Of course getting one’s own space really means starting one’s own business. It’s one thing to run a few classes in rented premises, but with one’s own space one has overheads and all the other obligations of a real business. What did I know about that? Not much but I was to learn quickly. I had help. Local architect John Keith-King, husband of Sherry Grauer — yes, that Sherry Grauer — helped me locate the first space, three rooms over a picture framing business. In order to meet all the overheads we would need to rent the space sometimes to other performing arts groups. What should we call it? I wanted it to be a centre, a place where artists could convene and work and develop. Garry Davey, a graduate of the Playhouse School during my tenure and now an associate teacher with me suggested, “The William Davis Centre for Actors’ Study.” To be honest, I was never sure about attaching my name to the enterprise. In retrospect the decision worked out rather well.
And so in 1989 we officially opened the doors. Soon we had a small full-time program in addition to our part-time classes. Early graduates included successful actors, and acting teachers as it happens, William MacDonald, Nancy Sivak, and Sarah-Jane Redmond. But soon I was saying, still more or less in jest and still to the rolling eyes of the students, “When I get a larger space . . .” But I was not going to be given the opportunity to prevaricate; my hand was forced. The lovely picture framing business underneath us moved out and was replaced by an auto body paint shop. We had to get out of there quickly before the paint fumes suffocated us or lawsuits closed us.
In truth we were quite innocent when we acquired the first space. I think we called ourselves a studio rather than a school to avoid stringent zoning regulations. The requirements for a school include all sorts of unlikely things such as handicap access, fire regulations, and parking spaces, eliminating ninety-five percent of otherwise suitable buildings. What were we to do?
I don’t remember now how we found it, but at the corner of Hornby and Helmcken in downtown Vancouver was a modelling school that had been there since 1945. And it was closing down. If the premises continued to be used as a school it did not have to meet the current standards. At the time the area was a bit down-market, but it was a great deal better than some of our competitors in the Downtown Eastside. And as an added bonus it had a neon sign overlooking the street corner. Neon signs had long ago been banned in Vancouver, but existing ones were grandfathered. So I bought the air rights from the previous owner — well, actually she kept them and I paid her; if there had been an actual transfer the sign would have been prohibited. And so finally, I had my name in lights. If no one else would do it, I would do it myself. In 1992, after extensive renovations and a course in accounting for the owner — me — we opened our new school and remained there for the next fifteen years.
We were hardly settled into the new space when the Davis refrain began again. “When we expand our space . . .” and the students rolled their eyes yet again. But indeed we did add another studio so that in our prime we had four active studios before the business began to contract for whatever reasons.
Being on a street corner was a help. The school became a hub, for actors, students, teachers, and occasionally the homeless who might spend the night on our doorstep. And after The X-Files became a hit, we were a focus for fan tourism as well. Always messy it seemed, under the egalitarian leadership of longtime administrator and my great good friend Sharolyn Lee who used students as “gumbies” to do the grunt work in exchange for classes, the centre had a palpable energy and friendliness.
Organizationally the school evolved from a studio for part-time classes for working actors and beginners to a mix of a one year full-time program and part-time students, some of whom would share some of the full-time classes under a program we called IPOs (Independent Program of Study). Now, long after I sold it, it has become almost exclusively a one year full-time program and is part of a larger school in the city, VanArts. Still under the name William Davis Centre — though now a division of VanArts — the program is run by the dynamic and excellent acting teacher Chilton Crane.
I am often asked, what method did I teach? The only answer I could ever provide? My method. Yes, but what is that? Well, come to some of my classes, act in a play I direct, watch me when I act in one. I know, that’s no answer and I have often said I will write a book on acting and perhaps I will one day. But as far back as my time in Dundee I have had a vision of what acting should be. The vision has modified and clarified over the years circumscribed perhaps by awareness of the context within which actors normally work. After all, how fresh and spontaneous and immersed in the character can you be when you are instructed to hold your cigarette two millimetres from your left nostril to maximize the lighting effect? Still, the goal for me always involves a reality, a truth, a spontaneity, an interaction between the actors. One sees so often a lovely performance that would change not one iota if a bomb went off on the other side of the stage. Or where an actor says her lines because she remembers them, not because she has to say them at that moment because of what has gone on before, who she is, and what she wants. I often used to say the life of a scene exists in the space between the actors not in the actors themselves.
All very well — who can disagree — but how do you accomplish these laudable goals? My own approach evolved from the multitude of teachers, directors, actors, and schools I had been exposed to. But LAMDA on the one hand and American traditions on the other have somehow fused into a central philosophy. But if there is one question an actor should ask when he starts work it would be this: why do I say what I say or do what I do? At this moment. Not two lines earlier or later but right now. This question will lead one to everything from the social history of the play, the physicality of the character, the precise meaning of the line, the background and thoughts of the character before entering the scene, to the relationships with the other characters, etc.
And if there is one word of advice I could give to an actor it is this: Don’t learn your lines! No, I am not saying you should work like Marlon Brando in later years and have crib notes of your lines all over the set. Of course, you must know your lines. But if instead of memorizing them you constantly ask yourself, why do I say this, exactly this, at this precise moment, not only will you know your lines you will know many other things about the character and the scene. And when you struggle in rehearsal to remember a line you will remember it by thinking more closely about the scene and what is said to you. I remember an old-time film teacher saying to me he didn’t like stage actors because they have “dead eyes.” He was thinking, I imagine, of actors who try to remember their memorized lines by looking in their own head and not at the other actor. Not only is memorizing lines really boring, it deprives the actor of the clarity of the question: why.
But who, besides me, could I get to teach both what I wanted and the way I wanted it taught? Garry Davey had been my student at the Playhouse — coincidentally the only student that I actually auditioned myself for that program. It was clear when he was a student that he had both a good eye and an ability to communicate. He became first my assistant, then my associate, and finally, me. When the demands of my acting career overwhelmed me, Garry became the Artistic Director of the School with Sharolyn Lee as the General Manager.
Of course, not all our choices for instructors worked out well. We hired a local teacher who operated her own studio and taught the Meisner technique. I have always been suspicious of techniques named after an individual, but I audited one of her classes — for which she was forty minutes late — liked what I saw, and asked her to teach for us. I have already confessed to making poor choices in the past — add this to the list. For one thing it turned out that being forty minutes late was the rule not the exception — often far later than that for the start of a class. The Meisner technique itself, based as it is on projecting one’s personal emotions into the imagined scene, is prone to self-indulgence, and our new teacher was a master at encouraging her students to express their personal pain even to the
point of punching a hole in the wall of a classroom. Yet these classes were highly popular and good for our bottom line. Did the technique help the students act better in actual scenes? I remain to be convinced. But when we discovered that she was poaching our students for her own studio I pressed the delete button.
While there was never money to be made it seemed — there was no profit stream; I made a living by teaching a lot of classes — fame was just around the corner. It began with a curious correspondence with a young woman in New Zealand. She wanted to come to our school. I mean, why not? Was she any good? Why our school? I’m not sure I ever did find out how Lucy Lawless heard of us and decided she wanted to study with us. At any rate we took a chance on this unknown person and accepted her into our full-time program. Well, guess what? She was terrific and has gone on to fame and fortune most notably as Xena, the Warrior Princess.
And meantime, I auditioned for a small role in a pilot for a television show about alien abductions.
The X-Files
And so, at age fifty-five, I played a background character in a science fiction television pilot. At age fifty-six I was playing a recurring but minor character, and by age fifty-seven I was playing a featured character in a hit show. I was a celebrity, a star, recognized around the world.
I’ve always had a share of respect from colleagues and the public ever since I began running a theatre company at age twenty. As I fondly imagined my career developing I had hoped for an increasing degree of respect and approval. Being a celebrity is something else altogether. How do you know you are a celebrity? One day early on in the life of the show I was recognized when I walked into an electronics store. Nothing too surprising in that. It was when I could see that the salesperson was shaking with nerves and declared that he had never been this close to a movie star before that I knew my life had changed.
Am I being remiss here? I am assuming you know what The X-Files was. But it’s possible you are reading this memoir for the arcane detail of early Canadian theatre in the forties and fifties and you have never actually heard of The X-Files.
Created by Chris Carter in the early nineties, The X-Files was a television series centred on two FBI agents, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully (David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson), the former a believer in all things paranormal and the latter a skeptic. The X files were cases buried deep in the archives of the FBI, cases that didn’t seem to allow for normal explanations. Mulder’s task was to investigate these strange cases. Initially Scully was supposed to spy on Mulder, but she became his ally. The show looked at many of the strange things some people believe and asked the question, ‘What if that were really true?’ As the show developed, most episodes fell into one of two categories affectionately known as monster of the week or mythology. Monster of the week shows were one-offs, possibly a ghost story, vampire tale, or story of someone with weird powers. The mythology became the overarching theme of the series, a story of a pending alien invasion and a conspiracy of collaborators.
Unlike most television series, The X-Files never had a bible, an in-depth treatment of the whole series outlining the characters and story lines. Basically the producers and writers flew by the seat of their pants. For nine years they flew by the seat of their pants. Not only did they not have a plan, they never seemed to catch up; scripts appeared at the last minute if they appeared at all. Sometimes casting had to be done based on nothing more than a script for the teaser. The show ran so close to the wire that first AD Tom Braidwood — fans know him better as Frohike — joked that one day they would have to do a live feed on a Friday night. Terrifying to all connected to the show as that improvisation was, it allowed the writers and producers to respond to circumstance, to what was working and what was not, to the fans, and strangely, to Gillian’s pregnancy in the second season. And so the mythology story emerged, unplanned and unbidden, and with it the gradual evolution of my character, the Cigarette Smoking Man, from the murky shadows to prominence.
The show became not just a hit, but a global phenomenon. Dubbed into dozens of languages, the names X-Files, Mulder, and Scully became part of the lexicon. Few shows before or since have captured such worldwide attention. It seems everyone had heard of The X-Files — even those who never watched television. As for me, people seeing me in the street would yell from their cars, “Hey, you got a smoke?”
But to start at the beginning, my beginning on the show. It is the spring of 1993. I am running my acting school, the William Davis Centre for Actors’ Study, and about to direct the end of year production of Picnic. I have had a few decent acting roles in the previous few years, but mostly I have been a teacher, acting primarily to supplement my income and stimulate my teaching. I remember waiting for our second audition in the show’s tiny offices with Ken Camroux, who actually got the three-line part that I auditioned for, when Stephen Miller, a successful Canadian actor who was already cast, came out and patted us hopefuls on the head, wishing us good luck. Stevie was actually very good in the pilot episode, but that pretty well ended his career on X-Files, although he was to play a continuing role on Millennium, a later Chris Carter effort. Who knew that my career was about to begin? Or Chris Carter’s for that matter, or anyone else’s on the show.
The pilot episode, which was so successful the studio executives stood up and applauded when they saw the cut, was directed by Robert Mandel, who never did another episode. I’m sure there is a story there; I just don’t know what it is. Fans often ask me what direction I was given, what I was told about the character, what his backstory was. Truth is, I wasn’t told anything. Real truth? I don’t think they had any idea themselves. A mysterious man smoking in the background was an interesting presence; I don’t think anyone had thought further than that. As for me, I guess I made up something to inform what I was doing, but I have no idea now what it was.
Actors complain frequently about all the waiting around we do on set. I know fans think we lead a glamorous life, but the truth is film acting, better called film waiting, can be tedious. But when you are hanging around to play a character who hangs around, the waiting can seem endless. Fans of the show may remember a terrific shot at the end of the pilot where CSM (Cigarette Smoking Man) walks down a long hallway between rows and rows of shelves. It was a difficult crane shot to set up and we waited several hours before I could actually do my walk. I say “we” because that was when I first became aware of how redundant some of the structures of film production can be. For me to walk down the hallway, four of us had to wait: me, the hair person, the makeup person, and the costume person. Even though none of these items would change for the shot.
Still, as we all know the show was picked up and a season launched in the fall of 1993. But that had no apparent effect on me; I carried on running my school, teaching my classes, and auditioning for other roles. It wasn’t until February that I heard from them again and then it was for a different role altogether — well, maybe it was a different role. The character in the episode “Young at Heart” was known only as CIA Agent, but apparently they wanted me to play the role in case they should decide he was the same person as the smoking guy in the pilot — though this character didn’t smoke, in the episode at least. So I did this tiny little job still with no idea that my life was changing.
To be honest, it was a rather embarrassing piece of work. You will have to look at the episode with great care to find me, but you will find me, unlike my role in The Dead Zone. I do appear in “Young at Heart,” briefly in the background, frantically waving my arms. Apparently I was hoping for some information from a dying man and the director thought that if I waved my arms this need would be communicated to the viewer. Well, let’s hope it was, as a more unlikely way to try to get information from an unconscious person would be hard to imagine. When you are doing small roles to augment your income you do what you are told.
But the Smoking Man did reappear in season 1 as the Smoking Man, first in the episode “Tooms,” and then again in the final episode of the season, “The E
rlenmeyer Flask.” “Tooms” marked the introduction of Mitch Pileggi as FBI Assistant Director Skinner, the hard driving and, in this first episode, quite unpleasant senior director to Mulder and Scully. Me? I was standing around in the background, you know, smoking. Who was I? What was I thinking? Who knows? Since I was primarily an acting teacher at the time I was probably thinking about how well, or not, I thought Gillian Anderson, David Duchovny, and Mitch Pileggi were acting. I won’t comment on that other than to say I think we all improved greatly as the series progressed through the years.
But it is important in film acting that the characters be thinking something. If what they are thinking has something to do with the show so much the better, but it actually isn’t necessary. Some years earlier I was playing a role in Airwolf and the director and producers were very excited as they had brought John Ireland in as a guest star for one episode. Born in Vancouver, Ireland had been a major film and television actor going back to the fifties and was once nominated for an Academy Award (for his role in All the King’s Men). But by 1987 he was getting on; he would have been seventy-three, just a year older than I am as I write this, and no sooner had he arrived on set than he clutched the script supervisor, exclaiming that she had to help him with his lines. He didn’t have any more lines than the rest of us, but whatever ability he might once have had to remember lines had by now deserted him entirely. How we ever got through a scene is a mystery. He could remember nothing. I was certain the episode would be a disaster, but when I finally saw it he looked terrific. The rest of us may have looked odd, panicked as we were about whether our cue would come or not, but Ireland looked just fine, focussed and concentrated. Of course the object of his intense concentration had nothing to do with the scene at hand. Only we other actors knew he was thinking, “What the fuck is my next line?”
Where There's Smoke...: Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, a Memoir Page 24