Miner achieves showbiz dream

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This article was published 28/07/2011 (5540 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

BEVERLY HILLS — It’s a short, cool story about a long, strange and highly unlikely journey.

The seldom-travelled road in question runs from Flin Flon to Hollywood, and in just one year, 23-year-old Jared Abrahamson has travelled all the way from there to here.

“At this exact time last year, July 27, I was leaving my job at the diamond drills by Snow Lake, then I hitchhiked from Flin Flon to Swan River, where my dad’s ranch is, and I spent the day with him before heading out west to pursue this (acting) dream in Vancouver,” Abrahamson told the Free Press Wednesday, while relaxing on a couch at the showbiz-history-steeped Beverly Hilton Hotel.

“And now I’m in Beverly Hills doing interviews about a TV movie. It’s my first time in L.A. … It’s pretty hard to believe.”

The movie, Finding a Family, in which Abrahamson co-stars with NYPD Blue alumna Kim Delaney, was shot in Vancouver for U.S. cable’s Hallmark Movie Channel. It’s an against-the-odds true story about a Detroit teen who overcame obstacles in the foster-care system, found a permanent family and achieved his dream of an Ivy League education.

Finding a Family will air in October on Hallmark (at this writing, no Canadian broadcaster has been identified).

Abrahamson, who was born and raised in Flin Flon, followed many of his boyhood friends straight from high-school graduation into the underground copper and zinc mines at age 18. But unlike most of his pals, he was determined to find a way back to the surface and out of the hard life his northern Manitoba hometown offered.

Two years ago, he saw an opportunity.

“I was working underground, in the 777 and Trout Lake mines, and I had a friend who was going to Vancouver to try acting,” he recalled. “It was something I’d always thought about, but in our community there’s no opportunity for it, so it seemed unrealistic. But once he said he was going to Vancouver, I thought, ‘OK, there’s a platform for it; I could give it a try.'”

After saving enough hard-mined wages to finance the move, Abrahamson travelled to the West Coast and spent a year studying at the Vancouver Film School. Short on cash, he returned to Flin Flon and spent another seven months in the mine’s bush camp before returning to B.C. to pursue acting as a career.

And after that … well, that’s just showbiz-fairytale stuff.

“I got back to Vancouver and about a week later I had an agent,” he said. “It happened really fast. And about two months later, I booked the lead in this movie — my first job, my first role, was the lead in a Hallmark movie. It’s crazy.”

Since shooting Finding a Family last year, Abrahamson has landed major roles in two other TV movies — Seattle Superstorm, a sci-fi movie slated to air on Showcase Action, and Mommy’s Little Girl, a Lifetime network movie in which supermodel Rebecca Romijn plays his stepmother.

“I have to fly back to Vancouver in the morning because we’re still shooting,” he said.

Abrahamson said he had the support of his family — mother, father, three brothers and three step-siblings — as he pursued his showbiz dream.

“They thought it was great,” said Abrahamson, who delivered the Free Press to Flin Flon homes as a youngster (“I don’t think I was a very good paperboy,” he says). “My dad wanted me to do anything but work in the mine, because he’d done it — he worked the mines for 15 years or so before he saved enough money to buy his ranch. He was happy when I got out.”

In addition to getting him out of the mines, Abrahamson’s sudden success has also interrupted his second “career” as a mixed martial-arts fighter.

“My brother and I and a few of our friends had converted our friend’s garage into a gym and we started training each other and then started taking fights out in Saskatoon and other places,” he explained. “Everyone looked at us as these backwoods guys who trained in a garage and didn’t have a real gym, but we were cleaning up — we’d go to these shows and blow ’em away.”

He last stepped into the cage in October, just before shooting began on Finding a Family. His intention was to return to the fight game after the movie wrapped, but he has kept landing acting jobs that don’t allow for black eyes and bruised knuckles.

“Every time I try to get back to it, something keeps pulling me in this other direction,” he laughed.

Abrahamson is based in Vancouver these days, but said he makes a point of getting back to Flin Flon every few months as his schedule allows. And he’s very excited to be able to tell his family and friends back home that they can read his story in the newspaper.

“I’m pumped,” said Abrahamson. “My buddies and I used to read the paper every day underground. I know they’ll be reading the Free Press in the mine (today).”

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca