Apr 20, 2011
Author: The Toronto Star
By Bill Brioux
Special to the Star
Apr 19, 2011
Stuart Townsend plays a man with a tattoo on his back and no memory of his super spy past on the new drama XIII. The suspense thriller premieres Wednesday at 10 p.m. on Showcase.
Based originally on a Belgian graphic novel written 25 years ago, the series takes its cue more from the 2008 XIII miniseries starring Val Kilmer. The Franco-Canadian production was shot mainly in Toronto with a few scenes shot in Paris. It’s from many of the same people behind the Showcase hit Lost Girl, including executive producer Jay Firestone. Gil Grant (NCIS, 24) is showrunner and Peter Mohan (Lost Girl, The Bridge) is co-executive producer.
Townsend plays XIII, a spy with amnesia who is slowly trying to uncover his true identity. Aisha Tyler (24, Friends) is the CIA operative helping him sort things out without getting his head blown off by the bad guys. Canadian actors Stephen McHattie (Happy Town) and Ted Atherton (The Border) play a pair of U.S. presidents. Greg Bryk (Saw V) is a national security adviser. Caterina Murino (Casino Royale) is XIII’s ally and love interest. Tom Berenger (Inception) plays a shadowy industrialist.
“To be honest, it came out of left field,” says Townsend on the phone from his home in Los Angeles. “My agent said, ‘There’s this series, it’s French or something, I really like the script.’ I got 10 pages into it and was hooked.”
The 38-year-old actor says it was great fun playing an action hero. “You feel like a kid again, you get to play with guns, ride motorcycles, shoot bows and arrows, and hang out with hot babes; it’s not a bad gig.”
Townsend knows from hot babes. He was in a long relationship with Charlize Theron that ended last year.
He knew nothing of the graphic novel or the previous miniseries before reading the script. “If I’d seen the miniseries or the comics I might have been swayed,” he says. “Instead I just read the script and got a very clear sense of who this guy was in about five minutes, even though he didn’t know who he was himself.”
Part of the appeal for the actor was playing someone “who saw everyone he came in contact with as a potential threat. That must be a very strange way to have to function and live. Obviously, he doesn’t remember his past, but he knows he’s trained.”
The spy with a memory glitch has been done before on everything from the great but short-lived Bruce Greenwood series Nowhere Man (1995-96) to Chuck. What distinguishes this series, says Townsend, is that XIII is also on a search to find out if he is a good guy or a bad guy.
“That’s pretty intriguing,” says Townsend, who tried not to read too far ahead while shooting the series so as to be only steps ahead of where the audience would be. “I think a lot of us have at some stage asked ourselves what it would feel like if we forgot our past. Some people want to forget the past!”
Known mainly for his work in such films as Queen of the Damned and Chaos Theory, Townsend has worked in television before, notably in the short-lived ABC remake of The Night Stalker in 2005. He can also be heard in his buddy Seth Green’s animated comedy series Robot Chicken.
“I did a romantic comedy with Seth a few years back (2005’s The Best Man) and he was setting Robot Chicken up at the time,” says Townsend. Green kept trying to sell the Irish actor on providing voices for some of the doll-like animated characters on his series. “I had no idea what he was talking about, but he kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be great.’”
Green had a specific role in mind for Townsend: the Lucky Charms leprechaun as a raging alcoholic.
“It’s been a dream come true,” says Townsend, “a career highlight for sure.”
Among Townsend’s other credits is a role in the 2003 film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Asked if he has any funny Sean Connery stories to share, he just laughs. “Oh my God,” says Townsend. “Him and the director . . . the only stories I have involve almost fist fights. Luckily, I didn’t have anything to do with it. That was just one of those shoots that didn’t go well. We had a massive flood and a submarine set that very ironically went 14 feet under water. (Shooting) went on and on and was a bit of a disaster.”
As Townsend says, sometimes forgetting the past wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
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