On Thursday, December 1, I got the wonderful opportunity to go and see Theatre Calgary’s production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I recommend that you go and see this as soon as possible, it’s really worth it! The next day, I was lucky enough to talk with the star of this amazing production, Stephen Hair. Stephen Hair has been playing Ebenezer Scrooge for over 20 years! I would like to thank Mr.Hair for taking the time to talk with me during his busy schedule. Here is the interview:
Q: Have there ever been any lessons that you’ve learned recently that you wish you knew when you were a youth?
A: Yeah, especially from doing A Christmas Carol, I think what I’ve learned is that you can make a real significant, positive difference in people’s lives with just a very small act of kindness. So I think that’s something that took me a while to learn.
Q: What is your favorite musical/play?
A: My favorite musical is a show I did years and years ago called You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown, I did it a few times and I was lucky enough to play Snoopy and it was one of my favorite characters too.
Q: Are there any myths that are surrounding the dramatic arts that you would like to dispel?
A: Yeah there’s a couple. One is that going to see theatre is only for rich people, it isn’t meant for everybody, but it is meant for everyone; and the other one is that everybody can be an actor. I go and talk to a lot of schools and everybody wants to be an actor, they put up their hands and say: “I’m going to be an actor.” And really, out of a group of thirty or forty people, maybe one maybe two actors may come out of it if they’re lucky. It’s a very difficult business and for some reason, everyone nowadays wants to be an actor, I think it’s because of movies and so on but that’s not the reality of it, it’s a very tough life to get into.
Q: If you could improve one thing about the youth of today, what would it be?
A: Not so much improve because, in A Christmas Carol I work with a lot of young people ages 8-15, and they’re a great lot of people. But one thing I notice is that Social Media places a lot of pressure so that sometimes people lose their own opinions because they get swept up in some movement or something goes viral and they jump up and make a racket just because everyone else is doing it. So I’d like it if people listen, think and form their own opinions about life and what’s going on in the world.
Q: Name one life-changing point/experience/time in your life that you’ve felt very grateful towards after.
A: There was a time when (I had lived in Calgary and all of my career had been in Calgary) I sort of got panicked and thought: “Well if I don’t move to Toronto and become a big-time actor, I’ll never make it.” So I gave up my entire life in Calgary, I had been working constantly for about fifteen or twenty years, and I moved to Toronto. But after three months, I thought: “You know what? I’m going back to Calgary. It’s been my home and it’s where I’ll go on.” And coming home was the best thing I ever felt. I was welcomed back into the theatre community and Christmas Carol came out of this and that’s a huge part of my life now.
Q: What inspired you to be an actor, or did you fall into the business by chance? How?
A: I was very shy in school, but then in high school, I put my hand on the door and I said: “I’m not going to be shy and a nerd anymore, I’m going to go in and be the class clown and I’m going to have fun.” And that turned me into an actor. My teachers didn’t necessarily like it, but it changed my whole life and it changed my way of looking at myself; my career sort of started there.
Q: Has there ever been a time when you couldn’t ‘muster up some punk’ so to speak, to go on and perform? How did you overcome this obstacle and how did you feel afterward?
A: No I’ve never had that experience, a lot of people call it stage fright. But I very often feel more at home onstage than I do in real life because when you do a play, it’s the same thing every night, you back stage everything is the same, all ordered and you know exactly what’s going to happen. Life isn’t like that, and sometimes, I like going to work.
Q: What was the best gift you’ve ever given someone?
A: Well my mom died about a year ago, and this sometimes happens to very old people. She said to me one night that she saw people at the end of her bed and she thought they were angels. So I bought her a little ceramic angel and she held on to it and she loved it and it was a great comfort to her; after she passed away we buried it with her, she always had it with her.
Q: Do you ever find some elements of the Scrooge’s character in your own personality?
A: Well, when you’re creating a character you try to draw on your own experiences and your own life and especially with Scrooge, he’s a guy who has gone through many ups and downs, we’ve all done that, and I’ve certainly done that. I don’t think I’m mean and nasty like he is, I kind of like to think that at the end when he’s happy and more charitable to people, that that’s a big part of me in there, I hope. I think I’ve learned that from Scrooge actually.
Q: What would your career choice be if you were not a performer?
A: I’ve always wanted to be a paleontologist and go hunting dinosaurs and old bones and things like that. It never happened but it’s been a huge interest in me.
Q: Is there a particular artist that inspires you?
A: Nope there really isn’t, except for the one character that’s always been in my life since I was a little boy, his name is Alastair Sim. He played Scrooge in the movie, back in the 1950’s. I always watched it and my family always watched it and I think he’s the best Scrooge there’s ever been. I always try not to copy him and what he did with the character in the film.
Q: How big do you think is your heart?
A: Well, we do a thing at the end of every show called Toonies for Turkeys, where I ask the audience to donate to the Calgary Food Bank as they leave the theatre. And just to see those people reaching even during these hard difficult times it sort of makes my heart swell, every Christmas I think: “Boy oh boy, are they going to do it this year?” and they do and we’ve been doing this now for twenty years. So far we’ve raised 1.7 million dollars for the Food Bank and it makes me feel so proud to be a Calgarian. Especially during such hard times as we have now, to see people coming forth, it makes my heart jump.
Q: If you could use a word/sentence/quote to describe your theatrical journey, what would it be?
A: Yep, I can give you that: “I’ve been very lucky to have been in the right place at the right time a number of times in my career.” It’s all luck.
Q: What is your favorite scene of the whole production?
A: I love the very end scene in our production when Scrooge has seen the light and becomes happy and the actors are all on stage skating around Scrooge singing a beautiful song called Still Still Still and the snow is falling on the stage and it suddenly starts falling all over the audience and the audience just loves it, so it’s a great way to end the play. It’s a beautiful beautiful scene and it gets everybody involved.
Q: How do you build upon each performance for next time/next year?
A: What I do is a couple of weeks beforehand, I sort of think to myself: “What has happened to me in the past year that I can put into Scrooge?” because it’s such a gift to be playing Scrooge, I’ve been playing him for 23 years now. I’m building him as a human being and you can never get to the bottom of a human being. And it makes me look back over my life a bit. I was forty-four when I started playing Scrooge and now I’m sixty-six, and a lot has happened since then. So I try to find some life experiences that I’ve had and put that into Scrooge.
Q: Favorite cake/pie flavor?
A: I like chocolate pecan pie, I cannot get enough of it.
Q: What question do you detest to answer?
A: Everybody asks me: “Well don’t you know the lines by now?” since I’ve done the show so many times. But learning the lines are the least important to being an actor and people always think that that’s a big deal, but it’s not. I suppose they’re trying to be funny but that question I hate, don’t ask me that.
Q: Do you have a favorite book, or do you read much?
A: Yeah I read a fair bit, and I use it to escape, and I usually like series of books like Game of Thrones and all that kind of stuff. I love those box sets where you start at the beginning and you go all the way through. I usually wait until the whole series or the greater part of it is out before I actually go read it. Like the series by Jeffery Archer, there are seven books and I’m on book six now, just one more to go. But I like to escape from life because life seems to be so busy and full of stuff that I like to have my down time to just escape into good fiction.
Q: Who do you think is your hero?
A: It’s kind of a cliché but I think that it’s my dad. He’s had a very tough upbringing and a very tough life and he’s brought up two kids that are both very successful in their lives. He didn’t have a lot of education himself, but he taught me three things, even when I was a little kid I may not have known what they meant but he said that: “You must have honesty, integrity, and creativity.” you know HIC. I’ve tried to live my life that way. He died in 2004 and he fought a battle against lung disease, he was very brave about it, it was tough to watch a battle like that. But he’s my hero and always will be.
I would like to thank Mr.Hair once again for finding the time to talk to me and to everyone who made this interview possible. Please go and see this beautiful production, it closes on the 24, but it will be back in 2017, and if you do go, make sure to bring some extra change for their wonderful fundraiser: Toonies for Turkies, it’s a great cause and every little bit helps. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! 🙂