In a perfect world, Mark O’Brien would be dying his hair blonde, tugging on a No. 99 jersey and trying to make like Wayne Gretzky.
Alas, there is no film — yet — on The Great One, much to O’Brien’s chagrin.
So Terry Sawchuk will have to do, which isn’t bad considering O’Brien’s portraying one of the game’s all-time greats in the film “Goalie” , which opened Friday in Toronto and Vancouver.
A self-described hockey “maniac”, O’Brien, the Paradise born-and-raised actor, jumped at the chance to play Sawchuk, the enigmatic Hall of Fame keeper who was one of the best to ever play the game.
“I’m a bit of a hockey nut,” O’Brien said. “I’ve got the NHL app on my phone. A few years ago, when the Canadiens were in the playoffs, we were filming and I was watching the game right up to the point where they called ‘action!’.
“I knew all about Sawchuk, about his 971 games, his record 103 shutouts, his years in Detroit when he was the greatest goalie in the NHL.
“He’s always been known as the No. 1 goalie and for me, a guy who loves hockey, to play him, I was super excited.”
Hockey’s always been a big part of 34-year-old Mark O’Brien’s life, from his days playing minor from atom up through to bantam in the C.B.S. system — “a proud Raider,” he says, though now they’re Renegades — through to today.
Though he now lives in L.A., O’Brien still skates three times a week in Burbank, with mostly people in the film and music industry, including Michael Vartan, who was a lead actor on the TV show Alias, which ran for five seasons — “he’s a real good player, too,” says O’Brien” — and members of the former poplar boy band, R5.
“They’re all a good group of guys,” O’Brien said. “We have a lot of fun in the room. And that’s half of it, right?”
When he’s in L.A., O’Brien will take in a Kings game when he can, especially if the Canadiens are in town. While Gretzky and Mario Lemieux are his all-time favourites, he loved watching Patrick Roy.
Much the same way he enjoys watching the Canadiens’ Jesperi Kotkaniemi.
“His hockey smarts are off the charts,” O’Brien says if the Finnish teen sensation. “It’s why I loved (ex-Canadien) Andrei Markov.”
“Goalie”, filmed in Sudbury, Ont., is the brainchild of screenwriter-director Adriana Maggs, whose inspiration came from her father, Corner Brook resident Randall Maggs, who authored the 2007 book “Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems”.
Adriana’s sister, Jane, was the film’s co-writer. Both grew up in Corner Brook, and the two previously worked with O’Brien.
While playing the part of a hockey player wasn’t foreign to O’Brien, playing a goalie was.
O’Brien had never stood between the pipes.
“That actually benefitted me because I had no set stance, no set way of playing so I had no habits to break when I was trying to adapt to the way Sawchuk played,” said O’Brien, who is currently in New York City filming “City of a Hill” which will air on Showtime.
With the exception of a scattered stunt double, O’Brien was on the ice in goal for 95 per cent of the filming, wearing goalie skates and the old, vintage leather goalie pads that weighed a ton at the end of the day.
“We spent days and days and days on the ice, sometimes 15 hours a day. I got used to it pretty quick,” he said.
“The weirdest was when we wrapped the movie and I went back playing with the boys in L.A., you know, playing out. Felt like I was learning all over again.”
Before starting filming, O’Brien did his homework, speaking with Sawchuk’s son and the goalie’s former Detroit teammate and Los Angeles Kings coach, Hall of Famer Red Kelly.
Sawchuk, of course, was a well-known introvert, whose off-ice exploits have been well-documented.
“And playing someone like that,” O’Brien said, “was actually more difficult than playing an extroverted character who wore their emotions on their sleeve.
“I’d talk to people about Terry, and they’d be like, ‘When he was on, he was the greatest goalie in the world.’ I’m, like, ‘Yeah, but, tell me about him. What was he like?’ ‘Well, he kind of kept to himself. But when he was on, he was the greatest goalie in the world,’” O’Brien recalls with a chuckle.
“‘But what about him?’ People didn’t have a lot to say about him. It was really interesting. It was kind of closed book and it was my job to kind of figure out why.”