Honour to be in 'The Guard'
By:Bill Harris, Sun Media

 

When first encountering David James Elliott in the new TV series The Guard, you'll swear you're watching Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now.

The room is dark. Elliott's character barely is seen, save for the light at the tip of whatever it is he's smoking. He speaks in a hushed tone.

Oh my lord, it's Colonel Kurtz!

"Wow, cool!" said Elliott, clearly both amused and pleased by the comparison.

Elliott then lurched into a surprisingly convincing Brando impersonation, quoting Apocalypse Now dialogue by memory:

" 'Are you an assassin?' I'm a soldier. 'You're neither. You're an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.' "

Anyway, at first glance there aren't many assassins or soldiers or even grocery clerks on display in The Guard, which debuts Tuesday on Global.

Rather, the compelling, visually rich series centres on four members of the Canadian Coast Guard's elite rescue team on the West Coast, played by Steve Bacic, Claudette Mink, Jeremy Guilbaut and Zoie Palmer.

Elliott, the former star of the long-running JAG, technically is a recurring guest-star in The Guard. He plays David Renwald, the boyfriend of Mink's character, and comedic Brando references aside, there is a serious reason why Renwald is sitting in the dark to give his sore eyes a break when we first meet him.

"He has Multiple Sclerosis," Elliott said. "He was a former extreme athlete and a fairly successful businessman. But he wound up with M.S., so he smokes a lot of medicinal marijuana and he's just trying to keep his life together.

"He's trying to raise a daughter, too. It's his daughter, but not the daughter of (Mink's character). She is trying to take on that responsibility and it comes with an enormous amount of baggage. And we finally meet the mother later on, and the mother is a challenge as well.

"But I don't want to give it all away."

Elliott, 47, said he basically was asked by the creators if he was interested in being part of The Guard, and he was told his scenes would be written to his strengths. The number of scenes in which he appears varies from episode to episode.

"It really has been about my availability thus far," Elliott said. "After they approached me, I was working on a bunch of films and I wound up being very busy -- it's funny how it works in this business, you don't work for four months and then boom, you have nine jobs. So I'd fly into Vancouver for a day or two and we'd jam everything in there.

"I just found the character to be really interesting and I thought it would be fun. So I got up there, and there was one scene with the cast, where everybody was together, and I thought, 'Well, this cast is terrific.' Everybody was really good in it.

"So it's nice to be part of the project, and go up to Vancouver, and see old friends and be back on native soil."

Or on native water.