David Branches Out
Hewlett goes out on a limb in the psychological drama Treed Murray
David Hewlett has a thing about roles that take him into tight spaces and
tight places.
In Cube, the actor was trapped in a, well, you know. In Elevated, an
earlier film directed by his close friend and Cube director Vincenzo Natali,
he was stuck in an elevator. On Traders, he co-starred for five seasons as
Grant Jansky, a statistics savant who preferred to
work in a closet rather
than on the trading floor. His character inhabited a different sort of
closet in the recent feature Century Hotel.
On Friday, when the new movie Treed Murray opens, he'll be seen as an
advertising executive literally up a tree and seemingly
without a prayer.
Hewlett plays the Murray of the title, a smug, upper-middle-class suit who
clashes with a teenaged gang member while taking a
shortcut across a city
ravine, and ends up cornered overnight high in the branches of an enormous
beech tree.
"My joke about Treed Murray is it's Die Hard in a tree. That's Canada's
answer to the action film," Hewlett was saying during September's Toronto
International Film Festival of writer-director William Phillips' taut
psychological drama in which right and wrong and the power position keep
shifting. Murray is not as upstanding as he first appears, his captors are
not as tough as they initially seem and they're particularly vulnerable to
their captive's professional skills of persuasion.
"He's a bit of a prick, if you ask me," Hewlett said. "I think his world is
about manipulation. His job is to manipulate and talk people into buying
things they don't need. The basic idea is I think he'll sell anything to
anybody."
Making the movie last year, he spent days harnessed 24 feet up the massive
tree at Boyd Conservation Area.
"I think my ass has taken on the shape of some of those leaves, I was in
there for so long. But it's a beautiful old tree."
Speaking of tight spaces, director Natali is now in residence in the
basement of the L.A. canyon home of Hewlett and his wife of one
year,
actress Soo Garay. Naturally, no sooner had the couple moved a year ago than
they got calls for all kinds of work back here.
Hewlett returned this summer
for the Toronto shoot of Natali's feature Company Man. (They'll team up yet
again for next year's feature Nothing, a surreal comedy in which Hewlett
will play a broke, jobless guy who literally becomes nothing.)
Garay has a part in the Comedy Network's upcoming series, Puppets Who Kill.
In March, she'll reprise her critically-acclaimed role in Belle at Toronto's
Factory Theatre and the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
"I know I sound biased, but I would really recommend people see it," said
her proud husband. "I was like, 'Oh, my God, I've fallen in
love with
someone who's a better actor than I am. I have to deal with that now.' "
In L.A., Hewlett recently guest-starred on ER as a father who wanted the
doctors to mercy-kill his severely handicapped five-year-old
son. Otherwise,
the move hasn't paid off in terms of work yet.
"We both went down there thinking, 'Okay, we're going to start again,' and
we really are. You show up and it's pretty much a blank card. Your resume
means something, but not alone, because generally everybody knows your name
but nobody cares. They'll recognize stuff, they'll go, 'Oh, you're from
whatever,'" he said. "It's not about talent. It's about fame. And that's
fine. That's why we're down there. We're there to get to a standpoint where
we're taken seriously up here. It's unfortunate that we don't feel that we
can do it up here."
In between jobs, he spends his time doing "a lot of nothing, a lot of
hobbies.
"I'm Jesus' age, that's what everyone keeps pointing out," he said. "I
know, he did a lot by 33. I haven't started my own religion. Yet."
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