Thursday, January 10, 2008

Glenn Howard: Union Guy



















Nice job, Mercy.

As promoted yesterday, the fictional Saskatchewan town played host to last night’s “curling” episode – Jihad On Ice – of the CBC-TV show Little Mosque on the Prairie, featuring a few interesting things... besides the world’s first fictional Muslim curling team, of course.

“I was in the bubble bath, up to my pecs in bubbles,” recalled actor Manoj Sood of one particular scene.

“I thought to myself... never in TV history has there been a scene where a Hindu-Canadian actor, playing the part of an orthodox Muslim, is in a bubble bath with a shower cap and at the same time reading a curling manual!”

Note that we said fictional Muslim curling team. Faithful TCN readers know, of course, that there is now a tiny pocket of real curling in Rabat, Morocco, as profiled in the December issue of The Curling News.

As blogreader Mark pointed out yesterday, the curling episode was shot last May “at the fabulous Richmond Hill Curling Club.”

And what of last night’s anticipated cameo appearance of a real curling star? We’ll let First Assistant Director David Manion take up the story.

“The executive producer was from Western Canada and he thought of Kevin Martin,” said Manion. “I said we had the current Canadian and World champion right here in Southern Ontario and he is a great guy (like most curlers I know).”

Take a bow, Glenn Howard (photo by Sophie Giraud).

“It was fun,” said Howard, who finally arrived home last night after from winning Scotland’s Ramada Perth Masters on the weekend.

“The crew treated me like gold. I practiced my lines, all two of them, and I think it worked out okay.

“I really like the part when they dissed me,” Howard continued. “That was funny.”

“(Glenn) was great to work with, knew his lines, hit his mark everytime and took direction well,” concurred Manion. “Also on time and friendly as hell.”

The best part of the story? Manion and Howard do indeed have a personal history, although it dates back to the final of the 1980 Ontario Junior championship many, many moons ago. Manion won, and Cliffy lost.

“(David) called me up and said ‘Glenn, I don’t know if you remember me’,” recalled Howard. “I said ‘Of course I remember you!’. I mean, I was so young back then and it was such a big game, how could I forget?”

Manion, who played lead for the John Kawaja squad out of St. George’s in Toronto – which also featured Graeme McCarrel at third – went on to lose the national junior final to Quebec’s Denis Marchand.

Want more? Check out the February print edition of The Curling News for more exclusives from the Little Mosque set... and perhaps a photo or two of that 1980 junior final thrown in for good measure. You should see the hairstyles.

“It was thoroughly enjoyable,” said Howard.

“I even had to join the union.”

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