Believe the hype: Marriage is work. At least a happy, successful one is and blessed are the chosen that can sustain that passion and maintain a fruitful partnership in the process.
Canadian actors Peter Keleghan (The Red Green Show) and Leah Pinsent (ReGenesis) have not only been wed for almost a decade, but have managed to weave both their personal and professional lives together smashingly.
They met on the set of the lamented CBC series Made in Canada, and are now starring together onscreen as stranded, starving co-workers (and ex-lovers) in writer/director Brian Keenan’s wacky, ultra-satiric farce Eating Buccaneers.
It opens in theatres next Friday.
Keleghan stars as ad exec Jerry, whose arrogance and ersatz sheen of self confidence is taxed when his private company jet crashes into the Canadian wilderness, stranding his staff in the middle of nowhere with only a handful of chocolate bars (the titular Buccaneers) to sustain them.
The film is funny, ferocious and full of bitter wit and manages to cheat its small budget, the likes of which wasn’t more than the cost of those aforementioned snacks.
“The budget for this movie was absolutely tiny,” says Keleghan, who — among his myriad of professional credits — also played George Constanza’s nemesis Lloyd Braun on TV’s Seinfeld.
“We only made a few hundred dollars per day — if that — and the shoot lasted 18 days. I lost a lot of work because of my commitment to it but it was worth it.”
Playing Vanessa, the terminally Zen yoga loving peacenik in the group, Pinsent plays off Keleghan’s rapidly unraveling stuffed shirt brilliantly, a radical departure from her uppity, prim roles in Made In Canada and The Newsroom.
“I always play put together people,” she says.
“But I hate eating the same meal over and over again, if you know what I mean. Really, this character is closer to who I am.”
Pinsent is the daughter of iconic Canadian actor Gordon Pinsent, and when the most ambitious sequence in Eating Buccaneers was filmed in Algonquin Park, Keleghan arranged for his famous father–in-law to make an appearance as a mad, backwoods trapper. It’s yet another way the film manages to milk its miniscule budget to grand effect.
“I couldn’t be happier with it,” says Keleghan of the movie, which ultimately plays like The Office meets Lord of the Flies.
“To me, a good movie always starts and ends with the script and believe me, Brian gave us one that was nothing short of terrific.”
