NICE GUY/DRUG THUG

Intelligence's pilot movie already has a fistful of award nominations.
Now the gritty 13-part series begins. In Vancouver, Alexandra Gill
talks to Ian Tracey about his complex star turn

VANCOUVER -- Stop the presses! British Columbia is a dope den.

Ian Tracey probably had a good chuckle when he read about a new study,
released last week by the University of Victoria-based Centre for
Addictions Research of B.C. and Simon Fraser University's Centre for
Applied Research on Mental Health and Addictions, which shows pot
usage is more prevalent is his home province than the rest of Canada.

The hunky actor with the gap-tooth smile certainly didn't need to read
any reports to prepare for his leading role as the cannabis-smuggling
shipping magnate in Intelligence, a new 13-episode dramatic series
that premieres on CBC Television tonight at 9 p.m.

"If you've been living here for any amount of time, you know what's
going on," says Tracey, hauling on a cigarette outside his
dressing-room trailer a few days before the news hit the headlines.

The study, which says that in some parts of the province marijuana is
even more popular than alcohol or tobacco use, might simply
corroborate what locals have already guessed for years. But by laying
it all out in black and white, this statistical evidence makes an
interesting backdrop to the new series, which delves into the many
shades of grey that emerge when gangsters team up with law-enforcement
authorities and good guys cross into bad-guy territory.

The uncanny timing of the study's release also proves, once again,
that no one in Canadian television has a better read on the streets of
Vancouver than show creator, writer and executive producer Chris
Haddock, he being the creative genius who so slyly interwove fact and
fiction into the fabric of his Da Vinci franchise for 13 years that it
was often hard to decipher which story lines were made up and which
were real.

The last time we saw Tracey on the small screen he was playing Mick
Leary, the Vancouver cop promoted to head coroner in Da Vinci's City
Hall. The series, a spinoff of Da Vinci's Inquest, lasted only one
season. And it was probably a blessing in disguise, as least for
Tracey, when the show was cancelled around the same time that
Intelligence was picked up.

"If [Da Vinci] had continued, I think Coroner Mick Leary might have
been posted up to Yellowknife or something," says Tracey, who looks a
lot like a young Willem Dafoe, with a similarly deep-lined face, bushy
eyebrows and a disarmingly charming yet faintly sinister grin.

Tracey certainly has his hands full with his Intelligence character
Jimmy Reardon, a third-generation crime boss who makes a deal with
Mary Spalding, the ambitious director of Vancouver Organized Crime
Unit (played with cool precision by Klea Scott). Jimmy agrees to be
her star informant to keep from being prosecuted, but his deal with
the devil is probably the least of his worries.

As the show's slickly layered plots unfold with gritty realism and
bullet-fire pacing, Reardon is also juggling the moles in his own
world -- an impending war with his biker competition, several
legitimate businesses, the two-faced cop determined to take him and
Spalding down, a mountain of unwashed cash, an obstinate younger
brother, a hysterical ex-wife and a custody battle over their daughter.

Haddock wrote the role, one that any actor would kill for, with Tracey
specifically in mind. And as evidenced by the praise from many critics
already, he plays the mob boss with such coiled perfection it fits him
like one of the nubile dancers wrapped around a pole in his strip club.

"As a performer, you always dream of those great gigs that you really
sink your teeth into and work with people you really respect," says
Tracey, who hasn't been given such a finely crafted role since 1999,
when he starred in Milgaard and won a Gemini Award for his portrayal
of one of Canada's most famous and tragic victims of wrongful conviction.

"It feels like I've won the lottery or something," adds Tracey, who is
already up for another Gemini as lead actor in the series' 2005 pilot.
The two-hour TV movie pilot for Intelligence, which aired last fall,
has five nominations in total, including best television movie,
writing (Haddock), direction (Stephen Surjik) and lead actress (Scott).

And now the new series is going international. Just yesterday, the
show's distributors announced a licensing deal with Hallmark Channels
that will bring the show to more than 80 television outlets around the
world.

Haddock couldn't be more pleased with his casting decision. Tracey
"really looks the part of a West Coast rounder," says the writer,
whose scripts force viewers to step outside their preconceived notions
of good and evil by portraying Reardon as a nice-guy thug beset with
the same problems facing any divorced dad or white-collar criminal.

"It's been such a delight to watch him sink into the role so
completely," adds Haddock, who is careful to add that his driving
ambition behind the show isn't to advocate for the decriminalization
of marijuana.

"I didn't set out to do anything but create a hit," he
says.

For Tracey, the transition to leading man was certainly made smoother
by all those years of working closely with Haddock as a supporting
character on Da Vinci's Inquest.

"I think by now I share a lot of his filmmaking sensibilities," Tracey
says of Haddock, who has already entrusted him with directing one episode.

It also helps knowing how Haddock operates, given that he writes the
scripts episode by episode and only hands them over to the cast a few
days before prepping begins.

"It's not quite guerrilla filmmaking, but it's not far from it,"
Tracey explains, pointing out that most of the shooting is done with
handheld cameras and there usually isn't any time for second takes.

"We've got to be ready to go all the time and get it right. Luckily,
[Chris's] writing is so natural it's not hard to remember. And in this
world of thieves and dealers, the conversations are a bit more
clickety-click, not so deep. There's no mincing of words and a lot
less social conversation that there was in Da Vinci's."

Unlike Nicholas Campbell, who studied for the character of Dominic Da
Vinci under the tutelage of Larry Campbell (Vancouver's former
real-life head coroner and eventual mayor), Tracey didn't hang out
with thugs during rehearsals. Although Haddock does have several
consultants in law enforcement, there are no criminals on the payroll.
Tracey says he's learned all he needs to know about the role simply by
living in Vancouver.

"For most of my adult life, I've been either playing bad guys or cops,
so a lot of my studying on thugdom has been done beforehand. Most of
it's just people watching," he continues.

Stepping out of character is a harder task. "Sometimes, when I'm
driving around, I imagine I'm being tailed. This [Reardon] guy's got
so much going on, he's got to have this 360-degree awareness. I guess
I've become more observant."

Well, not all the time, he admits, suddenly looking down guiltily at
the cup of coffee in his hand.

"Am I drinking your coffee? I guess I grabbed the wrong one.

"Uh, oh," he laughs, before racing off to stir up some trouble and
extinguish a few fires on-set. "I'd better watch my back."