Black Sheep interviews Marc-André Grondin

NOBODY'S GOON
An interview with GOON star, Marc-André Grondin

Before Québécois actor, Marc-André Grondin started work on the Canadian hockey comedy, GOON, he was not what you would call a great skater. “I skated like shit,” is how he actually put it to me.

This meant Grondin would have to train to convincingly play Xavier Laflamme, a major league hockey player burnout, who has been demoted to the minor league, which he can still barely keep up with. “The players today are machines. They start at 12 in the gym. There are like five guys in all of the NHL who are my size,” he explains of his motivation to pick up his game, with only a hint of self-deprecation. “So I trained. I had to go on a big diet. It was two and a half months of hell.” But worth it, I’m sure.

Laflamme is a character Grondin knows well. In fact, the tweaked out, trashy Québécois hockey bum is a character we all know well, whether we’re hockey fans or not. Rather than allow the character to sink into cliche though, friend and GOON co-writer, Jay Baruchel, worked with Grondin to keep the character feeling real. “When Jay sent me the script, there were a couple of things we knew we had to work on, mainly to not make this French-Canadian character a joke. We didn’t want ‘Tabarnac’ to be the punch line.”

Their efforts were successful. Actually, Baruchel, along with co-writer, Evan Goldberg (SUPERBAD), and director, London, Ontario native, Michael Dowse (FUBAR), injected Goon with so much genuine heart that none of the main characters succumb to any of their potential trappings.

Grondin, with co-star Seann William Scott

“The heart comes from Jay. He’s just like that,” Grondin says of his longtime friend, and fellow Montrealer. “He can see a douchebag, a nerd, a gay guy, a Russian, stuck up parents or potheads, whatever. Even though he labels them, he doesn’t judge them. I think that’s what comes out in Goon.”

And did Baruchel write the part of Laflamme with Grondin in mind? “That’s what he told me,” Grondin says, somewhat suspiciously. When he realizes I’m not sure if he’s kidding or not, he continues, “Well, he told me so early on in the process that I have to believe him.”

My Ottawa Xpress GOON cover story

Ever since Grondin’s breakout in Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y., he has been working consistently in Québec and France. When I ask why he never went after the English market or Hollywood, he gets a little reticent, as if nervous not to say the wrong thing. I learn why when he says, “I don’t really dream of a perfect career because my happiness doesn’t reside in movies,” he admits, candidly. “If you ask me what it would take for me to be happy, I would say a small farm and a family, maybe a few horses. If I work in the US or in France, it doesn’t matter, as long as I can bay my bills and work with interesting people.”

Before we move on, Grondin chimes in with one more thought on the subject. “Obviously I still see some English films and think, fuck, I wish I could have done that.”

Grondin will be seen later this year in the Victor Hugo adaptation, THE MAN WHO LAUGHS, alongside Gérard Depardieu. With GOON now behind him though, is he keeping up with his hockey? “When we finished shooting, I continued working out. I stopped the diet but I continued playing hockey.”

GOON, which also stars Seann William Scott, is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Alliance Films.

THE GREEN HORNET

Written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg

Directed by Michel Gondry

Starring Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Cameron Diaz, Tom Wilkinson and Christoph Waltz

Britt Reid: That is the balls.

I’ve got to give it up for Seth Rogen. The man has gone from full on geek to perpetual stoner to slimmed down, unexpected superhero in Michel Gondry’s most indisputable attempt to penetrate the mainstream, THE GREEN HORNET, a big budget 3D adaptation of the popular 1930’s radio series. Rogen’s transformation is admirable but ultimately not as successful as it needed to be to irradicate the image of the affable teddy bear character we’ve all come to know, love and get slightly tired of in recent years. Subsequently, THE GREEN HORNET plays like a laid back stoner flick without the actual weed, and Rogen, without the haze of smoke surrounding him, is just not as funny as he is when he’s high. That said, he could have been high throughout the entire production for all I know. It just isn’t written in this time.

Rogen co-wrote the script to THE GREEN HORNET with SUPERBAD co-writer, Evan Goldberg. Under Gondry’s somewhat scattered direction, their screenplay becomes a surprisingly well-woven send-up of many superhero clichés, while remaining reasonably grounded in a realistic place, with the exception of random misplaced bursts of Gondry’s hyperactive imagination. Rogen plays Britt Reid, the only heir to his father’s (Tom Wilkinson) newspaper fortune. Britt lost his mother when he was just a boy and his relationship with his father has always been strained, living in that vastly cast shadow. His life is one party after another until his father dies suddenly. Unable to resolve the public admiration for a man who never seemed to care about him, Britt decides he is going to save the world his way – in a green mask and hat, one bad guy at a time.

Of course, Britt can’t do this alone so he enlists the help of his super genius buddy, Kato (Jay Chou), to be his alter ego, The Green Hornet’s sidekick. He also takes Cameron Diaz into his fold but she just looks confused as to when her career became about playing such superfluous secondary characters the whole time. Together Britt and Kato form something much stronger than your everyday bromance; each of them now orphaned, they actually become brothers. It is their relationship, uneven and influenced by class and status yet still devoted, that makes THE GREEN HORNET so relatable and real, which is a lot to say about a movie where guys can stop time in their mind. This is the age of the every man superhero after all. The trouble with regular guys though is that they are often nowhere near as funny as they think they are.