Chad Rook is badass. I borrow the adjective from him as he uses it to describe the things he holds in the highest of regards: his character in the upcoming series pilot Flash, his prairie upbringing and resolute hard work. We meet up for a coffee and chat on what happens to be a doubly auspicious day for him. It is the eve of his 32nd birthday and the day that he quit his day job as a graphic designer to commit 100% to his acting and directing projects. Actors have that magic about them, don’t they? They are the shapeshifters of the human race, malleable and mouldable. And for this we are obsessed with them. We want to know where they go, what they eat, who they kiss. There is something so glamorous about their ability to show us our own truths with their bodies. Judgement ridden, the entertainment industry is brutal. Yet it still represents the ultimate human fantasy. Chad Rook has come out on top of the storm to tell the tale.
Chad has small town Canadian prairie roots. He grew up in Lethbridge, Alberta where there were no signs of an entertainment industry. “Adapting to a city like Vancouver,” he explains, “ when you come from a small town is a big thing. There are different people, different races, different sexualities, different styles, and different trends. Alberta is very conservative. It’s old school, old age. It’s funny, I’ll go back to Alberta and I’ll wear dress shoes that have pointy toes. My brothers will stare at my feet right away and say, “What is that?!”” His country charm still surfaces in the relaxed speed of his sentences and in the southern twang that reveals itself when he gets comfortable. It gives an endearing edge to his super cool urban persona. He speaks fondly of listening to country music, going camping and his brothers playing the guitar. He paints a golden picture of a wholesome prairie childhood that I can vividly imagine from our Americano-laden, pretentious west coast cafe table. “I’m a meat and potatoes guy, that’s for sure!”
Chad’s twelve-year acting career has been a labour of love, complete with dark, trying times and ebullient highs. He has racked up quite the resume with diverse roles on popular TV shows like Supernatural, Sanctuary, The Secret Circle, Cult, Alcatraz, just to name a few. His path to acting wasn’t always clear given the limited options in northern Alberta. He excelled at drawing and animation, but gravitated towards performance when he discovered drama at school. He recalls how it socially turned the tides for him as an awkward young adult, “It gave me a sense of noticeability that I wasn’t getting by being me normally”. Our man was hooked. “I played Santa Claus in a Christmas play. That was in grade 6. Then in junior high I started playing Sherlock Holmes and singing as a lead Beatles’ singer. When you perform you start getting laughs and then you start getting attention.”
Chad knew then that acting was what he most wanted to do. Thus began his search for avenues that would help him achieve his goal. He started modelling in local runway shows. “I sent out probably 200 envelopes to every agency in North America and Europe. I went and bought a book about it. I got a summer job to buy this big book. It was like 60 bucks! It was a crazy amount of money as a kid”. The investment paid off because Chad was picked up by an agency in Tampa Bay, Florida. In Tampa he worked on campaigns for Ibiza Hippie, Jean Paul Gaultier, Escada, Gucci and Swiss Army. It’s not at all too difficult to imagine him as a fashion model. After his time in Tampa, Chad scored big at the annual talent and modelling convention in Vancouver called Facewest. He won 7 out of 8 events there. Despite his success in the modelling world he always knew modelling was a stepping-stone to an acting career. The only other avenue available to him in Lethbridge was acting school, of which Chad was sceptical. And rightly so, as he discovered later that “casting directors and directors don’t care about the section on your acting resume that says school. It’s not even looked at. Your credits are looked at. Thank god I didn’t go that route. I was contemplating it but I got thrown right into acting.”
As a result of Facewest, Chad booked an independent film, Sleepover Nightmare, on Vancouver Island and a TV series called John Doe. “My first line was “How fast is lightning?” That was a metaphor for how fast my role on TV on that show was. And that was it. My family went nuts! You know. Alberta boy! I thought I was on top of the world, right. But after that it was two years until I booked another role. Two years of nothing.”
The following two years of nothing really tested Chad’s mettle, not only as an actor but as an adult too. “Those two years were really difficult. I call them my broke years. I was taking an odd class here and there. I was working retail at Bootlegger. I was making minimum wage and paying Vancouver rent. To afford headshots meant rice and Kraft dinners for the next 4 months.” It no doubt contributed to his strength and resilience as an artist. He went to over 40 to 50 auditions a year without a single call-back. “That’s 80 somewhat times someone’s telling you you’re not good enough for a role. You can understand why people quit this industry.”
He explains how much of landing roles is about showing up over and over again and proving to casting directors that you are serious. “It took me years for them to realise, ok this guy is serious, because every year you update your headshots, keep your demo reel up to date. You book things; you get bigger roles and you get better and better. And then they see you. It takes years to develop that. There were times when it was a blond-haired, blue-eyed character of German descent from Lethbridge, Alberta for example, and I didn’t get called into the audition. Like…that’s 100% me!” With the support of his family, his acting friends and colleagues, (“I call them my mafia” he jokes), and the absence of a fallback plan B, Chad approached acting as his only option. He consequently made it out of the challenging two-year dry spell into a regular stream of acting work. “When I go into auditions now I take that script, learn what they’ve written on the page, and say “ok now I refuse to do everything that’s on that page”. I have to create a whole world around the lines and that creates the character. When you create those badass characters you really stand out from the 300 people in LA, New York and Toronto auditioning for that role.” For Chad it has been a conscious and constant journey of self-development. “It’s been 12 years now of learning how to develop the character, script analysis, about confidence in the room and controlling nerves. The second you walk into that audition room they judge you. It’s not just action and cut that they’re judging; it’s hello to goodbye. It took years to learn it all. Most actors quit this industry during the times of learning.”
Chad was also part of the sketch comedy groups The Classholes and Fine Lines. “I used to do a lot of stand-up comedy. I do a lot of impersonations. I did the Yuk Yuk’s thing. I have respect for stand up comics. There’s rejection and then there’s what those guys go through”. He got into writing and directing with short films and music videos, “I like directing when I write because I get what I envisioned. It’s an incredible amount of work. Sometimes you have to do 16 or 20 drafts of the script until everyone likes it. I don’t do it often, but when I do, I like it when it’s done.” Meanwhile he continued scoring guest starring roles on major TV series. All of which have brought him to this exciting point in his career.
“I just finished a pilot called Flash for the CW. I can’t talk too much about it but it will be released this fall. I play a really fun role, I’ll say that. Right now I’m filming Cedar Cove. I’m playing a recurring character on it that is of a really sly guy. He forges identification and stuff”.
His career boasts of a hefty list of negative characters. “I love it! You always remember the bad characters. They get to do the cool things. They look the weirdest. They get the gun, they get to drive the car, they get to blow up things, they cause hell, and they act out of the norm. To be able to do that is awesome. I don’t know why they don’t do TV series based on villains. Why are they always based around the good guy, right?”
The evil characters also get the attention of the fans, the power of which Chad knows all too well now. His fan-base has multiplied manifold over the years. With the increasing number of cult characters under his belt- vampires, hunters, demons and pimps, he has given his fans the menacing and sexy bad guy that drives much of TV today. He has a wonderful relationship with his fans. He interacts with them actively over social media and makes a genuine effort to include them on his journey. “If they don’t watch me, if they don’t support me, I don’t have a career.” It still must be slightly disconcerting for him though, to have fans finding out what hotel room he is staying in and sending him gifts. Not to mention, having to deal with the many fake twitter accounts on the internet masquerading as Chad Rook. “I’m flattered but at the same time you take a step back and it can get pretty personal, pretty fast. I try to balance that. Sometimes it’s hard.”
Flash is a dream come true for Chad, as he himself is a big comic book fan. More than content with playing villains and comic book characters at the moment, he hopes to play important real life icons in the future. “You playing a real life character, is you getting a paintbrush with every colour in the world. You can do so much.” He cites the character-driven careers of Johnny Depp, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Kate Winslet as his inspirations. Currently he is filming My Life as a Dead Girl in which he continues his streak of negative characters. “I have played a lot of bad guys but this character is above and beyond any bad guy I have ever played. I’m talking the worst of the worst. The film is about girls who are trying to get out of a prostitution ring. My character is a pimp who drugs and sleeps with people. Uses them in very violent and vulgar ways. It will definitely take me out of my comfort zone. It’s a very aggressive and abusive role.” He also has another exciting acting slash directorial venture titled The Perfect Pickup, “It’s a comedy about 4 guys who try to find the perfect way to pick up women.”
Chad’s hard work is finally paying off. “It comes down to self-discipline; fun over work. Now I have fun. I get to travel for work. For Flash I will get to go to Comic Con in San Diego. I get to do all this because I had the discipline. Work now and play later.” With travel to LA on the horizon, and a potential long-term move there eventually, the momentum continues to build. Vancouver has prepared him for the blinding storm that LA promises to be. “The prairies were never for me,” he says, “I’ve always been the city guy. I like the go, go, go of it all. Vancouver is a little bit more relaxed. LA is more you better work your ass off”. He credits having worked out of Vancouver as being an advantage in landing roles, as the competition at home is a lot less when compared to the daunting overflow in LA. Talent-wise there is more quantity than quality in LA and with a meaty resume built up in Vancouver, Chad is all set to, in his own words, “kill it in LA”.
With such a busy schedule does he ever switch it off? Observing people around you “becomes second nature. You have to observe because you imitate. That’s the fun of life. There are so many people in the world and they’re all different.” When it comes to his personal life, though, acting is entirely separate. “My family keeps me humble very fast. When I go home, it’s Alberta again. You smarten up and you don’t act big and you’re not anyone there. I love that. Actors who are acting all the time almost don’t know who they themselves are. It becomes fake.” In his time off he plays beach volleyball and loves to golf. He is a big hip-hop fan. Especially an Eminem fan. “I listen to a lot of old school rock like AC DC, Kiss and Metallica. I am addicted to the 90s, whether it’s rap or old school rock.”
What makes the cut then, when it comes to movies, for someone who lives and breathes them on the daily? “The Exorcist is still my favourite film. My mom is a big movie buff. She is a huge horror fan. We used to watch horror films together all the time. There have been some recent ones that have been really good like The Conjuring. It all comes down to playing monster in the house with my mom. The Exorcist had a midnight screening once and I was in the theatre at midnight on my own. I love it!”
Chad’s advice to new actors is “to make friends with rejection” because it is 90% of the game, “just keep throwing stuff at the wall and eventually it’s going to stick.”It’s impossible to imagine Chad doing anything other than acting. His passion is visceral and undeniable, “like I said, acting allows you to be anything you want without limits. You have to really go for it. Sometimes it can blow up in your face, or it can go in your favour. It’s a weird game, right?” It is. And it is cutthroat and it is lethally dazzling. But Chad is playing it all right. In fact, more than all right.
-Prachi Kamble, With Brandon Hart Photography
(Printed with the permission of Fame Blog Canada where it was initially published).