"

When Riley's L.A. manager sent his clip reel to a major movie studio, a casting executive called back, befuddled.

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"She said, 'Why did you send me a tape with a bunch of your clients on it?' My manager went, 'No, no, no, that's all Michael Riley, that's all Michael.'"

"When my manager was telling me this, I thought, 'Wow, mission accomplished.' But the woman wouldn't see me. It was too confusing to her. She couldn't digest it. She couldn't pick one thing that I was."

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Back in Canada, where versatility goes unpunished, Riley's latest role is again a question of identity — our national identity as expressed in our national game.

In Power Play, the drama series premiering Thursday night at 8 on CTV, he stars as Brett Parker, an arrogant New York sports agent who returns to his Hamilton hometown purportedly to run its struggling NHL franchise but really to try and move the team to the U.S.

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Power Play creators Glenn Davis and William Laurin call Parker the personification of all that's wrong with the modern game. He wants to find a Dennis Rodman-like bad boy player purely for publicity purposes and to introduce a pre-game show with cheerleaders.

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"His character treats hockey as a commodity rather than a trust, so his character sort of sins against hockey. In our world, at least notionally, his character invented the glowing puck," says Laurin.

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The producing pair are also fond of referring to Parker as "Satan," which returns us to the issue of identity.

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"I don't think he's Satan exactly," laughs Riley, who prefers to think of him as "a 12-year-old boy in an Armani suit."

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"He's a lost, corrupt guy. It's kind of a beauty and the beast thing," he says. "He's running from things in his childhood and he has created this version of himself to kind of hold the outside world and his interior world at bay."

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In the eight years since Riley's film debut in Perfectly Normal, the hockey-opera-beer Canadian comedy, the 36-year-old has worked about equally here and in the U.S. Power Play is his first TV series, something that both pleases and perturbs him.

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"Brett has a kind of sweeping color, this Satanistic color they choose to describe him in. But I'm building him more like a pointillist painting. He's made up of the details and sometimes those edges get smoothed away by the time it reaches the air. I'm just hoping enough of that survives that the intent of what I'm trying to do will come through. I'm trying to build a circle with spikes on the outside and TV likes to have smooth, rounded edges."

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Riley's credits read like a list of passions, mostly independent films that did the festival circuit, then disappeared.

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"The irony is, of course, those projects were feature films where they're looking for edges and there's nothing homogenized about it," says Riley.

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"Those are the ones that people won't see and this is the one that they will see. That's just the nature of the beast, I guess. That's just the way television is."

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He's considering projects for Power Play's hiatus, with one stipulation.

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"The only prerequisite is that it be as far from Brett Parker as is humanly possible. I want to play the cross-dressed coke addict who's from outer space or something. I need to do something that's really outrageous so I can get into this Armani suit again and delve into 22 more hours."