They’re separated by centuries and geographical distance, and yet Eadweard Muybridge and Michael Eklund share an inextricable link.
In the trippy sphere of cause and effect – where a single act can set something beautiful or mundane or horrible in motion – Muybridge (born in England in 1830) lit a spark that, more than a century later, impacted the trajectory of Eklund’s life.
The Saskatoon-born, Vancouver-based actor would likely not be a Leo Award-winning screen actor today had 19th century photographer Muybridge not conducted exhaustive investigations into movement and photography.
Muybridge’s studies led to motion picture projection, and, ultimately, to showbiz as we know it. So if you consume film or television or work in the industry, you’ve got Muybridge to thank, too.
But if you haven’t heard of Muybridge, you’re not alone.
Eklund hadn’t either, at least not until Vancouver director Kyle Rideout and producer Josh Epstein approached him to play Muybridge in Eadweard, a drama about a transformative and tumultuous period in the eccentric photographer’s life.
“We all know the name Thomas Edison, and he usually gets the credit, but we’ve never heard Eadweard Muybridge’s story, and he was actually the beginning of all of it,” says Eklund in a recent phone chat.
Muybridge is finally having his moment in the spotlight, thanks to Eklund (who ultimately took the role) and Rideout and Epstein (both graduates of Langara College’s distinguished Studio 58 theatre training program).
To date, their locally-shot period piece – filmed over 29 days in 2013 and featuring an impressive roster of BC talent, including Eklund, Sara Canning, Charlie Carrick, Christopher Heyerdahl, Torrance Coombs, Aleks Paunovic, Ian Tracey, and Jonathon Young – has won five Leo Awards and scooped up a boatload of accolades on the film festival circuit.
There was a best acting nod for Eklund at the Alhambra Theatre Film Festival, and the audience choice award for best narrative film at the Nashville Film Festival.
It’s played to packed houses in Edinburgh and Munich, Maui and Brooklyn, Newport Beach and Cleveland.
And on Aug. 31, Eadweard will finally play for the hometown crowd in a special red carpet screening at the Rio Theatre.
It was in a similar theatre that a five-year-old Eklund got his first taste of movie magic (and where Muybridge’s long-ago work affected his life journey).
“I remember walking into the movie theatre with my eyes open and my mouth open and thinking, ‘what is this magical place?’” says Eklund. “I knew something was going on when I went to the theatre that day, and I remember sitting down in the movie theatre seats and that’s when I was seduced by the magic of film.”
The film? Lassie Returns (adorable, right?).
“I was five-years-old, and that was the first time I remember wanting something,” says Eklund. “I didn’t know what at the time, but I wanted to do that, and that’s when I started to realize that I wanted to be an actor and that I started to have to think about how to get that, at five-years-old, coming from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.”
It was a slow start. Eklund couldn’t get cast in a school play, although he auditioned every time.
After high school, he went to art school to be a painter, but “I realized it was too much of an introverted art form for me. When I sat in my studio and painted, I could feel the world was passing me by, and I knew that it didn’t work for me.”
Eklund decided to embrace whatever fears he had and make a go of acting.
He moved to Vancouver, took classes, answered open casting calls (including one for an audience-participation dinner theatre), and wooed his first and only agent, Deb Dillistone, who he’d heard was the best in the city.
“It took me six months, but then I finally convinced [Dillistone] to take on this prairie kid with no experience,” says Eklund. “She started sending me out on auditions, and just by using instinct, I started working. That’s when the noes started turning into yeses.”
And there have been a lot of yeses, among them: 88 Minutes, Battlestar Galactica, DaVinci’s Inquest, Intelligence, Bates Motel, Cruel & Unusual, Gotham, and The Call, with Halle Berry, for which Eklund won a Leo Award for best supporting performance by a male in a motion picture.
Eklund’s 2015 releases include WWE’s action-thriller Vendetta (directed by Vancouver’s own Soska Sisters), Mr. Rightwith Sam Rockwell and Anna Kendrick, and the final season of Continuum, which will begin its Canadian run on Sept. 4.
Sixteen years into his acting career, Eklund is committed to learning, chasing new work (“When you’re not working, you’re trying to find more work. It never stops. And enough is never enough”), and pursuing roles that test his boundaries.
“[If] you have a goal that you’re reaching for that takes you out of your comfort zone, something that scares you, you’ve got to face the fear,” says Eklund. “If you embrace it, then you’re going to find talent that you didn’t even know you had.”
Which brings us to his character in Eadweard: passionate, divisive, and – despite the white beard – many shades of grey.
“[Muybridge] was obsessed and he was dedicated, and I think those were the qualities that made me identify with him,” says Eklund. “As a man and as an artist, when you’re satisfied, you’re basically committing artistic suicide.”
Also, Muybridge “had a lot of pain. I like characters that have pain, that are going through something, and he had a lot of that.”
The film follows Muybridge as he pursues his research into motion and photography, a pursuit that was fraught with academic pushback and controversy.
We see him employing cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs, working with shutter speeds and developing practices that we take for granted now.
We even meet an opportunistic Edison, who married Muybridge’s pioneering discoveries with sound.
“Edison put sound to moving pictures. He made it exciting. He made it entertainment. Eadweard was more of a scientist. He studied motion,” says Eklund. “[Muybridge’s] work wasn’t ready to move to the level of entertaining people, which is why his name wasn’t as known, but he was the pioneer of it all.”
Muybridge is notable for another, more sinister, reason: He was the last person in the United States to be acquitted on the grounds of “justifiable homicide” after killing his wife’s lover.
Eadweard builds towards this pivotal moment, and delves into Muybridge’s complicated relationship with his wife, Flora (portrayed by Canning, who Eklund describes as riding “that line of playfulness and pain at the same time. She has that quality where she can sit on the pain and hide it, which the character of Flora needed because she was going through a lot”).
The film required Eklund to undergo a significant physical transformation. Muybridge’s hair turned snow white at a young age following an accident. Archival photographs of Muybridge reveal a prominent white beard.
“I remember when I first started talking with [Rideout], one of his first questions was, ‘Can you grow a beard?’ And my answer was, ‘I don’t know if I can grow a beard like Eadweard Muybridge, but I can try.’”
Growing the beard was relatively easy. Finding someone who could bleach Eklund’s hair and beard snow white was a different story.
Eklund and company found their champion hair tech in Wendy Keown from Yaletown’s Avant Garde Salon. “She took on the challenge and helped create the Eadweard look,” raves Eklund. “It was very important to the film.”
It’s because of people like Keown that this upcoming screening is, for Eklund at least, better than all of the rest.
“You can screen it in other cities and nobody was really involved and everybody likes it and it’s fun and fine and dandy, but when you bring it home to where it was made and have all of the people that took part and donated their time and their talents to it and we get to show it for the first time, I think that’s the most important screening to me,” he says.
Eadweard
Tickets for the Aug. 31 screening of Eadweard at the Rio Theatre are available at RioTheatre.ca/movie/eadweard/.
MORE FROM MICHAEL EKLUND
On words of advice he received from his mother: “All of the kids I grew up with were playing sports, and I went into the arts. You were picked on and you were teased and stuff like that, but it comes down to the support I had from my mom. She just said, ‘if you know what you want to do and how you’re going to do it, then the world would just get out of your way, and that’s just how it works and there’s no other choice.’ I didn't know any different. My mom always just encouraged me to be happy. I didn’t have anyone telling me that I needed a back-up plan, including myself. I never told myself that I needed a plan B.”
On his Eadweard co-star Sara Canning: “Sara is amazing. We did a huge search for Flora. When I think of Flora now, I think of Sara, and when I think of Sara, I think of Flora. We saw a lot of amazing, talented actresses. Eventually we did a chemistry test, and they were all amazing. Everybody was so great and talented and really committed and brought it. And then Sara came in, and it just clicked. When that happens, it’s easy to see greatness. It’s easy to watch greatness, and working with Sara is easy because she has that kind of greatness. It’s pretty much as simple as that. She has it all, and we knew that when she came in we had found our Flora. That was really important to me to find that person that would have that kind of connection that I needed to have on my end. A lot of times, you know a lot of actors in town and you’ve already worked with and have that built in history and connection, but I’d never worked with Sara at that point, and that was our first time working together, and because of that film, we’ve been friends ever since.”
On how his idea of success has changed over 16 years in the game: “When you’re first starting out, you have this idea of what success is, and this dream of what it looks like, and you start to realize that success mutates. It isn’t what you once thought it was. Success isn’t this mysterious, elusive thing that only special people get to experience. I think success exists in all of us. We all have something special to offer, and I believe as an actor, but also everyone in life, we have to have this delusional quality, a dreamer quality, that most artists gravitate to, and they have to have that. I think now, at this age, doing this for this many years, success for me now is knowing your life’s work and knowing what gives you a sense of meaning and purpose, because we all need purpose. If we don’t have purpose, then I don’t really know what gives people the energy to get out of bed anymore. I think the world’s changing, too. You need that sense of purpose, and when you find that purpose, then, I think, you’re successful. It’s not about money and popularity and stuff like that anymore. It’s knowing your purpose, and if you know your purpose then I think you’ve already succeeded. My opinion.”
On being motivated by fear: “That’s the best part I think about this job besides the people, it actually is the fear. We’re all riddled with it, so I made a choice to be motivated by fear instead, and to be motivated by the challenge of this job. I learned through this career not to allow fear of failure and the easiness of playing it safe to draw me in. Not to be afraid of making decisions and not be afraid to fail. Other actors might be better than me, or smarter than me, but I'm not afraid to fail doing this. The challenges are being ok to make mistakes. We are going to make them anyway, so enjoy your mistakes. I think in this business we subconsciously think we don't deserve it. We have fear and a lack of self-esteem. All I know about fear combined with this career is that it kills hope and dreams and holds you back. There is no point to fear. It’s an illusion. So the challenge is to learn to handle it and use it to your advantage. I began this process by just trying to scrape the surface of whatever potential I had, and exploring that. I always believed, even starting out, every time someone said no, it just brought you another step closer to a yes, and you’re always getting closer, no matter what walk of life you’re in. Never listen to the nos.”
