Tom McCamus has been part of the fabric of Canada’s theatre, TV, and movie scene for a few decades. He’s mostly a stage actor and is a veteran of top festivals like Stratford and Shaw. At Stratford I’ve seen him play Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, King Richard III in Shakespeare’s Richard III, King Arthur in Camelot, and Captain Hook in Peter Pan, among other roles.
But he does cross over into film and TV now and then, very often playing villains or morally compromised characters. My favourite movie project of his is 1993’s A Man in Uniform, for which he won the Genie Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role. He plays an actor hired to play a cop on a TV show who takes the role too seriously. He borrows his uniform from the show and patrols the streets pretending to be a beat cop. As you can imagine, hijinks ensue.
Things non-Canadians might recognize him from:
As Sarah Polley’s father Sam Burnell in Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter, involved in the lawsuit against the bus company after the accident that injured his daughter. He is not a good person.
As surgeon and geneticist Dr. Alan Nealon on Orphan Black, who
infiltrated Dyad on behalf of Neolution, attempted to perform an oopherectomy on Sarah, and took care of Rachel after the pencil to the eye incident.
As mutant hunter Mason Eckhart on the TV show Mutant X: Totally Not Affiliated with X-Men, Per Marvel’s Legal Team After That Lawsuit Filed By 20th Century Fox. (Fun fact: He quit this show as a regular after the first season to appear in the Stratford production of Richard III I saw him in, and made only sporadic appearances in subsequent seasons.)
Every month has Ides, but we’re only afraid of the March one. So you know… beware today.
