Boys to Men

Drama king: stage actor Randy Hughson. Courtesy CanStage Theatre.

I first met and interviewed Randy Hughson five years ago at his favourite pub in mid-town Toronto. At the time, he was among the busiest stage actors in the city, specializing in destructive young men — the horse-blinding psycho teenager in Equus, a homicidal rent boy in Being at Home With Claude, a revolutionary university student in Nothing Sacred. “Low lifes and reprobates” was Hughson’s own description of his early roles.

A head-banger of an actor, he played these parts with gusto, cranking it up to a volume of 11. His signature moment came in High Life (which debuted in Toronto in 1996 and then toured the country), when he rolled his eyes ecstatically back into his head after a potent hit of cocaine. “It was so realistic,” the acclaimed director Daniel Brooks says. “And he presented it so shamelessly to the audience. I’ve never forgotten it. No one has.” In the play, he held his own against Brent Carver, then just returning from his Tony-winning turn in Kiss of the Spider Woman in New York. Randy Hughson had arrived.

Still, at the time of our first interview, Hughson was nearing 40; younger actors were starting to nab the bad boy parts. He slouched over his beer — lessening the impact of his considerable height and heft — and admitted he was a little tired of “playing roles where I have to rape and beat up people or stick a needle in my arm.” I suspected his best years were behind him.

In the half decade since our first encounter, though, demand for his services has remained strong, not just in Toronto, but, increasingly, across Canada, as he’s convincingly shifted gears from angry young men to complicated, middle-aged ones.

This last year, he must have set a theatre record or, at least equalled his own, personal, workaholic best by playing diverse, meaty parts in seven plays, often performing at night and rehearsing his next role during the day. In Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria, he’s had roles as various as a horny car salesman (The Optimists), a bitter restaurant-industry flunky (The Dishwashers), a sound-sensitive hermit (Earshot), a bumbling priest (Half Life) and a crafty baseball team manager (Take Me Out).

When we met this winter, at a pub (again, at his suggestion), he was spending his evenings on stage impersonating a mellow country boy in Homechild in Toronto. Mornings, he was prepping a part as an urban neurotic for another tour of Earshot — now in Ottawa, and moving soon to Gananoque, Kitchener and Toronto. And his afternoons were spent practising the guitar in order to play the Canuck troubadour Stompin’ Tom Connors at the Blyth Festival this summer.

He’s pleased with the variety of roles he’s landed. “There’s not much in common between these guys, is there?” he grins. These characters do, however, share something: a certain ease. As played by Hughson, they’re slow-handed men, who’ve made peace with themselves, even if they’re still pissed off at the world.

Listen up: Randy Hughson in the touring stage production, Earshot. Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann. Courtesy National Arts Centre/Tarragon Theatre.

The actor doesn’t speak readily about his personal life. Only at the tail end of the interview does he disclose that he and his wife, actor Waneta Storms, best known for her work on The Eleventh Hour, recently split, and that he’s now dating a teacher. A colleague — speaking off the record — sums up the curious case of Randy Hughson: “Randy seems like an ordinary guy. But put him on the stage, or talk to him a bit, and he’s full of surprises. You’re constantly taken aback by what he thinks and what he knows, by where he’s been — even who he’s slept with.” 

Hughson has carved out a niche of his own over the years, coming at the hoity-toity end of show business with a refreshing lack of pretension. The son of a factory worker and a university administrator from Kingston, Ont., he was a high-school jock, who did a play on a lark. He found performing so intoxicating that he later left the relative safety of an arts program at Queen’s University to study acting at Ryerson University’s theatre school. 

“I bring a blue-collar perspective to my acting,” he says. “I tote my lunch in every day to work.” Instead of frequenting artsy openings at Toronto’s club of the moment, he prefers to spend his days off hiking and camping. “If I could manage it professionally, I’d move back to Kingston,” he says. He’s happy to be appearing in nearby Gananoque twice this spring (in Earshot, and in Quebec playwright Allana Harkin’s Real Estate).

Most Canadian stage actors of Hughson’s vintage and prominence have logged some time doing classical theatre at the Shaw or Stratford festivals. Although he’s been asked to work with these established troupes, he’s reluctant to commit to a prolonged season. “A year seems a really long time to be doing the same role.” Also, in his early days, his extra octane would have been wasted in a drawing-room comedy or a wordy Shakespeare.

Hughson’s career evidences the growth in the last two decades of modern theatre in Canada, as the scene has moved beyond its colonial roots. Once, you couldn’t have made a living playing in homegrown dramas: Hughson is one of the first generation of English-Canadian actors who didn’t need to genuflect in the direction of the mother country.

Although he’s never waited tables, he hasn’t had an easy ride, either. Unable to land acting work in Toronto after he graduated from Ryerson he barnstormed at various theatres on the Prairies in the 1980s. He owes his big break in part to his Average Joe quality. Urjo Kareda, the late head of Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre, cast him in Judith Thompson’s edgy Crackwalker in 1990. “We were looking for someone who could convey an off-the-street quality,” Kareda later commented. “Someone who could be dangerous and also, in an odd way, sweet.”

This distills Hughson’s essential duality: he can do both sweet and low, sometimes simultaneously. Case in point: his endearing, but thuggish, Irishman in 2002’s The Lonesome West. For someone who made his mark playing doomed youngsters in dark dramas, Hughson has a deft comic touch. “He’s always sniffing around for a laugh,” Brooks says. Probably the biggest guffaw he ever earned came when he played a jonesing junkie in Zadie’s Shoes, the hit of the 2001 Toronto theatre season. I saw it three times, and every time his tics brought down the house.

In last fall’s production of The Optimists, his character had to deliver long, philosophical speeches. These time-consuming addresses could have stood out awkwardly, coming as they did in the midst of much snappy dialogue, but Hughson seamlessly integrated them. He believed in the script, and his belief was infectious. “Morwyn [Brebner], the playwright, is a woman in her 30s,” he says. “And she’s written with great insight about men in their 40s, their competitiveness, their fading dreams. Remarkable.”

He generally plays nicer guys than he once did, but occasionally he reverts to type. In Victoria, last year, during a performance of Earshot, a cellphone went off in the audience. Rather than ignoring it, Hughson ordered the audience member to pick it up and then hang up. “My character was considering committing suicide, with a gun. I pulled it out and pointed it at the phone’s owner. He was terrified.” He tugs on his baseball cap, and closes his startlingly small eyes, but he can’t quite hide the pleasure that terrorizing an audience still gives him.

Alec Scott writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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