Joe Biz - March 9, 2009

Joe Biz – March 9, 2009
By Joe Leary

I had the chance to chat with a couple of our country’s busiest working actors over the past week; Brendan Fletcher and Donnelly Rhodes. Although both boast lengthy acting resumes, the two come from decidedly different eras.
The 28 year old Comox-born Fletcher can currently be seen in ‘The Green Chain’, the newly-released indie flick that portrays five different perspectives of the local logging industry, while continuing to garner acclaim for his role in the upcoming HBO mini-series ‘The Pacific’, “It’s a companion piece to ‘Band of Brothers’ but this time it’s set in the Pacific and it’s following the 5th Marines in Okinawa and Iwo Jima and all of those campaigns,” Fletcher tells me. “It was a grueling shoot - If it’s any indication, I was there for eight months to shoot four episodes. The battle scenes and beach landings that we did are massive. There’s going to be a lot of post-production on it. It’s not even coming out until 2010.”
In addition to a litany of film and television roles in his career, Fletcher also took to the stage a few years back to tackle the role of Alan Strang in Peter Shaffer’s controversial Tony Award-winning play, ‘Equus’. The role - most recently portrayed on Broadway by Daniel Radcliffe of ‘Harry Potter’ fame - tells the tale of a psychiatrist who attempts to cure a teenage boy of his pathological and sexual obsession with horses. If the troubling storyline of ‘Equus’ wasn’t enough, adding fuel to the controversy is the full frontal nudity required for both the young male and female leads. Having taken to the stage in Vancouver, often encountering friends and family in the audience, I asked Fletcher if being seen in the altogether can sometimes prove distracting. “Nudity is definitely a part of it and you hope that people aren’t going to focus on that, but it gets easier,” he admits. “What was more terrifying were the rehearsals under the fluorescent lights, and the fact that I could see the audience.”

Meanwhile, veteran actor Donnelly Rhodes is likely best known for
‘Da Vinci’s Inquest’ and ‘Danger Bay’, but his body of work dates actually back as far as the fifties, and includes scores of appearances throughout the years on such landmark television series as ‘Soap’, ‘Mission: Impossible’, ‘Hill Street Blues’ and ‘Cheers’. But to dedicated and longtime fans of ‘The Young and the Restless’, Rhodes will always be Phillip Chancellor, the two-timing husband of Genoa City matriarch, Katherine Chancellor. “I still get recognized for that to this day,” he tells me. “I’ll be out somewhere and people still come up to me and tell me what a bad thing I did – and that was back in 1973.” Rhodes, along with the great Babz Chula was named a recipient of the 2008 Sam Payne Award, an honour that recognizes performers for their humanity, artistic integrity, and development of new talent. Congratulations to both.

On the musical front, it’s just been announced that seven-time Grammy winners, Coldplay will bring their ‘Viva La Vida’ tour to GM Place on June 20. Last year only served to underscore that the Brit rockers are certainly among the biggest bands in the world, picking up three Grammy Awards for ‘Song of the Year’, ‘Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group’ and ‘Best Rock Album’. Tickets go on sale Saturday at 10am.

While ‘Viva La Vida’ may have been 2008’s signature song, two years ago that distinction easily belonged to Plain White T’s. Their breakaway hit single, ‘Hey There Delilah’ reached Number One on both Billboard and iTunes, becoming one of the very few songs to achieve more than three million downloads. Based on the worldwide popularity of the song, the Chicago-based band was suddenly propelled from opening act to headliner. You can see them in the intimate confines of Richards on Richards March 24.

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