Dean Eadie is that random guy, experiencing some random luck.
Laid off from CP Rail, the Revelstoke native has landed himself a role on a Calgary TV series – quite randomly.
You see, he developed an iPhone app (Rocky Mountain Gameworks’ Vowels Gone Wild app), and he knew an actress in Calgary where he was living. She was working on a TV pilot, and they needed a computer game for a scene. So they called him up.
‘Can you put your app onto a TV screen?’ they asked him. Yes, he could.
So, while hamming it around on set, he landed a bit part.
“They needed a cowboy character to play in a poker scene,” he said.
With his foot in the door, he landed a part as several recurring characters. The joke is, he’s that random guy who keeps popping up: “Oh, it’s that guy, that random guy in every scene.”
Eadie isn’t an actor and doesn’t have any training. He just hammed it up and it clicked. “It doesn’t make any sense to me,” Eadie said. “It just fell into my lap.”
I sat down with Dean Eadie and fellow actress Jill Robinson in Revelstoke last week. They were here on a trip to Eadie’s family retreat, that rustic old waterfront cabin on its own island at the end of Three Valley Lake – you know the one.
The TV show, called Go Fish, is set to air on Shaw Channel 10 on Oct. 1, with six episodes shot so far.
The low-budget, independent comedy features a cast of basement-dwelling twenty-somethings striving for success and failing epicly. It mixes slapstick with realism – think Friends meets Three’s Company, I’m told.
Jill Robinson is determined to will the show to success. A close cohort of the show’s creator Zulie Alhahas, Robinson tells me it’s just bound to get picked up by CBC or Global for national distribution.
At our interview, she contrasts Eadie’s checked on checked casual attire, wearing a strategically-cinched, short purple dress, and loose-fitting cowboy boots.
Robinson oozes ambition; for a lot of the interview she’s selling the dream of a big TV hit – that I’m talking with soon-to-be household names.
“It’s going to be a really big show for Calgary,” Robinson explained. “We are trying to do something people have been trying to do a lot of time. Alberta actors get to be the stars of the show.”
They’re using local actors and behind-camera talent, trying to develop an all-Canadian show. The ensemble of mostly female actors portray young urbanites struggling to make a go of it.
“The scenes are so reality,” Robinson explains. “A lot of the things that happen to the girls are things that have happened to Zulie or myself. “It’s relatable. Its so relatable to young people today.”
As we stroll out to take some photos, Eadie shows me some shots from the set; it looks like it has relatively sophisticated production.
On the way to the river, Eadie points out his childhood home – right across the street. His grandmother, Lil Edwards, was the first alderwoman in Revelstoke. They ran the hostel that is now the Same Sun. He’s officially moved out of Revelstoke, but he visits a lot.
With October around the corner, we’ll see how the show fares – possibly coming to this market. In the meantime, you can follow them on Facebook, or check out their premiere party at the Grey Eagle Casino in Calgary on Sept. 28.