"Brian Downey Says Hello "

Interview by "Alicubi" editor Martin Downs.

Actor Brian Downey spoke to "Alicubi" by phone from his home Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is best known for his part as Stanley H. Tweedle in the TV series Lexx. Previous interviews have focused almost solely on this role, the making of Lexx, and his co-stars--all the things that cult sci-fi fans are eager to hear. Few would know that he had a remarkable acting career before he stepped into Stanley's red overalls. Downey's talent, energy, and wit are apparent in his performance on Lexx, but they precede it and extend well beyond it. The show may be done, but Downey is not.

MD: I assume Lexx finished filming some time ago, although the last episode aired on the Sci-Fi channel in April of this year.

BD: We finished our final day of shooting in Thailand, and it was October 30 (2001). That was the day before my birthday. It was interesting to be in Thailand, you know, Halloween. Nothing in Thailand changed. There were no pumpkins, there were no jack-o-lanterns; people were dressed in normal garb, even the Europeans.

MD: Whereabouts in Thailand was it?

BD: Our first base of operations was a town called Kanchanaburi. We were staying in a hotel called the Felix River Kwai Hotel. From there it would have been about a five- ten-minute walk to the famous bridge, which, by the way, was never blown up. It still exists to this day. That whole thing about the British commandos going in and the Alec Guinness character that was cooperation somewhat with the Japanese and trying to save the bridge, that was just a bunch of horse shit. The real story is much more interesting. It was built by prisoners of war. The Japanese were having a lot of trouble during the Second World War sailing toward India into Burma, around that long tip that becomes Malaysia. They were having a lot of trouble with Allied naval forces. So they decided they would take an overland route into Burma. So they took the prisoners of war out and got them to build it. I don't remember exactly, but it was something on the order of 300 kilometers of railway. Something on the order of 7,000 or 8,000 Allied troops died. Asians that died, principally Chinese, there were over 100,000 that died building the railroad. We saw documentation of the things that those prisoners suffered during the building of that railway, and it was absolutely inhumane, absolutely horrifying, abysmal. The worst that humans can do to humans were done to those prisoners--and more so to the Chinese than to the occidentals; people don't realize that.

So, that's where we were shooting. There was a temple that we shot in that was a Khmer temple, and that's an ancient dynasty, for an episode called "ApocaLexx Now."

MD: Was that the scene with the buckets of gasoline and the golf balls?

BD: You'd have to have seen it, but in a nutshell: Stanley Tweedle and the President of the United States are tied up in a temple with candles burning at their feet and buckets of gasoline perched precariously on boards above their heads. They have been kidnapped by the Pope, who is driving golf balls at them, trying to knock down a bucket, which would dump gasoline on the unlucky man, and of course, engulf him in flame.

That's right. That was in that temple. And that temple was about 800 to 900 years old. Until about 15 or 20 years ago, they didn't know it existed. They just uncovered it, chopped the jungle back, and it's a remarkable temple, with a golden Buddha at the back.

Then we moved upriver and did a lot of shooting right on the River Kwai, and in some fairly dense jungle.

MD: What have you been doing since then?

BD: I co-produced a short with a friend of mine from Newfoundland, and I'm trying, with the cooperation of others, to develop either a spin-off or series five. Whether that happens or not remains to be seen.

I've been into the chat rooms with some of the fans, and a lot of people are under the misconception that the Sci-Fi channel in the US cancelled the show. That's not what happened at all. Paul (Donovan) had decided that this is going to be the last season. We shot the 24 episodes, and he said okay, that's it; that's all I want to do.

MD: What was the name of your short?

BD: The Little Dickie Song.

MD: What's it about?

BD: Well, this friend of mine, this great lady who is a Newfoundland filmmaker, went back to her hometown in Newfoundland, which is the most northerly community on the island of Newfoundland. She had been away for a number of years, came back into town, went out to see some friends, went out to a local bar, and there were a couple of guys that hit on her. She couldn't believe the pick-up lines they used. She said when she'd heard those two lines, from two different guys, she thought, oh my god, I've got to do something with this. One guy came up and said, "Listen, Anita, I got a really tiny dickie, but I really know how to use it." And the other guy said, "You oughta come back to my place, cause I am a human trampoline."

She said, of all the things that they possibly could have said to her, those were the funniest and the most ridiculous and the least becoming that she'd ever heard in her life.

It's part of a trilogy that she's putting together, roughly about the same sorts of things--absurd interactions between men and women on that level, the kind of "I want to get you in my bed" kind of level.

And apart from that, I've been playing my guitars. I'm in my office now, and I'm looking at four guitars and a bass, three amplifiers and a keyboard.

MD: Your bio on the Salter Street Films web site says you're a musician, but I haven't been able to find out much about your music. Do you have a band?

BD: I've played with some good groups in Newfoundland. You know, it's only a recent phenomenon that remote parts of Canada have had access to larger markets and recording studios, and that grew out of people being interested in the Celtic revival. There's a huge history of music in Newfoundland. There are thousands and thousands of folk songs that are indigenous to Newfoundland. There was a group called Figgy Duff that was principally responsible for the revival of interest in those songs, because they used modern instruments, and made the songs more accessible to a wider audience. They toured with the Chieftains.

They were great musicians. There have always been great musicians around. In every little nook and cranny of the world, you can find wonderful musicians, but to have access to a market, when you're isolated as we are in Newfoundland, it becomes a real challenge.

The only thing that I ever recorded was for a promotional tape, and we pressed a 45--songs taken from a show that I co-wrote in the early '80s. The show was called Some Slick. I wrote the title song.

The show was about the social and economic impact of an offshore oil discovery on small communities--like how land prices change, some guys get good jobs, some guys are fisherman who start to work on the rigs and oil-related industries, and some fisherman whose livelihood is totally disrupted because they can't fish there anymore, because environmental disasters happen.

MD: It seems to me that Canadian television, like what you just described, tends to take more risks, and is willing to accept more interesting or quirky concepts than TV in the US does. Would you agree? I wonder if it has to do with the production system. Is there an equivalent to Hollywood in Canada, or are most shows independently produced?

BD: For years, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation--which is the national broadcaster--the CBC was an autonomous organization that broadcast right across the country and it was, and it still is, extremely popular. They're having difficulty meeting their mandate these days only because of government cutbacks. It's funded by the federal government, but at arm's length. They've been cut by tens of millions of dollars, so production has decreased. But in its heyday, CBC attracted a lot of good minds and radical viewpoints. People were given a voice across the country. If somebody had a good idea for a show--CBC did a lot of their own production--it was taken on.

I think a lot of that grew out of something that started to happen in the mid '60s through the early '70s. There were a lot of independent theater companies growing up, people that would survive on box office receipts alone. A lot of it was highly political. Out west in the prairies--Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba--people were talking about the plight of the farmers. On the east coast, especially in Newfoundland, we took more radical approaches than just about any place else in the country: like defending the seal hunt, when the seal hunt was being given a very bad name by the press, and trying to explain, well, look; we're not destroying anything. The seal population was then and is now, incredibly healthy. Hundreds of years ago, man introduced himself into an ecosystem, and to take man out of that ecosystem right now would be detrimental to other species. So we tried to explain that. The idea that the killing of a seal is so awful--well, look, you're wearing leather, man; where the fuck do you think that came from? You go to some cattle farm; you go to some sheep farm; you go to a chicken farm--what are you going to see there? The conditions are abysmal. These animals are being treated far less humanely. There was that. We took stances against huge corporations, against established political dynasties, that sort of thing.

We brought up points. We always did our research; we didn't bullshit; we didn't try to fabricate. If we depicted a scene on stage, it was based on absolute fact. We did something about a guy who was the minister of fisheries in Newfoundland, whose company at the time was acting on behalf of a bank, who were repossessing boats belonging to fishermen. We thought, this is really bizarre. His legal firm is repossessing the boats of fisherman, and he's the minister of fisheries, responsible for protecting the interests of fishermen. Because we said that, he brought that issue up on the floor of the legislative assembly the next day. We thought, good, we got him. We hit a sore point.

Certainly there is a sense of, if something needs to be said, there's going to be a voice somewhere in Canada that will say it. There is no such thing as a truly sacred cow. We were the first people that took on the issue of the clergy abusing kids. We took that on in the mid '80s.

You don't see a lot of really safe sitcoms coming out of Canada. I think Canada perhaps leans more toward a British sensibility than an American sensibility.

There are things we did with Lexx that I think are going to be emulated or imitated in other sci-fi shows. I know some of our set designs, I've seen virtually identical sets showing up now on other shows. The idea of Stanley Tweedle as more or less an antihero, the captain of "the most powerful destructive force in the two universes," he's a bit of a jerk. He's not a courageous person; he's not a warmonger; he screws up. I think elements of that are in Farscape. We did a musical episode. I know that Buffy the Vampire Slayer, they did a musical episode.

There's another series called Starhunter. Something that we developed in the show, too, was that this ship is so huge, people can just show up. Anybody can just show up. We don't know who's on board the ship. We did that with an episode called "White Trash" during season two. Starhunter has used that, too.

MD: Do you track the sale of Lexx merchandise on eBay?

BD: Never.

MD: A Stanley Tweedle uniform recently went for over $700.

BD: Now, I'd heard about that. When we wrapped the show, our wardrobe mistress came to me and said, so, Brian, is there anything you want to have? I said, well listen, I'll take whatever you want to give me. So they gave me virtually everything.

There was a convention in March called Icon, on Long Island, and I brought a costume down for a charity auction--everything except the boots. It went for 500 or 600 bucks. They said that was a record for any single item, ever. I thought, that's good, and the money goes to charity, so that's doubly good. That was the only costume that I can think of that might have been outside my grasp.

I'd like to find out who bought it and authenticate it or not, and where it came from exactly. Essentially it's pajamas with a belt, but I know the details of every costume.

I know that a couple years ago, somebody on the streets of London, in England, was selling autographed pictures. They didn't exist. Then are other things out there. There are all kinds of, let's say, lewd images of each one of us out there. I haven't seen them, but I've heard. Apparently there's one of Stanley and Prince (Nigel Bennett) having sex. I think, what are fucking chances of that happening? Say, like, zero?

Anyway, the image is out there. They've taken our heads, and with the technology that's available, people can do things like that. But if I ever find out, I'll sue their asses. There are certain liberties you can take, certain minor liberties, and that's fair enough. The use of an image is to be protected, a personal image, or even a character image.

MD: You seem to be more open about communicating with your fans than other TV stars are, or at least, more so than I expect they would be. Why is that?

BD: I look at the whole process as kind of a unity. I think an audience is an essential part of the entire process. If you're out there and you're doing something that's in the public eye, then you have to acknowledge that there will be a certain amount of feedback. That's just the name of the fucking game. You have to realize that people are going to watch it, and people are going to respond to you. If you don't want to take that responsibility on, if you don't want to acknowledge that that exists, then don't fucking do it in the first place.

Of course, I love the fans. To me, they're part of the extended family.

MD: Well, that's really very nice.

BD: You know, to me, it makes all kinds of sense. I don't think it's nice or good or bad, it's just my philosophy.

Some of the people that we've worked with feel they have nothing else to say. I say, well, look, you don't have to say anything. Don't feel like you've said everything you have to say. They're just interested in you. They want to know how your mind works, and how you work, and what you're doing. So, answer a few questions once in a while. Say hello.



Martin Downs
June 2002