Hank fuels up on Corner Gas for his trip to the silver screen

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This article was published 03/04/2007 (6830 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

AS Brent Butt’s goofy buddy Hank in the CTV sitcom Corner Gas, actor Fred Ewanuick is seen by more than 1.5 million Canadians a week.

And that’s before reruns.

Now Ewanuick is starring in the new feature film Young Triffie, which means he’ll be seen by, oh, say, two dozen film critics and a few thousand homesick Newfoundlanders in Alberta.

“TV actors are lucky in Canada because it’s easy for us to break into movies,” said Ewanuick, 35, who stopped in Winnipeg with his Young Triffie director and co-star, Mary Walsh, for a recent promotional screening.

“I guess that’s because there are fewer expectations from the public.”

Walsh admits that the Canuck movie industry faces an uphill battle. But she hopes that using TV stars — such as Ewanuick, Whose Line Is it Anyway? regular Colin Mochrie and sketch comedian Andrea Martin — will entice a crowd into the multiplex.

“We go to the movies to see people we know,” says Walsh, herself a Canadian TV celebrity thanks to her decade on the CBC current-affairs satire This Hour Has 22 Minutes.

“We’re building a movie-going public bit by bit.”

An oddball mystery comedy, Young Triffie opens in Winnipeg and other major Canadian cities on Friday.

It is based on Ray Guy’s 20-year-old play, Young Triffie’s Been Made Away With, set in a Newfoundland village in 1947.

The title has been shortened, Walsh explains, “so people in Toronto can understand it.”

Ewanuick stars as a hapless young Newfoundland Ranger, the local equivalent of a Mountie, who investigates the murder of a teenage girl.

“I’ve had roles in features before,” says Ewanuick, who hails from Port Moody, B.C. “But this is my first chance to really carry the story.”

Indeed, Ewanuick played the oversized-eyeglassed parking enforcement officer Grant Parker in the 2003 mockumentary The Delicate Art of Parking.

“I get recognized in public from that as much as I do from Corner Gas,” Ewanuick says. “It’s nice that Canadian stuff can have a life on video.”

The exception, mind you, would be in Saskatchewan, where Corner Gas is shot and set and remains No. 1 by a country mile.

“I can’t go into a bar in Saskatchewan without staggering out,” he says. “Everyone wants to buy me a drink. They’re very proud of the show.”

He’ll return to the Prairies in early May to begin shooting Corner Gas Season 5. Is he worried about competition from that upstart Saskatchewan-set sitcom, Little Mosque on the Prairie?

“They’ve stolen two of our writers (Paul Mather and Rob Sheridan), so I know the quality of their show is going to go up,” he says. “But it’s only better for everyone if there’s more than one Canadian hit.”

morley.walker@freepress.mb.ca

Young Triffie opens Friday.