Cardinal pumped about Corner Gas

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Lorne Cardinal is a happy man.

The 40-year-old member of the Sucker Creek First Nation in Alberta has a steady acting job in the most popular situation comedy in Canadian television history.

And he's now in a position to attract and educate Aboriginal young people about what it takes to work in television, film, and theatre production.

Cardinal plays Davis Quinton, the police chief of the fictional town of Dog River. It's the home community of Corner Gas. The show is televised on CTV and The Comedy Network.

Cardinal, the first Aboriginal person to graduate from the University of Alberta's theatre school, also relishes the opportunity to trash a politically correct artistic concept that, to him, is as phony as the set of The Ruby, the coffee shop where the denizens of Dog River meet up on a regular basis.

When producer David Storey started the casting process for Corner Gas, he asked Cardinal to audition for the role of the community's top cop.

"It was a color-blind casting," Cardinal said.

"It didn't matter who was trying out. It was up to Brent ( Brent Butt, who plays the lead role of Brent Leroy and is one of the show's writers and executive producers) and an executive from CTV to make the final decision," Lorne Cardinal said.

"I'm just playing a cop and there's no big emphasis on my heritage. You don't hear the flute or the eagle scream when I come onto the screen," he said. "That time has come and gone."

It doesn't mean that Aboriginal people shouldn't be proud of who they are or where they come from, he said. It means that Aboriginal people in the arts shouldn't be restricted to playing roles writtenfor Aboriginal people.

That was the message he brought to Saskatoon when he took part in Gathering Our Artists, an event that introduced young people to the cream of the crop of Canada's Aboriginal theatre community.

"We did two workshops for the kids, people who are just coming into theatre. We answered some questions and shared some experiences. We want kids to know that there's a huge potential if they make the theatre a career choice, not just in front of the camera but also behind it."

Cardinal took the scenic route to his acting gig. In the mid-80s, he was a seasonal worker in Kamloops, looking to do something else with his life.

"I was a tree planter. At the end of one tree-planting season there was no great need. My other job was a darkroom technician. With a 17 per cent unemployment rate, Kamloops didn't need another one of those."

So he enrolled at Cariboo College in the faculty of education, hoping to become a teacher. A year later, he transferred to the University of Alberta in Edmonton. But Cardinal became disillusioned with the experience.

"I didn't agree with how the system works kids into trade craft on the basis of their marks. I was one of those kids that they wanted to stream. They wanted to put me into welding because my marks weren't great when I was in high school," he said. "I didn't know what I wanted to be, but I knew I didn't want to be a welder."

While at Cariboo College, he enrolled in an acting class to score an easy credit. Instead, he grew less interested in teaching and more interested in acting. When he transferred to the U of A, he switched majors, first to history, and then to theatre. He graduated in 1993.

Cardinal has kept busy as an actor, both on stage and in the studio. He worked with Al Pacino and Robin Williams in the thriller Insomnia, and appears in Susan Sarandon's latest movie, Icebound.

But right now, he's very happy to be the police chief on Corner Gas. In the last television season, the show was attracting a million Canadian viewers,making it more popular than any other Canadian-made show on Canadian television, except for Canadian Idol.

Corner Gas is filmed at the Canada-Saskatchewan Production Studios in Regina and on a set in Rouleau, a village outside of Regina. Cardinal is proud of that fact as well.

"t's great that there's an opportunity now to create stories in the west. Not every television show has to be about a doctor or lawyer in Toronto."