Interview with the vampire/cop IN PERSON /
A veteran of the Stratford and Shaw festivals, Geraint Wyn Davies is the least-vampirish person you might ever meet, but here he is, starring as such in a TV series called Forever Knight
By: Liam Lacey
Television Critic
August 3, 1994
DINNER time in Don Mills, and the undead are beginning to awaken. Geraint
Wyn Davies ushers a visitor into his vampire loft, where the fake
fireplace, the fake stained-glass windows and the klieg lights from the
ceiling create an atmosphere of stylish gloom.
Here, on the TV show Forever Knight, vampire/cop Nick Knight likes to
retire during the day to drink his bottles of cow's blood (he's trying to
stay away from the human hard stuff) and avoid the sunlight.
Here, actor Wyn Davies begins his nightly shift through this summer,
getting Forever Knight in the can for next fall, its second season on
television.
The loft is one of the handful of recurring studio sets used in the
series. It's certainly more comfortable than the tent on a sandlot that
represents turn-of-the-century Egypt in an upcoming episode, or the
blacklit and neon nightclub where Nick and his fellow vampires hang out.
Wyn Davies, a friendly, 37-year-old Canadian stage actor with a
roundish, handsome face, ramrod posture and slightly British
pronunciation, is the least-vampirish person you might ever meet. He has
the bouncy energy of a young Jack Lemmon. "It took me a while to realize I
have to be as small as a TV screen," he admits. "I'm the sort of actor
that loves to eat scenery and go wild. But Jim Parriott (the series'
producer and creator) told me early on, 'Geraint, you're in people's
living rooms every week. Calm down.' So I've learned to adjust."
He comes with a long resume, both in TV and stage. Born in Swansea,
Wales, he is the son of a United Church minister, who attended Upper
Canada College, where he was president of the Little Theatre Club for
three of the seven years he boarded there. He went to the University of
Western Ontario to study business, but quit after three months to act and
has worked steadily since then. As well as nine years at the Shaw and
Stratford festivals, he has done lots of episodic television, including a
role in the series Air Wolf.
He finished at Stratford at the end of the 1989 season. Shortly after,
married, with two children, he headed off to England to try his luck.
There he found his onstage energy was welcome in a way that it never quite
seemed to be in Canada. "No one was making assumptions about my
limitations. I felt completely free, in being as wild as I like onstage."
But by the end of a five-month run playing Hamlet with the Chichester
Theatre, he found himself at one of those to-be-or-not-to-be crossroads.
He was invited to play in Les Liaisons Dangereuses with the Royal
Shakespeare Company. He was thinking about buying a house in the south of
France. His prospective neighbours were suitable vampire neighbours,
members of the Gothic rock group Siouxsie and the Banshees. But before he
bought the house or signed with the Royal Shakespeare Company, he heard
about a chance to play a vampire cop in an upcoming TV series. And the
idea immediately appealed to him.
The CBS pilot, with rock musician and soap star Rick Springfield in the
starring role, had done reasonably well, although the producers felt
Springfield lacked the depth for the part. Would Wyn Davies be interested?
"I thought, yes, sure. After Hamlet, a vampire would be good. It seemed
very Hamletian, the socially disfranchised guy trying to get inside."
It also allowed him to move home to Canada and, as he says candidly,
"the large whack of dough it provided is quite welcome as well."
Forever Knight is, of course, based on a ridiculous idea, and Wyn
Davies acknowledges as much: "Eight hundred years of experience and it
comes down to this pop haircut and Miami Vice beard? Really, the only way
to make it work is to treat it as if it had the same impact as Chekhov."
By this point in his career, says Wyn Davies, "acting is not a problem
any more; it's maintaining your energy and trying to remember all the damn
lines."
It is in the alteration between historical and present-day scenes that
Wyn Davies excels. The vampire/cop premise has some interesting
elaborations. Nick Knight was a 14th-century knight who was bitten, and
initiated into the world of vampires. Now he works for the Metro Police,
using his super-acute vampire hearing, ability to fly and 800 years worth
of education in foreign languages, piano playing and archeology, to solve
any number of crimes. But, by special police dispensation, he only works
nights - he claims an allergy to sunlight.
Nick Knight is a reluctant vampire who is trying to find the spell to
bring him back to mortal existence. He's also sexually unobtainable, which
may be one reason the show has helped make Wyn Davies a cultish sex
symbol. Nick Knight's love life is an exercise in constant frustration;
each time he starts to nuzzle close to an attractive woman, he feels that
old urge stirring in the incisors.
Only a classically trained actor, perhaps, could make such a role seem
convincing at all. A parallel can be seen in the Star Trek series, in
which fantastic premises are made possible by actors firmly grounded in
technique. Each of the leads in the three Star Trek series (William
Shatner in Star Trek, Patrick Stewart in Star Trek: The Next Generation
and Avery Brooks in Deep Space Nine) has played Shakespeare and other
classical roles onstage.
"There's no doubt about it," Wyn Davies agrees. "Patrick Stewart, I
think, is the prime example. If you were not experienced in acting in
historical pieces, of speaking in heightened language, then this sort of
role would be very difficult. Once you've got used to standing on a bare
stage in tights and making a different world come alive, you can do just
about anything."
The Star Trek connection is important in other ways. Forever Knight
became a cult favourite in its first season on CBS late-night TV. Both Wyn
Davies and one of his co-stars, Nigel Bennett (who plays the evil vampire
LaCroix) have fan clubs. In June, 500 fans showed up at a Nigel Bennett
Fan Club meeting, to bid on his vampire cape for charity. Wyn Davies has
been invited to Star Trek and other fantasy conventions.
Wyn Davies says the fans of Forever Knight seem to be of no special
type, except that they are "night people, and intelligently curious."
There is one clue to who the viewers are: the producers possess a thick,
growing book of messages left on computer boards, the new virtual
nightclubs for people who like staying at home with their TV sets and
modems rather than hitting the bars.
"The fans are quite serious about it all," says Wyn Davies. "They tend
to ask about the 14th episode and you have to say, 'Excuse me. What was
that one about again?'
"For a while we wondered if I should flinch every time I passed a
window frame with a cross in it, or went near a fireplace. But finally we
said, 'Oh shut up.' The rules can change."
In its second season, Forever Knight will show across 85 per cent of
the United States this fall, as well as on the CanWest Global network in
Canada. It is produced by Paragon Entertainment of Canada along with Tri-
Star Pictures in the United States, and is shot entirely in Toronto using
Canadian actors. (The other regular cast members include John Kapelos,
Catherine Disher and Gary Farmer.)
There are no attempts to disguise its Toronto location. One accidental
charm of Forever Knight - rare for an American TV show - is that it
celebrates, rather than disguises, the Canadian city where it is set.
Every episode shows the skyline in the best possible light: each time the
day passes, the camera cuts to some new version of the Toronto skyline,
with the orange ball of the sun and the needle-point of the CN Tower
cutting across it.
In the first season, the local vampire hangout, The Raven Club, was
actually a downtown club called Stilife. When Stilife decided to renovate,
the producers were forced to reconstruct the entire Undead nightclub in
their Don Mills warehouse studio.
There it sits alongside rooms representing Knight's groovy loft, where
the windows close by remote control and the refrigerator is always well-
stocked with bovine blood.
James Pariott, the 43-year-old Los Angeles writer and producer who
helped create the series, is a veteran of a certain kind of junk TV, from
his post-graduate school start on The Bionic Woman through the quirky
Young Elvis TV series (seen in Canada on MuchMusic). Pariott says he had
no interest in vampires, or comic books, or any other sort of horror
fiction. But he was encouraged to rewrite the draft of writer Barry
Cohen's script. On a friend's advice he read a couple of Anne Rice novels
- Interview With the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat, and decided it might
be fun. He says he has met lawyers and scientists and goth-rockers who
follow the show avidly; it's also a favourite at the air base where his
brother is stationed. His own favourite show on television is Northern
Exposure because it maintains a careful tension between seriousness and
comedy.
"We would never play Forever Knight for humour in any obvious way,"
says Parriott. "That would kill it. It doesn't work if you can see the
bulge in the actor's cheek.
"The whole cast is strong. No one else we considered came even close to
Geraint. For the present-day scenes a lot of actors might be able to
handle it, but for the historical flashbacks only someone with Geraint's
sort of experience could pull it off; David Hasseloff, for example, just
wouldn't cut it."
Initially, says Parriott, Forever Knight got strong support from top
CBS executives such as Barbara Gorday (best-known as the producer of
Knot's Landing). But when CBS head Larry Tisch showed it to his family
"they hated it." The show was cancelled, but found second life through
syndication, which Parriott says should be an accidental bonus. "The truth
is, in prime time you are highly restricted in what you can do and how
much you can experiment. With syndication and the late-night spots, we can
be a little more adventurous. Up until now, the show was a bit more
middle-of-the-road and 'coppy.' Next season we're going to take more
liberties."
As for Wyn Davies, he admits that when shooting is finished in
September, he might like to return to the stage and transform back into
his naturally batty self.
"Maybe I'll do a one-man show later in the year," he says hopefully.
"I'm looking forward for a chance to flap my arms again."
Copyright 1994 Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. and its licensors
All Rights Reserved