Maybe you know him as the handsome Mountie from Due South, the eccentric artiste from Slings and Arrows, or the voice from Hockey: A People’s History, but chances are high you’ve heard of (or heard) Paul Gross.
If Canada had a Hollywood, he would be the Tom Cruise of the 49th Parallel.
At 65, Gross has a long and diverse career on stage and screen to his name. His acting credits include feature films such as Barney’s Version, Men with Brooms, Gunless, Hyena Road and Passchendaele. His TV credits are just as varied — think Tales of the City, Republic of Doyle, H20, Alias Grace and many more. He’s also worn director and producer hats, is an award-winning playwright, and has acted in theatre productions across North America, from Stratford to Broadway.
While Gross has worked and continues to work south of the border, unlike other actors with his level of success, he primarily built his career from and in Canada. “I was in L.A., and I worked there, but I never liked that city. It’s not a comfortable place to live,” Gross says. “I am Canadian and I like this country. I’ve been lucky enough to mostly do the work I wanted to, and do it from here.
“There’s also a massive price to pay for stardom. I like the casual anonymity I have.”
The Canadian character of Gross’s career goes beyond his eschewing of the American entertainment industry’s celebrity machine. Many of his best-known film and TV parts are quintessentially (you might even say stereotypically) Canadian: a constable in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a professional curler, a First World War soldier in the Canadian military, a director of a Canadian theatre festival. His projects are often based in Canada, or tell Canadian stories, and he has worked with the who’s-who of Canadian talent, including Atom Egoyan, Paul Haggis, David Cronenberg and Margaret Atwood.
“I made decisions to stay here and work on things that were Canadian-made. A lot of it was because it involved people that I know quite well,” Gross says.
That close connection to the people he works with continues to play a big part in the projects he takes on, including his decision to return to Calgary this year to star in Alberta Theatre Projects’ (ATP) The Seafarer. The play is a spooky thriller set in Ireland and will launch ATP’s 50th anniversary season.
Haysam Kadri, ATP’s artistic director, acted alongside Gross at the Stratford Festival in 2000, when Gross was starring in Hamlet. “I got a call from Haysam when he first took over in 2023,” Gross says. “I hadn’t seen him in 24 years since we’d worked on Hamlet. I always really liked him, so, when he came to me with the idea of doing The Seafarer, it’s a terrific little play and I thought it would be fun to do.”
Gross may not get mobbed regularly by paparazzi, but he is internationally recognized and knows his name has the potential to draw audiences. “Theatres across the country are experiencing varying degrees of difficulty and, if I can help sell tickets, that seemed like a pretty good reason,” he says.
A return to the Calgary stage also represents a return to his roots. The eldest of two brothers, Gross was born in Calgary, but grew up all over the world due to his father’s career in the military. The Gross family lived in Europe and the U.S. before returning to Canada in the 1970s.
Today, Gross lives in Toronto with his wife, actor Martha Burns, but still has strong ties to Alberta. His parents lived on a farm near Dinosaur Provincial Park until they passed away, his brother still calls Alberta home, and Gross recently built a house on the edge of the Badlands. “I love that valley and my parents were there for a good long time, so it’s nice to get back,” he says.
The last time he performed on stage in Calgary was during Theatre Calgary’s 1981-1982 season, when he appeared in George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession and John Murrell’s Farther West.
Gross had just completed the third year of his Bachelor of Fine Arts in acting program at the University of Alberta when he was cast. He describes his U of A training as “terrific” and adds that the program’s real value was the friendships he forged in the acting program — one example being his classmate, Francis Damberger, who helped produce the 2008 film, Passchendaele, a WWI epic Gross wrote, starred in, directed and produced. Filmed in and around Calgary, it was the biggest-budget Canadian film at the time and continues to be recommended Remembrance Day viewing.
“The theatre is tiny; it’s just the actors, a director and a stage manager in a room. You spend all your time in this intensive environment that is also, generally speaking, pretty emotional,” Gross says. “You need each other. So, there is a commonality of need for one another that makes the ground fertile for having partnerships and friendships last over decades.”
These days, when he considers a project, whether on stage or on camera, Gross likes to ask himself, “What kind of conversations will we have?” He seeks to work with people who are “funny and bright and curious and have a free mind, so that it’s enjoyable to do.” Sometimes, he has a good idea of what he’s getting into, but he also leaves himself open to forming new relationships, such as the one he developed with Mark McKinney over the course of working on Slings and Arrows, a dark comedy about a Shakespearean theatre festival.
McKinney, an actor and former member of the sketch comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall, created and wrote Slings and Arrows, and Gross played the eccentric director Geoffrey Tenant. “Before Slings and Arrows, I didn’t know Mark McKinney; I think I’d met him a few times. But I absolutely loved him,” Gross says. “He’s so nuts, and smart. We laughed our heads off, but we also had quite serious conversations about the nature of what we do.”
Some of Gross’s greatest successes in theatre have been in the Great White North. His 2023 turn as King Lear at the Stratford Festival was called “non-stop watchable” by The Globe and Mail and “superb” by the Toronto Star. The six-month run was a commercial and critical success. It was also a full-circle moment for Gross, as it was the first play he remembers seeing that made him fall in love with acting. “My mom took me up to Stratford to see King Lear in 1972,” he says. “It starred William Hutt. I remember thinking, ‘I’d like to be part of that world.’” Just over 50 years later, he was. “I loved every second,” Gross says. “I’d wake up, and [think]: “Yes! It’s a Lear day!”
King Lear is a bucket-list part for many actors. It’s physically, emotionally and intellectually challenging and has been described as “a mountain whose summit has never been reached,” most notably by English theatre director Peter Brook. Gross knew the role required a singular kind of focus. He prepared for seven months and up to three hours a day before rehearsals actually began.
“I drove to Alberta [from Ontario] when I was building my house, and I must have done Lear the whole way there four or five times before the lines became unconscious,” he says. “It’s a balance, where you go back and forth between your ego and your id until you find that clean, bright line through the story. It had been quite a long time since I’d been on the stage, and, with Lear, I remembered I actually really love theatre.”
He had a very different experience playing Hamlet on the Stratford stage. He took on the role in 2000, following the final season of Due South, the buddy-cop dramedy about a hardboiled detective and painfully polite Canadian Mountie, played by Gross, which made him a household name. “Hamlet was very different,” he says. “You’re constantly inside yourself, and it’s like going to the world’s meanest therapist. I was coming off a popular TV show, and there was a sense of being judged as being incapable before I even started.”
The experience proved so challenging that during rehearsals, Gross says he was ready to quit. Director Joseph Ziegler convinced him to hang in there and just do one audience preview. “After the first soliloquy, I felt the audience lean in, and I realized that they were there with me,” Gross says. “I thought, ‘Okay, I can do this.’”
Like Lear, he got excellent reviews for his performance in Hamlet, but reviews are something he says he stopped paying attention to decades ago. “The positive doesn’t actually feel good, and the negative really isn’t good, and you can’t change anything anyways, so I don’t read them,” Gross says. “Instead, it’s about finding the like minds who are pushing for art and who want it to be good and, hopefully, to be part of something that serves people and maybe transforms them a little bit, too.”
Gross jokes that if he could do it all over again, he’d consider becoming a Formula 1 driver. But, five decades into his career, he is still deeply passionate, curious and committed to his craft. He’s also interested in the legacy of the craft of acting and how he can play a role in helping younger actors find their way. This sense of history and shared knowledge benefitted him as an emerging actor, and he wants to offer the same to others, whether that’s intentionally hiring emerging Canadian talent on his film and TV projects, or supporting new actors on stage.
He credits Burns for teaching him the value of mentorship. “Martha has finally drilled it into me that mentorship is part of the job and she’s, of course, completely right,” Gross says. “We need to have that feeling of handing along the collected understanding of what we have been assembling over centuries to those people who are coming up. As I get older, I start to become more acutely aware of how privileged and lucky I’ve been that I have been able to do this, and mentoring has a lot to do with passing along the little I do know.”
As for what’s next, Gross says the theatre continues to have the strongest pull. “It’s an immediate and intimate conversation with the audience,” he says. Following his stint with ATP this fall, he will appear alongside Burns in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in early 2025 back in Toronto.
For now, he’s focused on honing his Irish accent for The Seafarer — in his words a “really grim, but fun” play. “It’s quite surprising and very funny,” Gross says. It’s also very bleak, but it’s going to be a lot of fun.”
Alberta Theatre Projects’ The Seafarer runs Oct. 15 to Nov. 10. Find tickets at albertatheatreprojects.com⠀⠀