MASTER AND COMMANDER
AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN NOVAK
by Carole Gordon
Stargate SG-1 fans will recognise tall, suave John Novak as Commander Ronson of the Prometheus, but he will also be familiar to fans of ‘MacGyver’, ’21 Jump Street’, ‘Highlander’, ‘The Outer Limits’ and ‘Sliders’, as well as to theatre-goers at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, Canada. During a recent visit to London for the Wolf 10th Anniversary event, he discusses his long, varied career with Carole Gordon.
And his surprising line in hobbies. John’s immediate ambition, he says, is to finish his seven-foot high papier-maché sculpture of a stork. Why a stork?
“I did a tri-coloured heron,” he explains, “about three foot tall – and I got a remarkable amount of feedback on it. People liked it and I wanted to do a larger bird. Size matters in art, I’ve noticed!”
Tongue firmly in cheek, John describes the development of the stork’s design.
“This stork has been influenced by my convention experience. It’s slightly beyond real, a magical stork. I want to mythologise him a little, bring in a bit of the phoenix though I’m not sure how to go about it. He looks awfully wise and benign, but it could poke your eyes out!”
On a more serious note, John says that he originally trained for the theatre and spent the first few years of his career on stage, including roles at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford (Ontario), where he experienced considerable success.
“I had quite a good future on the stage, but I shifted to film and television. The theatre can be a fickle mistress – they [theatre directors] become afraid that, if you have a film and TV career and you commit to a play, if an offer is lucrative enough, you’ll buy out your contract and they’ll have to recast. So, once you’ve made that transition, they are mistrustful of you. You get out of the loop and it’s hard to get back in.”
John is particularly proud of his work as Bertram in ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’. Helena, a maid, seeks Lord Bertram’s hand in marriage. Bertram agrees, but then flees to Italy to fight a war, hoping to die to avoid marriage. Eventually, after a complex Shakespearean series of errors and mix-ups during which Bertram sleeps with Helena believing her to be his new mistress, Diana, he confesses his love for Helena. John thinks the character of Bertram can easily come over as insincere and manipulative at the end of the play and was anxious to avoid this in his portrayal.
“I think I managed to pull it off and make him seem like a genuine, sincere guy. One of the problems of the piece is that he’s backed into a corner. If the actor isn’t capable, it’s like he’s trying to save his own ass, but if he is capable and it comes from here,” he says, hand over his heart, “he becomes genuine.”
“It’s one of dilemmas of Shakespeare that it comes from a time of honour and integrity where people were prepared to put their lives on the line over issues of their word. If they swore an oath, they’d have to be prepared to back it up with battle. Nowadays, people get to that point and they say, ‘Well my lawyer will be contacting your lawyer.’ Shakespeare has to have passion and conviction and that kind of commitment of energy and all those other ethereal values. How do you act honour? There’s something in the make up of an individual that I think has become washed out somewhat in contemporary times and I do hope we recoup that sense of honour and integrity and being prepared to risk everything on principle.”
He considers his Shakespearean experience to have been invaluable in other areas of his career, sometimes in unusual ways – such as working with Paddy Creen, who was Errol Flynn’s stunt double and later worked at the Stratford Festival as Weapons Master and Fight Choreographer.
Later, on ‘Highlander’, John worked with Bob Anderson, who had choreographed the fights that Paddy Creen did as Flynn’s double and more recently worked on the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy of movies and ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’. Having that connection to Paddy Creen made it easier, John says, for Bob to trust that he was sufficiently well-trained for broadsword fighting.
“We used real heavy duty metal swords with electrical cords so they literally did spark and it wasn’t a computer graphic insert.”
‘Highlander: The Series’ was a world away from TV’s current obsession with reality shows, which John feels are destroying employment opportunities for many devoted and dedicated actors.
“It’s a scary thing. Apart from being a financial threat to me specifically, I think it’s a scary statement of the times. People have been slowly detaching themselves from primary experience, first-hand, person-to-person contact. Experience has been giving way to a synthesised life. It’s curious and a little disconcerting and I hope it passes.”
After seven years in Los Angeles, John recently moved back to Vancouver, where the business is every bit as tough as in California. Government support for the arts is high on the agenda in Canada, but John does not feel this is an answer.
“One of the things I had to embrace when I first became an actor is that no city or town owes you a living because you have chosen to take that particular path. There are those who have felt that they could maybe legislate some work their way. That can be a compromise in the quality. It’s a dog eat dog business and you’d like to think that it’s based on talent.”
He admits to a certain cynicism. “Unfortunately, if it were only that fair, but my experience is that it becomes a real political game in terms of how work manifests in some people’s hands and not in other’s.”
There is also the difficult issue of movie distribution.
“You have to be able to put the stuff in the theatres and if the theatres are owned by the Americans, then you can try to legislate as much Canadian content as you want, but if it’s not good and it’s not entertaining, then it’s like putting a band aid on a gaping wound.”
Like most actors, he has to deal with the frustration of seeing some of what he considers his best work ending on the cutting room floor. When shooting ‘Fight for Justice: The Nancy Conn Story’, John had a highly emotional scene with Marilu Henner, whose character had been abducted and left for dead. Unable to deal with the physical and emotional damage done to her, Nancy’s boyfriend, played by John, has to tell her that he is planning to leave town. The scene was shot a number of times in different interpretations.
“Unfortunately, in the arc of the story, it wasn’t supposed to be a particularly important scene. It’s a step onto the climactic point which has to do with the apprehension of the criminal. So when they actually cut the thing together, they took the least, the most passive scene of the bunch so that it wouldn’t interfere with the arc of the story.”
Although he accepts that there are valid reasons for using a particular take, it still hurts, he says.
“We had this amazing scene and they decided to go with the least affecting one of them all.”
He also argues that producers and directors are often concerned that the star of their production should not be outshone.
“There’s a concept, there’s a show and it’s built around the figurehead and the figurehead is the star of the thing. If they challenge his strength and focus by bringing in people who might overshadow him – it just doesn’t work. You don’t want guys who are taller than the hero, or necessarily, too affable.”
On the other hand, he says with a laugh, you can have great villains.
“The better the villain, the more contrasting a backdrop it becomes for the hero. A hero looks really heroic if you’ve got a really, really really bad guy. So in many respects, in order to serve the drama, the responsibility of being the villain is a big one. You have to make them convincing.”
In his most recent work though, John played the “good guy”, starring alongside Daniel Baldwin in the movie, ‘Irish Eyes’. The story revolves around two brothers who lose their father to the Irish mob at a young age.
“It’s about family,” he says. “One [brother] goes after them with guns and I go after them with the law. So the guy who goes after them with guns becomes an outlaw himself, but he’s my brother.”
He is especially pleased with a poignant scene at the end of the movie which, he says, “just floors the audience”. But the scene nearly wasn’t shot.
“The young guy who wrote, directed and produced the movie [Daniel McCarthy] came to me and said ‘There’s this pretty long eulogy at the end and I don’t know if it will work or not. We’ve shot so much time of the movie already. What do you think if we cut it?’ I said, ‘If you feel like it’s necessary to cut it, then that’s what you do. But you can’t cut what you haven’t shot. And I think you did some good writing, so let’s give it a shot and we’ll see.’ We shot the thing and it became the end of the movie, it was so potent.”
John isn’t entirely happy with the opening of the movie, which he feels is a little weak.
“It’s set circa 1950s, so they went for a photographic style that suggests a home movie quality. We know that audiences are somewhat fickle and if you can’t grab them quickly at the top, they can wander.”
What’s next? Well, he would be delighted to appear on Stargate SG-1 again, though he agrees that the Prometheus is not exactly the best-looking ship in space.
“It’s a bit like a brick with wings,” he says with a grin. “It’s reliable though – it’s the Volvo of space!”
Nevertheless, he thoroughly enjoyed working on Stargate SG-1.
“To be sitting at a commander’s console, looking out into space, you go, oh my god, I’ve arrived! I’ve joined the world of Bill Shatner and Jean-Luc Picard!”
With grateful thanks to John Novak for his time, and to Katherine and Karen of Wolf Events for arranging the interview.
A list of all of John Novak’s appearances in Stargate SG-1 can be found at: John Novak
Filmography: A detailed filmography for John Novak can be found at: IMDB
Wolf Events organise conventions and events around the UK and in other European countries. Full details of their current programme of events can be found at: Wolf Events
(c) Carole Gordon, 5 September 2004
