North star

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This article was published 09/03/2017 (3517 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

So how did a kid from Flin Flon go from working in the mines to starring in the Canadian indie feature film Hello Destroyer?

Jared Abrahamson is too unpretentious to invoke fate, destiny or divine intervention.

“I was just the right combination of stupid and brave,” he says on the phone from North Carolina, where he is shooting the heist thriller American Animals with Evan Peters (known in the X-Men movies for his character Quicksilver).  

“I was stupid enough to think I could do it, and brave enough to take a shot.”

Abrahamson, 29, is referring to following a friend from the northern Manitoba mining community into acting school in British Columbia after an abortive attempt to become an oil rigger in Alberta fresh out of high school.

“I was talking to him and he told me he was quitting school to go to acting school in Vancouver, and I thought: ‘Man, I gotta try that out.’

“So I went to Flin Flon the next week and I worked underground for two years and I saved up every penny,” he says. “I had no experience (in acting). I had never even been to B.C. before. My idea of a vacation would have been Saskatoon, you know what I mean?”

That said, Abrahamson credits his step-grandfather for exposing him to the art of cinema at an early age.

“He would get me good movies to watch, so when I was five or six years old, I was watching stuff like Goodfellas and The Godfather,” he says. “I would rather watch stuff like that than what normal kids were watching.

“I was getting an education and didn’t even know it.”

In his first year at Vancouver Film School, Abrahamson started fitting in work around a gruelling schedule incorporating his training in mixed martial arts and Muay Thai kickboxing.

“I was competing in cage fighting at the time,” he says, referring to his fighting persona, “Wolfblood” Abrahamson. “I would go to school from nine to five and train from five to 11.”

When the acting offers dried up in Vancouver, he started getting hired by American productions, which would later include the TV series Fear the Walking Dead, Travelers and Awkward.

“Americans just took to me more. I was more marketable down there than I was in Canada,” he says. “They’re more charmed by my blue-collar essence, I think, than they were in Vancouver.”

They might have just been impressed by his acting, on full view in the low-key Canadian drama Hello Destroyer, in which he plays Tyson Burr, a solitary junior hockey player in Prince George, B.C., whose psyche starts to unravel after a game brawl has unexpected tragic consequences. 

“I’m a thoroughly northern boy and I know that world so well,” he says, admitting his youthful athletic pursuits were more focused on tae kwon do than hockey. But even that gave him some insight into the lone-wolf aspect of his character.

“I spent a lot of time alone growing up because all my friends played hockey and they would be on the road while I would just be roaming solo,” he says. “When I was preparing (for the role) I was thinking: Maybe this could be me.

“If I had gone back to Flin Flon after film school, maybe I would have been shut down too.”

He says he still gets to Flin Flon a few times a year, but divides his residences between Vancouver and Brooklyn, N.Y., where he feels especially at home.

“I love it out there. It’s nice to be around real people,” he says. “When you’re in L.A., everybody is connected to the industry and in Vancouver, a lot (of that city) is entertainment-based.

“But when I’m in Brooklyn, I’m the only guy I know in the game,” he says, asserting that he’s still quick to be true to his roots.

“Everywhere I go, that’s one of the first things people find out about me, that I’m from Flin Flon.”

 

Hello Destroyer plays at Cinematheque on Friday, March 10, and Sunday, March 12, as part of Canada’s Top Ten Film Festival. 

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing