{"id":143365,"date":"2018-01-02T23:00:05","date_gmt":"2018-01-03T04:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=143365"},"modified":"2018-01-03T00:21:17","modified_gmt":"2018-01-03T05:21:17","slug":"billy-campbell-on-season-2-of-ctvs-cardinal-feeling-spiritually-canadian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2018\/01\/02\/billy-campbell-on-season-2-of-ctvs-cardinal-feeling-spiritually-canadian\/","title":{"rendered":"Billy Campbell on season 2 of CTV’s ‘Cardinal,’ feeling ‘spiritually Canadian’"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Billy<\/a>
Billy Campbell (Photo by Keith McDuffee from Northborough, MA, USA – <\/a>FlickrUploaded by stemoc, CC BY 2.0)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

NORTH BAY, Ont. \u2014 The life of an actor isn’t always glamorous. Take Billy Campbell, for example. The lanky Virginian sits in a rundown mess hall on a remote and abandoned helicopter airfield. It’s late spring, cold, and raining hard. To kill time between shooting scenes on the CTV series \u201cCardinal,\u201d he kills mosquitoes.<\/p>\n

Campbell wouldn’t have it any other way.<\/p>\n

The show’s six-episode second season, set in fictional \u201cAlgonquin Bay\u201d but shot in North Bay and Sudbury, Ont., begins Thursday night.<\/p>\n

Generous tax credits and other incentives have lured \u201cCardinal\u201d and other productions to towns all over the provinces’ \u201cnear north\u201d region. That’s fine with Campbell, who has lived and worked across Canada and owns property in British Columbia.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel spiritually Canadian, maybe because I’ve been coming here since I was a young one,\u201d says Campbell, who used to summer with his family in Ontario’s Muskoka-area cottage country.<\/p>\n

The 58-year-old plays Det. John Cardinal on the series, a hit on CTV as well as stateside on Hulu; a third season has already been ordered.<\/p>\n

Quebecer Karine Vanasse stars opposite Campbell as police partner Lisa Delorme. The new season finds the two investigating a strange case: a young woman (Alex Paxton-Beesley) has survived a gunshot wound to the head but her injuries may be linked to a series of grisly, ritualistic murders.<\/p>\n

\u201cCardinal\u201d is based on a series of six bestselling crime novels by Canadian author Giles Blunt. Campbell has read them all.<\/p>\n

He didn’t always want to be an actor. \u201cI wanted to draw comic books,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

He attended a school of comic book art in New Jersey. A visit to a friend at an acting school in Chicago, however, opened his eyes to other possibilities. For one thing, he says, there were more interesting women in the acting class. Campbell followed one of them to Hollywood and the rest, as they say, is history.<\/p>\n

In fairly short order he landed a part on \u201cDynasty\u201d and starred in the sci-fi adventure flick \u201cThe Rocketeer.\u201d He claims, however, that his career was almost over before it began. His first acting gig was in a long-forgotten TV movie called, appropriately enough, \u201cFirst Steps.\u201d<\/p>\n

Campbell got on set and froze. \u201c<\/p>\n

\u201c(It) came the time to shoot and I was a block of wood,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n

The director swore loudly, turned his back and \u201cstomped away from the camera.\u201d Campbell still remembers the name of the compassionate assistant director who caught up with him later and assured him there’d be better days ahead.<\/p>\n

There were, including Campbell’s three-season run opposite Sela Ward in the acclaimed ABC drama \u201cOnce and Again.\u201d By the time that series ended in 2002, however, Campbell felt lost in Hollywood.<\/p>\n

\u201cI guess you could say I had a mid-life crisis. I really felt like I wasn’t living my life at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Driven by a longing to experience the sea after reading the \u201cMaster and Commander\u201d novels, Campbell set out for Norway. Over the next four years he sailed around the world twice, part of that time on a tall ship out of Lunenburg, N.S. The ship resembles the famous Blue Nose schooner depicted on the Canadian dime. Campbell proudly shows off a photo of the craft on his cellphone.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe last season I was on board, I met my now wife,\u201d says Campbell. She’s from Norway; the couple and their young child split their time between Copenhagen and her family’s farm in the south of Norway.<\/p>\n

Campbell did discover what it was like to be at sea, but mostly, he says, \u201cI discovered things about myself. Oddly, once I started doing that, work became so much more satisfying.\u201d<\/p>\n

That work has included starring roles on \u201cThe Killing\u201d and \u201cHelix\u201d but, despite the mosquitoes, he feels most at home on the set of \u201cCardinal.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NORTH BAY, Ont. \u2014 The life of an actor isn’t always glamorous. Take Billy Campbell, for example. The lanky Virginian …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":143373,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,106],"tags":[41473,41474],"class_list":["post-143365","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","category-hollywood","tag-billy-campbell","tag-ctvs-cardinal","mauthors-bill-brioux","mauthors-the-canadian-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143365","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143365"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143365\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143365"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143365"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143365"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}