Written By: Michael D. McClellan | Patrick Creery is a pro’s pro, which is to say that he’s the kind of actor who commands respect simply by the way he goes about his business, unwavering in his reverence for his craft and those in its orbit, his passion to perform trumped only by his desire to do the right thing. How would you respond if you had a sure thing in one hand, only to have Jason Priestley, he of Beverly Hills, 90210 fame, offer you a key role alongside Amy Acker and David Haydn-Jones in a prime time TV movie? Would you dump the lesser background work without giving it a second thought? Or would you do everything in your power to keep from burning a bridge? Spoiler alert: Doing anything less than the right thing isn’t in Creery’s DNA. It’s how this rank-and-file actor has forged a successful acting career in a maddeningly fickle profession.
“Acting is a relationship business,” says the Canadian-born Creery, who currently resides in Toronto. “You have to develop trust with the people you work with – producers, directors, other actors – because there are only so many jobs to go around.”
Like many journeyman actors, Creery has built his career brick-by-brick, pouring the foundation in theatre and framing it up with film. He’s taken on roles big and small, and he’s expanded his reach with social media, using it to promote his cleverly written and superbly acted pilot, The Parent Council.
“I was the producer, co-writer and lead,” Creery says, “so this project really stretched me in a lot of different ways. It also gave me a chance to explore traditional parental roles and what happens when those roles are reversed. Trust me, there was a lot of comedy to mine out of those situations.”
From left to right: Charles Andrew Payne (Malik Samuels), Filson Filsan Dualeh (Jen), Patrick Creery (Connor McPherson), Lydia Lau (Leticia), Roberta Mauer Phillips (Ruth) and Stacy Da Silva (Kate Williams)
In The Parent Council, Creery plays Connor McPherson, a stay-at-home dad who decides to join his daughter’s elementary school Parent Council. When he gets there, he finds a diverse group of people (and personalities) who are all passionate about doing what they can for their kids and for the school –but who have very different ideas about what’s best for all. Hardly a group that would hang together socially, they connect because they all share something in common: Being parents and loving their kids. Creery’s character, as it turns out, brings a little extra to the table.
“As a stay-at-home dad, Connor is getting more-and-more lonely,” Creery explains. “His wife is a superstar at the brokerage where she works, so as a result she is home less-and-less, and he’s starting to feel isolated. He’s a fish out of water when he gets to that first Parent Council meeting. He bumbles his way through it, because, after staying how with his child for three years, he’s still trying to figure out how to reconnect with adults and operate on an adult level.”
In Dear Santa, Creery plays Pete Kennedy, the flamboyant soup kitchen chef who befriends Crystal Carruthers, played by Acker. A modern fairytale with a Christmas theme, Dear Santa originally appeared on Lifetime before landing on Netflix. It remains in heavy rotation on Hallmark Channel during the holiday season.
“It’s a fun movie for me to go back and watch,” Creery says. “That’s the beauty of film. With theatre, you have the energy of performing in front of a live audience for three weeks, and then it goes away. I enjoy them both, but I prefer film because of its lasting power.”
These days, Creery has embraced the power of social media platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo. He digs the egalitarianism that comes with producing content with nothing more than a smartphone and a tripod. It’s a liberating step that opens the door for artists who previously had only the traditional avenues available – community theatre, perhaps, or the rough road leading to film and television. Now, content is produced much more freely, and it’s up to the viewer to decide the success of each upload. Creery’s success with The Parent Council is directly tied to an online program called STORYHIVE, in which viewers vote on the best content, and filmmakers are rewarded with funding, distribution and support from TELUS. It’s a door that wasn’t available just a few short years ago, and for creatives like Creery, it’s a match made in heaven.
“STORYHIVE is a great platform for artists like myself,” he says with a smile. “Whether you’re an actor, director, or producer, we’re living in a Golden Age of Filmmaking.”
What led you into acting?
I grew up in Calgary, which is located in the Canadian province of Alberta. I was the class clown in secondary school, the kid who enjoyed entertaining his classmates and who was happiest just goofing around. Drama and math were the two main extracurricular activities at school, and you would think that I’d be naturally attracted to the stage, but back then I was a math guy. I never really did anything drama-related until I ended up at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. At the time I was doing poorly in physics, and as luck would have it, I happened to take a drama elective that semester and really enjoyed the experience. Four years later I ended up with a degree in drama.
I went back to Calgary and I applied to law school, because that’s what I wanted to do when I was a kid. My LSAT score was good, but my university grades weren’t strong enough to get in, so I took a year off and lived in Banff, Ontario. It was during this time that I decided to give acting a go. Funnily enough, I bounced between Vancouver, which is a film-focused town where I did theatre, and Calgary, which I thought had better theatre opportunities, but I ended up doing more work in film and television instead. Go figure. And around the ’98 timeframe, I spent a year in England at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, which is otherwise known as LAMDA. I did a one-year post-graduate in classical theatre there.
A Christmas Carol – 2003 – Citadel Theatre, Edmonton
Did you immerse yourself in British culture?
It was a fantastic year. Culture-wise I enjoyed the experience, but not overly so. When you’re a student and you’re do a program like that, you’re so focused on “the program.” But I did get to see my fair share of shows. I got to see Alan Rickman and Helen Mirren do a production of Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre. I got to see Kathleen Turner in a production of The Graduate. So, even though those things weren’t a part of my formal theatre education, they were still very instrumental in terms of leading me into acting.
Which do you prefer, theater or film acting?
I like them both, and they are complimentary in some respects. If you have a theater background, you learn how to work at developing a character in chronological order. You can then translate those skills over to film, where you are filming out of sequence. There’s also a great, immediate response from the audience when you do theater, and you can feel the energy. I felt it when I did a show at Theatre Calgary right before we moved to Toronto. It was called The Audience, and I played Prime Minister David Cameron, opposite Seana McKenna, who is an amazing human being, performer, and actor. In fact, she was recently named to the Order of Canada. Working with her was an absolute career highlight for me.
What I like about film and television acting is that that stuff is around forever. You don’t have the immediate response that you get with a theatre audience, but you do have something that you can look back on and watch whenever you want.
You play the character Pete Kennedy, a flamboyant soup kitchen chef, in the 2011 Jason Priestley romantic drama, Dear Santa.
I have good memories of that film and that time in my life. My daughter Zoë was just about to turn one when I did Dear Santa. Funnily enough, when I first auditioned they wanted me to audition for the part of a radio announcer, which was only one line. My agent called to let me know that they had cut that part, but that they wanted me to come back and read for the supporting lead role. And I was like, “Okay!” That’s kind of how it works in Calgary. They will audition a lot of the locals when films like that are being shot, and I was one of the locals who auditioned a fair bit.
From left to right: David Haydn-Jones (Derek Gowen), Patrick Creery (Pete Kennedy), Emma Duke (Olivia Gowen) and Amy Acker (Crystal Carruthers)
Tell me about your audition for Dear Santa.
I went in and I did the first scene for Jackie Lind, who was the casting director. She stopped me midway through the reading and said, “I don’t even need to see the next scene, just come back in tomorrow for the director and producer.” So, I went in to audition for Jason Priestley, who directed that movie, and he was great. I did the first scene again and he said, “Yeah, it’s really good.” I did the second scene, and he smiled and said, “Yeah, that’s really good too.” And that was it, so I left. The next day my agent called me and said, “Congratulations, you booked it.” And I said, “Booked what?” She said, “Dear Santa. Jason Priestley really liked you. You got that part.”
In Calgary, if you’re trying to make it as an actor, then you’re doing anything that you can, which means that you’re frequently auditioning for more than one job at a time. As it turns out, I had also submitted myself to do background work on another project, so my short reaction was, “I’ve got to call you back, because I’ve got to call the background casting director and let him know that I can’t do that project anymore.” Don’t get me wrong. I was ecstatic to get the part and to be part of a cast that included amazing actors like Amy Acker and David Haydn-Jones, but in that moment my first thought was about being a professional. That was my big concern, because I didn’t want to burn a bridge.
Please tell me about your co-stars in the movie. Let’s start with Amy Acker.
Amy is a great actor, beautiful, and so talented. She’s done both film and television, and has acted in a wide variety of roles. She was a villain opposite Jennifer Garner in Alias during its final season, had a main role in Happy Town, which I thought was outstanding, and has appeared in everything from Supernatural to The Good Wife.
We had a great time on the set of Dear Santa, a lot of laughs. It was a lot of fun to do. My character works in David Haydn-Jones’s soup kitchen, and he wears a pink chef’s outfit. Amy plays Crystal Carruthers, a frivolous thirty-year-old woman drifting through life in New York City and shopping with her wealthy parents’ money – until they threaten to cut her off if she doesn’t get her act together by Christmas. Funnily enough, fate intervenes when Crystal discovers a letter written to Santa Claus from a seven-year-old girl, Olivia – played brilliantly by Emma Duke, I might add – asking him to send her widowed father a new wife for Christmas. Inspired by the young girl’s letter, Crystal tracks them down and vows to win over father and daughter. She ends up working in the soup kitchen with me, and we both have dreamy crushes on David’s character, Derek Gowen [laughs].
David Haydn-Jones has been in a lot of stuff.
David continues to have a great acting career. His focus has been primarily on TV, and he’s been on shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, Judging Amy, NCIS, and Supernatural. He was great to work with as well. In fact, the whole Dear Santa experience was a blast, and it sort of led me in another direction as an actor. Zoë was one at the time, my second daughter was sort of in the works as it were, and I thought if I wanted to pursue acting that I needed to get a little more serious about it. That’s when I sat down and talked to Jason Priestley. He’d been such a big star on Beverly Hills, 90210. He suggested that I move to Toronto because he thought it would be a good center to be based out of, so that’s how we ended up here in Toronto.
Let’s talk about your smart and witty series pilot, The Parent Council. You play Connor McPherson, a stay-at-home dad who decides to join his daughter’s elementary school parent council. Where did the idea come from?
I do some standup comedy, and part of the standup that I do is that my wife is very much a guy’s guy. Like, she used to work on cars, she buys season tickets to the hockey games, she likes to work with tools…and I’m a flight attendant who cooks [laughs]. So, a lot of my standup is based on the fact that we seem to have some of the stereotypical roles reversed in our household. She has been making more money than me, and I’ve been trying to take care of the house more, so I just kind of magnified those roles for The Parent Council. Since she’s a super strong woman, and she gets along well with the guys, I thought, “What if the female lead in the show was a high-powered woman who decides that I would stay home and look after the kids. What would that be like?”
And paternity leave isn’t that uncommon in Canada.
In Canada, you can take up to 18 months off. The government will subsidize a year of that leave. My wife went back to work early, and was kind enough to let me take the second six months off with Zoë, so I was busy taking care of the house. It was awesome, but it was also very isolating. When you only have a six month old to talk to, and then you are trying to hang out with some other moms, and you need to have adult conversations…it can play tricks on your mind [laughs]. And then there’s also a thing in my world where you have to consider what it means to be a middle-aged white guy [laughs]. In today’s world, with middle-aged white guy guilt about a lot of stuff that other middle-aged white guys have done in generations before, so you find yourself thinking about how you interact with people. All of this played into the idea for The Parent Council.
Let’s talk about your co-writer and co-star, Charles Andrew Payne.
Charles Andrew Payne plays Malik Samuels in the show. He’s just a brilliant actor, and I was incredibly fortunate to have him come aboard, both in front of the camera and also in helping to develop the script. From the beginning I said that I wanted to have a diverse cast, and he hates that word. He said, “The word you should be using is representative.” And I thought, “You know what, you are absolutely right.” Because that is actually what I wanted – a representation of what my world looks like, and beyond that, answers to questions like, “How do you interact with those people?” I wanted to explore whether or not my thinking is motivated by how I feel about their background, or by them just being dicks. Am I being a racist, or is that person just being a jerk? So, I thought there was some really good comedy to mine in that subject matter. At the same time, I also wanted it to be representative that we all have one thing in common, which is our kids, and our love for our kids. All of our decisions are usually based out of the place of wanting to do the best for our kids. So, how does that manifest itself in people who may not be doing exactly what they want to be doing in the rest of their lives, but in this little fiefdom of a Parent Council, they try and control as much as they can. That’s sort of where the genesis of that idea came from.
How were you able to put together a pilot on your own dime?
TELUS sponsored us through a program called STORYHIVE, which has funded productions, supported filmmakers, and brought hundreds of films to life online and around the world. They get people from Alberta, Canada and British Columbia to submit a pitch video. There is a voting period where viewers watch the streams and choose their favorites. With ours, we were successful and received $5,000 toward producing the pilot for the web series. I, along with Naddine Madell, who was my producing partner and the director on The Parent Council, put in $5,000 each of our own money, and that is how we were able to fund this pilot. We were trying to pitch it and sell it, but it’s gone on the back burner a bit because of my move from Calgary to Toronto. Now that my family is settled a bit more, we’re going to revisit The Parent Council and see if we want to redevelop it.
Anyone visiting your IMDb page will quickly learn that you wear multiple hats – writer, actor, director, producer.
Acting is my first love and passion, and it’s where I focus a lot of my time, but unless you’re producing or creating your own work, you’re very much at the mercy of the phone. There are people who can make a living as an actor because they are gifted, talented people, and they have really worked hard at it. I am a journeyman actor who is still trying to develop his craft, so part of the reason we moved to Toronto was that there’s more opportunity here. The Parent Council back in Alberta was directly related to me trying to create work, so that I could do my own work and try and stretch. If someone’s not calling you and offering you work, at a certain point you have got to do your thing.
Producing is always about solving problems, because no matter how much you plan something out, problems will come up. I don’t like a lot of problems, and I don’t want to solve a lot of problems, so it’s a bit of a challenge for me to step into that role. A lot of professional development books share a variation of the same theme, and that is if you are the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room. As a producer, I try to surround myself with people who have more expertise than I do, or better skillsets in the areas where I am lacking, so that they can share the load.
Best Left Buried – 2003 – TheatreOne, Nanaimo
Was that the case in The Parent Council?
Very much so. In The Parent Council, I brought Charles in to co-write with me. I had a basic story, but I thought it would be great to work with him, and he brought some great laughs to the table. And right before we went into production I realized that it was too much for me to be the producer, the production manager, the writer, and also the lead. So I called my friend Jillian and said that I need you to come and be the production manager for a few days. She showed up and made sure that everything ran smoothly, so that I could focus on doing the acting and trying to do the best I could for that.
Who are some of the actors that you admire?
Stanley Tucci is a great example of a great actor who created his own work. Big Night is one of my favorite films and he wrote that, and he acted in it as well. I have always been a big fan of Tom Hanks. And then you go to the other end of the spectrum and you’ve got people like Gary Oldman and Anthony Hopkins, you know, guys with big theater backgrounds. Daniel Craig has done a lot of theater as well.
How important is it to be prepared?
The job is finding the job. As an actor, you are constantly working on your craft. And being specific about what you want to do is important. For example, my focus right now is on comedy. I’m narrowing the focus down, so The Parent Council is sort of where I want to be going at this point in my career. A sitcom, or romantic comedy movie, those things are where I feel comfortable and where I want to contribute to the world, because I want people to laugh.
It’s a tough business. All actors face rejection.
I think Bryan Cranston had a great of comment on rejection. He’s like, “Go and audition. If you audition, that is a chance for you to act for two minutes, and any chance that you can get to do your work is an opportunity that you should be grateful for.”
How important are agents in the acting business?
Very important. And it’s not easy to get a good agent. Bruce Ward is the agent who I really wanted to be with when I first got to Vancouver, and it took me five years to get on with him. That was me persistently keeping in touch with him, inviting him to everything that I did. It didn’t matter if it were plays or community theatre. When I moved to Toronto I joined ACTRA, which is a film and television union in Canada that is similar to SAG. As a member, I used those connections to talk about who the agents were in Toronto…who the good ones were, and who to stay away from. I also used IMDb Pro to research all of the agencies that had been referred to me. Then I went through the agency rosters looking for actors that I knew, and I would reach out to them and say, “I want to apply to this agency, can you have a look at my demo and my headshot, and if you are comfortable referring me to your agent, can you do that to get me off of the pile?” That helps, because these agents get so many demos and resumes that you’ve got to figure out how to get noticed. And then you have to interview with them, and you both have to feel comfortable with each other before you enter into that actor/agent relationship.
The Meryl Streeps of the acting world are few and far between. As an actor, how important is it to be both realistic and self-aware when it comes to your acting talent?
That’s really one of the first things that aspiring actors need to come to terms with, but also one of the hardest. You see this all the time with actors who first come out of university. They think they can do everything. It is great that they feel that way, but the reality is that that’s not true. A good agent can help in that regard, because a good agent is going to tell you the truth. You need that outside voice to tell you where you fit, so that you can know what your wheelhouse is and then play to that. Then, once you’ve established yourself and you start getting more parts, you can start leveraging that to try other projects. So, being typecast is not actually a bad thing, because it gets you work, which builds momentum, which opens doors and allows you to try other things. Robin Williams is known for comedy, but then he also did Insomnia.
Does networking help open doors?
It’s absolutely important – it’s a people business, right? There are two examples that come to mind – one is Judd Apatow, who is been working with the same people since Freaks and Geeks. Why? Because he likes these people, he knows they’re good, and he knows they are all going to get along. The other is Ian Prinsloo was the Artistic Director of Theatre Calgary a number of years ago when I went and did a workshop with him. He said, “I have a million-dollar budget in my theater company, and if I don’t know you I’m not going to risk my budget. So get to know me, because if it’s between you and someone that I’ve worked with in the past and have a trust with, then I’m going to spend two-and-a-half weeks in a room with somebody that I already know and who I know will deliver.” That really stuck with me. It’s your job to get to know people.
Last Question: If you had one piece of advice for other aspiring actors, what would that be?
Do it. If you’re talking about wanting to do a film, then go film stuff. If you want to do comedy, then go do comedy. There are literally no more barriers to getting your stuff out there anymore. Gary Vaynerchuk is someone that I listen to a lot, and is a prime example of someone who has taken it upon himself to create content. There are no excuses. If you are making an excuse that you cannot do something, then you don’t really want to do it. It’s like someone saying, “I don’t have the money to buy the gear.” If you know someone who has an iPhone, you can make incredible quality stuff. You can get a library card and access Lynda.com through the library and learn how to do all these things, and it costs you nothing. The whole 10,000 hour concept is a real thing, so you can’t get discouraged. Some of what you do is going to be awful. Some of it is going to be great. I know standup comedian in Calgary, and he’s put out to albums. Is he the best comedian ever? No, but he’s got two more albums out and I got, and for that he has my absolute respect.