Schweig does bad guy role for really nice guy

Page 17

Eric Schweig doesn't see acting as his career. It's a hobby to him, something he does for fun.

Most recently Schweig was having his fun alongside Tommy Lee Jones and Cate Blanchett in director Ron Howard's new western, The Missing. Nice hobby.

"I play a bad guy, the head villain," Schweig said of his role as Chidin in the film. His character heads up a group of despicable renegades who kidnap a young girl, forcing the girl's mother (Blanchett) to turn to her estranged father (Jones) for help to try to save her daughter. The movie is scheduled for release in Toronto, Los Angeles and New York on Nov. 19, with a wide release scheduled for Nov. 26.

"I guess it's like a western horror movie," Schweig said.

"I was thinking about it, about catching flack from the Indian community, because my character is so reprehensible. He's just meaner than a hyena in this, and his face is all scarred up and it looks like he's been in 50 knife fights. But one of the reasons that I did it is because I really like Ron Howard. I met him about a month before I did the film, and he's just a nice guy. He's a straight shooter and he's for real and he's just a nice person. And that was one of the reasons.

"And then the other one was that nobody looks good in this film. We're all dirt bags. Tommy is, and I am. The crew that I have, I have this murderous band of cutthroats that ride with me, and there's Indian and white alike. Like there's white army deserters who are actually worse in this. Then we're always smacking them around in the film trying to straighten them out so we can get things done because they're always drunk and beating people up and stuff. It's pretty funny."

The bad guy role is a bit of a departure for Schweig, who doesn't usually get cast in the role of the heavy.

"I really like it. It's lots of fun ... I got a total kick out of it. I had to sit in the make-up chair every morning for three hours, but I didn't care because it looked so cool. Yeah, he's ugly."

Schweig's having quite a bit of success right now, though acting is not something he set out to do. It's more something he kind of fell into to.

"I'm not classically trained or anything. I wouldn't spend that much time preparing myself for something as vacuous and narcissistic as acting," he said.

Schweig, who currently lives in Toronto, was born in the Northwest Territories in 1967 where he was adopted by a German family. He lived in Inuvik until he was six, then moved to Bermuda. After several years, the family moved back to Canada, settling in northern Ontario. His first acting role came in 1987 when he played the shaman in a stage production of The Cradle Will Fall.

In addition to his role in The Missing, Schweig had the starring role in Cowboys and Indians: The Killing of J.J. Harper, in which he played Harper's brother, Harry Wood. He also stars in Mr. Barrington, where he plays Samuel, the husband of a poet tortured by demons from her past. His past movie credits include roles in Skins, Big Eden, Tom and Huck, Pontiac Moon, Squanto: A Warrior's Tale, and Last of the Mohicans. And he has a long list of television appearances to his credit, from playing the part of Joseph Brant in Canada-A People's History to playing Tonto in a Lipton Side Dish commercial.

"It's money, you know. And we all need money to live. So that's pretty much why I do it," Schweig said of his acting work. "I'm not interested in fortune or fame or whatever. I just want to buy a house and marry my girlfriend and live happily ever after in the bush somewhere."

In addition to acting, Schweig is a carver, and that is what he sees as his true profession.

His introduction to carving was much the same as his introduction to acting, he said.

"I just kind of fell into it.

"I've been doing it since I was a kid, and a friend of mine who's been carving since 1980 or something, it took him four years to talk me into it, but finally I just kind of buckled under the peer pressure and just starteddoing it."

The reason Schweig prefers carving to acting is because it allows him to call the shots.

"I'm my own boss, and I can express myself the way that I want to through that," he said. "And it doesn't come along very often in film, of course, because you've got to listen to what somebody else is telling you to act like or be like, or whatever. And you can express yourself to an extent like that, but it's nothing like just creating something from the ground up by yourself, using your own imagination and putting your emotions into it, and not having anybody putting any boundaries or parameters on it. You can just go wild and not worry about what anybody thinks. I don't anyway."

Schweig would like to see more artists expand their work past the boundaries of what "Aboriginal art" is expected to be and move out of creating comfortable works and into creating works of true self-expression.

"I've got a problem with the art in our community. I mean, traditional art is fine, but it occurred to me that art is supposed to be something that challenges your emotions and the way you think about things, and we don't do that a lot in our community. Because when you do that, it makes people uncomfortable. And especially us as Indigenous artists, we just came off the tail end of 500 years of oppression," he said.

"For me, personally, a painting of an Indian man on horseback looking at the sun just doesn't do it for me. I'd love to see more art coming from our true emotions and not just what the ruling class wants to see because they're comfortable with it. Like if they really wanted to see what's inside our hearts, it would make them uncomfortable. And that's what I want to see. Because there's truth in that, and it sets people free. It sets the individual free who's expressing themselves in that way. And it also lets the ruling class, or the people that buy art, see really what's going on inside the person that made it. And there's a real deep, personal connection that youcan make with people by doing that. And you can't do it painting pictures of guys on horseback or three Navaho women with their backs towards you, sitting there looking at a field. It's not expression to me. It's just doing what's comfortable."

Because he was adopted as an infant, Schweig didn't grow up with a connection with his Aboriginal roots and culture, and creating those connections isn't something that he places a lot of importance on.

"The only sort of connection that I have is through my masks. I'll do traditional Inuit masks once in a while, but even that's boring. I like doing my own thing," he said.

"I acknowledge my roots, but I'm Inuit, Portuguese and German. And I never really paid much attention to that sort of aspect of myself. I always thought that this world would probably be a much better place to live in if people paid less attention to where they're from and what skin color they are and more attention to what kind of human beings they are. And I'd rather concentrate on being a good person than being a good Eskimo or a good Portuguese person or a good German person, or a good Canadian person."