Jason Priestley (2 page)

T
he CBC movie
Stacy
was about a woman with two young boys who suffered from bipolar disorder. In what was one of the dramatic high points of the film, Stacy suffered a breakdown and I, playing her young son, wandered off and drowned in the ocean. There was a long shot of me floating motionless, facedown in the water. As promised, this was no problem as I excelled at the dead man's float.

Coincidentally, a neighbor who lived around the corner, an assistant director who was a friend of my mother's, was working on this movie too. He offered to drive me back and forth to the set. As we turned onto the quiet road where the first day's shooting was to take place, an ambulance went racing past us in the other direction, sirens wailing and lights flashing. I turned to watch it go by and then immediately forgot it in the excitement of reaching the set. The isolated house on the water was a beehive of activity; people in headsets were rushing around; there were huge lights and cords and rigging everywhere.

My neighbor parked his van in a makeshift parking lot where people were busily unloading more vans full of mysterious equipment and smiled at me. “Ready to go, Jason?” he asked, and the two of us began walking. A harried woman with a clipboard came racing up to us and said, panting, “Thank God you're here!” In my six-year-old mind, I thought she was referring to me. Of course, she was talking to my neighbor. “We've got a big problem!”

“What is it?” my neighbor, the second assistant director, asked.

“The lead actress playing Stacy got here an hour ago and said she wanted to explore the house, get a feel for the place. I said fine, so we went inside, and walked around a bit.

“On the second floor, she walked out on the balcony, leaped off, and broke both her legs.”

“
What?
” I was immediately forgotten.

“That was our lead! They just took her away in an ambulance!”

“We have no star? What are we going to do?”

“I'm on it . . . I already reached out to the casting director. She called our second choice, who's on her way. She'll be here in about twenty minutes.”

“Thank God!” The two assistant directors started walking toward the house, deep in conversation. I was completely enthralled. A crazy lady jumped off a balcony? And broke both her legs? And no one even missed a beat. Production kept moving right along!

Our neighbor remembered me after walking a few yards and called to me. “Come on, Jason. Come with us and we'll get you squared away. It's going to be a couple of hours.”

I ran to catch up. I could not have been happier with the way my day was going. Things got even better later on. I was given my own custom-made wet suit to wear under my clothes for my climactic scene. I felt very important and starlike. I had never worn a wet suit before, much less one made to measure.

I floated in the freezing water of the harbor in the middle of a Vancouver winter, a diver hovering just out of the frame for safety. I felt perfectly fine and toasty warm. But as the cameras started to roll and I leaned forward to put my head down for the dead man's float, icy water gushed into my neckline and trickled all the way down to my toes inside my wet suit. Talk about cold. It was bitter! It wasn't hard to remain motionless; my entire body went absolutely numb within seconds as my mind went blank. Fortunately, the director got the shot he needed in just two takes; I was probably only in the water for a couple of minutes and was immediately whisked into a warm towel and rubbed down and blow-dried back into warmth. That part was fun, too.

The showbiz lessons were starting early, and
Stacy
was the perfect example of the first and most important rule for an actor to absorb: Can't get the job done? Next! The show must go on. Also, I could see that “stars” were not necessarily the most mentally stable and together people. Third, being an actor meant there were lots of cool things to do and perks to be won—like my very own wet suit.

I had only one thought as my friend drove me home late that afternoon.
Man, I love this business!

I
wasn't exaggerating when I promised the
Stacy
staff that I was comfortable in the water. A lifelong avid sailor who had grown up spending his free time at the Royal Victoria Yacht Club, my dad transferred his membership to the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club after he married, and he bought a twenty-four-foot sailboat. From the time I could walk, we were out there on weekends working on the boat and sailing and racing.

Boating was always a big part of our family life. Being on the water is something that I absolutely love to this day. Being under sail, no noise from the engine, having the wind move your boat through the water . . . it's intoxicating. Eventually, my parents cobbled together enough money to buy a gorgeous new thirty-three-foot sailboat and we took an idyllic weeklong family vacation. The weather was simply spectacular, and everyone was happy. I recall it as pure joy. My sister and I were in heaven, swimming, fishing, playing in the sparkling water. Everyone was happy. Or so I remember.

Which made it quite a tremendous shock when my parents split up soon afterward. In fact, most of my memories are blank surrounding their actual divorce. There had not been any fighting or yelling or any signs of trouble; they were good at hiding their unhappiness from us. They reassured us both that it was nobody's fault, that they still loved us. They did the best they could, but it was still devastating.

Dad moved to a bachelor apartment in the West End for a while. Mom looked for a full-time job and taught classes at Ramona's agency on weekends. The beautiful new boat was sold. I lay in a sleeping bag on my dad's living room floor on weekends, stunned at the sudden sweeping changes in my life. It was the '70s, and divorce was rampant; families were breaking up everywhere. I was just one more kid among millions with a weekend dad and a broken heart.

W
indsor House School was exactly what you would imagine a small school run by a hippie in early-1970s Canada to be. Windsor had been founded by an innovative woman named Helen, who taught in her own home; the school eventually expanded into a proper building with a bunch of teachers. But it stayed quite alternative and progressive; all the teachers were hippies as well, many of them musicians. This was right up my progressive mother's alley; Justine and I were both enrolled there from kindergarten on.

What I remember most clearly from those days is sitting in a circle around our teacher, Corky, as he played his acoustic guitar while we kids sang “Up on Cripple Creek,” “Kumbaya,” and other folk songs. Corky had crocheted a brown vest for himself with a huge lightbulb shooting rays of light in yellow on its front. He wore that vest every single day, rain or shine, hot or cold. Deodorant was not something anyone at that school cared about. That was fine in the winter, but things got mighty fragrant in the spring and fall. Lunch was always raw almonds, millet, greens . . . which funnily enough seems quite trendy and acceptable now. But back in the age of processed foods? It was simply unheard of.

Truly, there was a great deal of sitting in a circle and listening to guitar music, though we must have learned our ABCs and numbers and how to read somewhere along the way. I had a strong pragmatic streak even as a child; I knew this wasn't exactly the way school was meant to be. Still, I went along with the program docilely enough for several years.

During Caveman Week in the fourth grade, we all dressed up in ratty old furs and grunted, using sign language as we pretended to be cavemen in the basement of the school. We were given actual dead fish to use as props as we pretended to catch food by hand like real caveman did. The fish, our food, were then stored on shelves in our “caves.” Some of the fish, of course, fell behind the shelves or were discarded someplace else, and as the week wore on they began to rot. The whole place smelled horrible. Beyond awful.

None of my fellow “cavemen” seemed to be bothered. When I tried to talk to them about how we should deal with the rotting fish and resulting smell in our midst, nobody was particularly responsive. That included the teachers. It was at that moment I realized it was definitely time to seek new educational opportunities.

On the way home from school my sister and I talked it over, and that night I spoke to our mother. “Listen, Mom, I can't do this anymore. I need to go to a real school. With classrooms and workbooks and stuff. I'm not learning anything at Windsor House.” It was agreed that starting in fifth grade I would attend public school, and Justine would join me there.

It wouldn't be until years later, when I had children of my own, that I would realize I was receiving a great education at Windsor House. I only had the confidence, as a nine-year-old, to question my mother's educational choices for me because of the type of education I was receiving.

Windsor House is still going strong and is a beloved and well-respected school in Vancouver.

F
letcher's Meats was Canada's equivalent to Oscar Mayer—a purveyor of breakfast meats. The company was looking for kids to star in a series of three commercials, and I landed one of the roles. A kid named Bernie Coulson was cast as my brother. We did look somewhat alike; he, too, had blond hair and blue eyes. The two of us hit it off right away. Bernie was fun. He had a mischievous gleam in his eye and was an explosion of energy.

Seven years later we'd be in a crappy 1967 Coupe de Ville on our way to L.A., but for the moment we were ten- and twelve-year-old kids, wearing goofy '70s clothes for “summertime fun” commercials. We all sang a song that went: “I love Fletcher's, it's the most fun you can eat; wieners, bacon and sausages, ham and luncheon meat. You can put it on the bottom, you can put it on the top, you can make it up all fancy, you can feed it to your pop. . . .” There was plenty more, but you get the idea. Dear God. It was all so very . . . 1979.

This series of three commercials played constantly all summer; there was no escaping them if you lived in Canada and turned on your television. They didn't do much for me besides get the crap beaten out of me in the school yard on the first day of fifth grade at my new school.

I wasn't paid a tremendous amount, and in Canada, with its significantly smaller population, residuals were not nearly what they would be for a commercial in the United States. Still, the money I earned on the commercials was enough to buy my heart's desire: a YZ80 two-stroke dirt bike. It was pretty much the perfect vehicle for breaking your arm. I managed not to break any bones, although a couple of my friends did.

While I enjoyed my new bike, Vancouver's nascent film and television business ebbed and flowed; it went into a very quiet period for the next several years as the Fletcher's commercials mercifully faded from the airwaves. I returned to my regularly scheduled childhood.

D
uring my high school years (the real ones), I kept myself busy in the theater department.

Delta High School had a beautiful new theater and a genius drama teacher named Ilene Jo Roitman, who also taught the comedian and
MADtv
actor Will Sasso.

The summer in between my junior and senior years I got a call from Fiona who asked, “Hey, what are you doing? Want to work as a stand-in on a film called
Hero in the Family
?” It made for a nice break from painting houses and crewing on boats at the Vancouver Yacht Club. I immediately accepted the job as a stand-in and stunt double for an actor out of New York named Christopher Collet. The film was a Disney Sunday movie of the week, a wacky comedy about an astronaut and a chimpanzee switching brains that also featured a teenaged Annabeth Gish, who later appeared on
The X-Files
and
The West Wing
. I kept my distance from the chimp and soaked up the atmosphere.

An older woman, a British actress named June Whitaker, showed up for a few days to shoot a small role. I could see, just watching the few scenes she appeared in, that she really knew what she was doing. This woman could act, so I started paying attention to her off-camera as well. Before they called action, June stood off by herself making faces and gestures; I couldn't imagine what she was doing, so I approached her one day and asked, “What were you doing just before they shot that scene?”

“Preparing,” she said. “Working on my instrument . . .”

I was lost. “What's
that
?”

“I teach acting, you know. Why don't you come to one of my classes and see what it's all about?” she said.

“I will,” I promised her.

I had taken lots of acting classes, with several different teachers, but there was something very special about this woman. She was approaching her work differently than I had ever seen before. I soon learned that June had arrived in Vancouver from New York five years earlier and opened an acting school. She was a part of the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York for thirteen years prior to that and introduced a new level of teaching to Vancouver. Over the next five years, June's school would produce countless successful actors from Vancouver: Bernie Coulson, Nicholas Lea, Christianne Hirt, and Martin Cummins, to name a few. Her teachings of the “Method” could be controversial, but also very effective. I met her at just the right time in my life when I was looking for more. I knew I needed to become a better actor. I knew I needed to grow in order to bring more to my work, but I didn't know how. I was passionate about learning all that she had to teach.

As soon as
Hero in the Family
wrapped, Chris Collet got cast in an episode of
The Hitchhiker,
and I moved along with him to serve as his stunt double/stand-in once again. Chris then returned to New York and completely fell off the show business radar. I returned to painting houses for the last couple weeks of the summer to earn money for June's classes and prepared for my senior year of high school.