For many years, Canada has mostly been a service industry for US film and TV productions. Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto would constantly be dressed to play New York, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and even Maine.
Right now the tide is turning, and there are some wonderful movies like Nirvana, The Band, The Show, The Movie, and Mile End Kicks where Toronto and Montreal are not just playing themselves but are essential for the plot.
The most popular TV show in the world right now is the very Canadian Heated Rivalry. Vancouver was constantly showing off its beauty on Family Law. Surrey, BC is featured in Allegiance. Vancouver is also the setting for Wild Cards. There is a Law and Order: Toronto. Canada’s biggest city is also the home to Kim’s Convenience. Private Eyes was set in Toronto, and the new series, Private Eyes: West Coast, will be set in Victoria, BC. Sullivan’s Crossing will inspire you to visit Nova Scotia, perhaps a bit more than Trailer Park Boys. Even though the town is fictional, Letterkenny is absolutely rural Ontario. Which can also be said for Schitt’s Creek. Of course, the international hit that started back in 2004, Corner Gas, proved that audiences around the world would be interested in life in Saskatchewan, as long as it was funny.
Unfortunately, most Canadian actors can’t make a living yet only performing in productions set in Canada. We have to master the standard American accent and try to get cast in US productions that are mostly shot here to save money.
A Day Player is typically a local actor who is brought in for one day of work to deliver one to five lines of dialogue.
With a monthly installment called Day Players, we will examine that very experience.
We first spoke with Alex for an article on July 18th, 2025.
Here is our next conversation with Alex about working as a local film and TV actor in Vancouver.
HNMAG: Do you remember the first time you had a funny experience while you were working on a U.S. production?
Alex Zahara: Oh, God, where do I start?
HNMAG: Early, I guess,1996?
Alex Zahara: Funny ha ha or funny weird?
HNMAG: Either one, anything that’s just unusual.
Alex Zahara: I was working on my first gig ever. The 13th Warrior.
Back then they called it the Eaters of the Dead. They had an initial round of auditions for some Viking roles. I didn’t even get an audition because they wanted people over six feet tall, and I’m five-eleven.
HNMAG: Close.
Alex Zahara: Yeah, close. So a few months later there’s a second round of auditions, and in big one-inch-high bold print, it says “MUST BE STRONG ACTORS ONLY!” The first round, they had all these muscle heads and gym rats come in to audition that were huge and probably “looked” like Vikings but obviously could not act.
So I get an audition, because I can act, lol. I learn my lines, go in and dress in a black T-shirt and black jeans, neutral so they can see me however they want. The first round of auditions I saw these muscle-bound guys come dressed in furs and horned helmets! lol So okay, fine. I go in and do my audition. I don’t hear anything for three or four months. So I decide to do a play; I’m not going to wait around cause I figure it is gone. So I am playing Cassius in Julius Caesar downtown with the Looking Glass Theatre. All of a sudden, I get a call from my agent at the time and, hey, guess what? They want me over in Campbell River as a Viking. I’m like, what? Suffice to say, there was a lot of drama with Disney even before we started; they delayed us two weeks with no hold pay. They said if we wanted hold pay, they would get someone else. So eventually they fly us over, myself and five other local actors playing Vikings that don’t go on the big adventure.
I get over there, and John McTiernan, the director, he’s still putting everybody (the main Vikings) through Viking boot camp. This has been going on for weeks, but we are filming now, and he’s still demanding that they go to boot camp every day on top of filming. Well, anyway, one day there was a mutiny. John yells out, “Hey, Alex?” I’m like, whoa, geez, yeah. Hey, John, what?” He holds his thumb and forefinger about four inches apart and says, “This much!” I say, ” This much what, John? He says, if you were this much taller, you’d be one of these guys!
HNMAG: Right.
Alex Zahara: And today, I wish you were every last motherfucking one of them. I said, “Okay, thanks, John.” I am thinking, “Wow, thanks for that. Endear me to my fellow cast mates.” Like, what the heck, right?
All because they had this little mutiny where they said, “Look it, we’re not going to go to the training anymore. We’re filming now. We gotta, you know, concentrate on filming, right?”
HNMAG: Was it like an army boot camp?
Alex Zahara: Viking boot camp. Horseback riding and swordplay, etc.
The actors had enough of it. They said we’re filming now. We got to stop and concentrate on the acting.
HNMAG: Did he think the actors were not proficient enough in their Viking skills?
Alex Zahara: Oh, I think they probably were. They’d been at it for quite a while, but John’s very intense, right? And it is his movie and vision, he has made some masterpieces at this point, Die Hard, The Hunt for Red October, Predator and the list goes on.
HNMAG: Okay.
Alex Zahara: He just wanted them to keep going. I love John, but he was so work-intensive. The armourer guys were trying to fit the cast for their armour, but John would never release anybody for costume fitting because he wanted to keep filming. The armourer Tony English told him, “I have to build eight to thirteen sets of armour in a couple of days. This is insane!”
Tony English, was a great guy, by the way; Tony was awesome. For his start in the business he made all the medallions and buttons for, Dr. Zhivago, David Lean’s classic!
He would take these guys as they’re being released. John’s releasing them after saying Okay, I don’t need them anymore today. Tony takes them to do costume fitting so they can actually fit their armour properly. Well, John found out because the turnaround screwed up his planned schedule for the next day, and he was livid. He started yelling and fighting with Tony. Tony tells John that he can’t work miracles. John tells him if he can’t work miracles, then he had better go home. Tony says right, and goes.
We used to meet in the pub every night after filming at the hotel we were staying at. I walked up to Tony this one night and just said, “Hey, buddy.” Then Tony said, “Excuse me a minute, mate, I am writing everything that happened today in my journal cause I think I just got fired today.”
I’m like, what? So he told me the story I just told you. Later that evening, the producers, along with John, came cap in hand, I believe, to…
HNMAG: Apologize?
Alex Zahara: John apologized to Tony; they hashed it out, and so he ended up staying. That production was rife with “emotional outbursts. Let’s just put it that way.
HNMAG: How long were you staying in Campbell River?
Alex Zahara: We’re only there about a week or ten days.
I was doing this play, and I had to quit the play early, and I went to the director and producer in tears, saying I couldn’t pass this opportunity up. They completely understood, saying that it would be crazy to pass up this large movie opportunity. The director filled in and played my part for the second half of the run, and the entire cast was like, Get out of here!! Go cause this is what we are all working towards!
HNMAG: Right.
Alex Zahara: We were supposed to be getting paid hold money for two weeks. Disney, being infinitely cheap, said, “Oh, you guys want hold money? How about we just hire other actors?”
We were on the plane. They were flying us over to Campbell River, in the little harbour air seaplane. We were in the plane, and nobody had a signed contract, cause production hadn’t sent them!
We got there with no contract; they put two of us in one little honey wagon room. We should have had a room each, then they literally said to us, okay, “So it’s twelve bucks for breakfast, fifteen for lunch, and eighteen for dinner,” to eat off the truck. You can pay over here, and we’re like, WTF?!!?….
This was Disney! This was Disney doing this. I was a newbie union apprentice, and the guys nominated me to call the union and told them what was going on, of course, lol! Then all of a sudden the accountants show up, and they’re giving us our per diem and everything. They wanted us to sign our contracts. The contracts were short a day. They were trying to force us to do that. It was a nightmare. That was a baptism by fire. That was my first professional film gig. Working for Disney was working for the worst corporation ever. Well, let me be clear: it was Elk Bay Productions, I believe, but it was a Disney movie.
HNMAG: It’s a good thing that you have a union, right?
Alex Zahara: Oh, totally, because we called the union, things changed quickly.
They were telling us no more than twenty minutes earlier to pay for dinner, lunch, and breakfast. Instead, we finally got our per diem and proper contracts, which our agents got to go over as they should have in the first place!
Here’s a really cool little bit of working on that show. So I was at the pub again, with Misha this time; he was a good friend of John McTiernan’s, and he lived on the same property as John. We talked about casting, and I said well, John probably never even saw my audition; someone from casting picked me, I suppose. Mischa said: “Alex, you know, John watched around four thousand auditions. I sat there and watched with him; we live in the same property. Hey can’t stand it when people aren’t doing well and he would go get a drink cause he felt so bad for the actor. I said, “Get out of here; he did not watch all those auditions.” Mischa says, “He sure did. You know what? You were wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans in your audition.” And I had!
HNMAG: Wow.
Alex Zahara: I confirmed I was wearing a black T-shirt and black jeans. I said, holy crap. Mischa then said: “John felt so bad for people who didn’t do a good job. He would just get up from the living room, go in the kitchen, and make a drink or a sandwich. I can’t believe the poor guy. But the people that he really liked. It was all cool, right? He’s as rough and gruff as he was, but he was actually quite sensitive.” You would think many people watched all the auditions, but John personally watched all four thousand.
HNMAG: That’s insane. That’s a lot of tape. What was another fun story after The 13th Warrior?
Alex Zahara: Here’s a funny one. I was doing a movie called Ogre with John Schneider, you know, from the Dukes of Hazard.
We were playing this thing where it was a dark take on Brigadoon, where there was a plague, and they made a deal with the devil so nobody would die in their town. But we had to sacrifice somebody in town for this deal, and we would come alive once every one hundred years, and someone else would have to be sacrificed. It was very twisted. There was a scene of me and John, and he was like the preacher saying, “Close your window, shut your doors, close your window, shut your doors.” I went behind John, and he suggested that I make little sounds, like a clapping sound, like horse hoofs, like in Monty Python’s Holy Grail.
We did that and bring out your dead. Bring out your dead. It’s in the gag reel. It was just hilarious.
HNMAG: That’s funny.
Alex Zahara: That was really fun. So it was a good one. There were other little ones, like in Viper. The lead female in Viper, she was being all sassy, and her character was going to have her hand scanned by my character, and then I’d prove that she wasn’t who she said she was. She insisted on putting her hand on the scanner. And the director is telling her, “No, no, no, you can’t do that because if you do that, then you’ll ruin everything. Your secret identity has not been uploaded to the internet yet. If you do that, it just doesn’t work.” She says, “Oh, my character is so brave and strong, and she would do this,” and he’s like, “Oh, my God, you’re not hearing me.” I took him aside and said to the director in the end, “Don’t worry, I got it.” And he said, “Okay, Alex.” So before she goes to put her hand there, I just unsnapped my gun holster and put my hand on my gun, so when she put her hand on the scanner herself, it made it look as if I was forcing her. And so we did the one take, and the director goes, “ Cut, right, moving on. Okay, that’s great. Thank you.” Cause that way she feels like she did what she wanted, and it looks to the audience what the director wanted, that she was being forced, because her character was uncertain as to whether or not he false identity had been uploaded yet.
HNMAG: Right. It’s great when we can contribute to the overall story.
Alex Zahara: I did a commercial with the Spice Girls. So when they did their final pay-per-view concert in Wembley, England, we had filmed the commercial for it while they were here performing in Vancouver. We shot at the CBC studios, and I was the captain of their space Spiceship, flying them through the universe on their tour. It was crazy because the director said, “Listen, they’re going to give you the gears. They’re going to try to tear you apart. You got to give it right back to them.“ I said, “No problem, I can handle it!”
HNMAG: Who was the broadcaster?
Alex Zahara: Sky TV! It was the biggest, most successful campaign they had ever done! The president of Sky TV wrote me a letter thanking me for my work and sent a copy of the commercial. You can still find it online!
HNMAG: What were some of the barbs that they shot at you?
Alex Zahara: I’m playing the captain of their spaceship, right? So we get in there, and Sporty Spice is fine.
HNMAG: Mel C?
Alex Zahara: Melanie Chisholm, right. They came in two hours late and two hours late out of hair and makeup. We’ve lost four hours out of our shooting day, and the director’s panicking because he only had twelve hours to make a commercial; now he only has eight!
HNMAG: Yeah.
Alex Zahara: Scary Spice, Mel B., would walk in, then sit in the captain’s chair. She completely changed everything, and the director was like, ah, ah, what’s going on?
So, now he’s down to eight hours only, and we did this little stunt gag of me flying backwards when Scary Spice hits the gas. I would then pop up from the floor all discombobulated and say a line. Well, she couldn’t stop laughing at what I was doing cause she “thought I was sooooooo funny!” The director finally had to ask me to just play it straight so we could get the shot! I had to change my performance so she wouldn’t laugh. It actually made it funnier!!! LOL
At one point, Mel B. was being rude and nasty. Melanie C and I were talking about acting and how to get going after her singing career was over, and she said, “Yeah, I know I’d have to get the proper training; I couldn’t just walk into it. She asked how I got into it; I told her I went to the acting program at the University of British Columbia, then got an agent and started auditioning. She asked if I had ever worked with anybody really famous or anything?” I replied that I had done 13th Warrior with Antonio Banderas and Omar Sharif. Scary Spice was sitting there, and she goes, “Oh, listen to Mr. big time fucking Actor man, blowing his own horn!” Which I wasn’t. I was just answering a question. She was in my captain’s chair because she insisted on taking it. So I just leaned down to her, and I leaned right in her face, and I said, yeah, well, I’ve worked with Henry Winkler, met Michael York, and the list goes on, honey, and I put my hand up to my mouth, like a horn, and I go, da, da, da. Well, you could have heard a pin drop in that place because everybody just went silent. And then she looks at me for a couple of seconds, and then she looks at her entourage and goes, “He’s fucking good. He shut me down. You’re fucking good, you are. You shut me down! Then starting laughing. Well, all twenty or thirty of their little entourage started clapping their hands and laughing too! It was just ridiculous. Victoria and Mel B were just not into it and kept complaining, so finally, Sporty Spice (Melanie C) said, “Listen, just do their coverage, get them out of here. I’ll stay late and do mine.” It was great because she was totally professional. So she and I worked the rest of the day together. Those other two I could have done without (at one point Victoria interrupted a take as her cell phone went off and she took a call from Becks! She said, “I don’t know some commercial.” It was for their farewell concert! lol Baby Spice was sick that day, so she was kind of a non-entity, unfortunately, or maybe it was fortunate. They were twenty-something and multimillionaires. They didn’t really care. Ginger Spice was gone at this point.
HNMAG: Any other shows you can remember a funny incident?
Alex Zahara: Actually funny, funny stuff. I was on Jeremiah, and I had a great stunt actor, double of mine, Doug Chapman, who’s a really good actor in his own right.
Doug’s doubled me for thirty years. There was a scene where we were with Malcolm-Jamal Warner, and Luke Perry, God rest both their souls now. I had to whip around in a truck, pick them up, and there’s gunfire going on. That’s all I had to do, and I said, well, I could do that. It’s not a big deal, whatever. And then Doug said, maybe let him do it just in the rehearsal. They do it, but they were doing it with the zerks, the little pellets that explode and make it look like gunfire.
Like little paintballs, right? We were sitting by the camera, and Doug comes around, and we’ve got this big four-by-four, and the windows are down to stop the reflection of the camera crew. The guy’s firing his zerks at the body of the truck, but I swear, you could see this one zerk pellet come out, and it rose up just like that and went into the cab of the vehicle and exploded on Doug’s nose.
HNMAG: Wow, must hurt.
Alex Zahara: Yeah, he could have lost an eye or something. It was just crazy. And I got a great picture of Doug and me after pointing at his nose, looking shocked and like twins! lol. That’s why you let the stunt double do it. There’s a great picture of him and me, and I’m pointing to his nose. He got this huge red welt on his nose. He was so lucky, so fortunate. And then I’ve got multitudes of shots of him and me. He has taken all the falls and explosions, fires, falls, axes, etc. Not an easy job.
HNMAG: What was crazy about what happened on Batwoman?
Alex Zahara: Well, Batwoman had a massive fire stunt. One of the characters sets fire to the whole facility. It’s a weird thing where my character got killed by one of the bad guys who was in the asylum, so then he could wear my face and pretend to be me. So I’m acting as him, pretending to be me, right?
HNMAG: Uh-huh. Kind of like Face/Off.
Alex Zahara: But then this fire starts, and I’m trying to stop the fire, and I’m trying to beat it out with this coat, and they were worried that the whole room was on fire and they didn’t want me to get burned or anything else. They suggested that maybe you should let Doug do that, you know? I’d learned my lesson because of the explosion in the face. So I let Doug do it, and it was a little risky too, because they’d put this glue-type gel stuff around to burn. Of course, when Doug started flopping it, of course, it got caught on the doctor’s coat he was using to put the fire out, and it was flipping around, like there was blobs of jelly fire going in the air. So I’m thinking, good thing I didn’t do that.
HNMAG: But he was okay?
Alex Zahara: He was fine, because he’s a total pro, and he knows what he’s doing, but yeah, just little things like that happen sort of somewhat unforeseen.
HNMAG: It makes you wonder why Tom Cruise wants to do all his own stunts. Supernatural is one of the longest-running shows in Vancouver. You’ve also worked on that.
Alex Zahara: Here’s a quick one. They just wanted someone to do this little teaser, this drunk magician, and nobody was getting it right in the audition. They asked if I would come in and do it. You could still audition for other roles in the series, but we need somebody good to do this. Because I’ve done some reading for them, they knew I could do it. So I said, okay, fine. In the end of the teaser, Barry Boswick’s character’s death gets transferred to me, and he’s a magician who screws up a trick of escaping the death of twelve swords, so he actually dies, but his friend in the show is a real sorcerer who saves him and transfers his death to me. The way we filmed it, I’m walking down Hastings, right by the meat market. We had the pig sign in the shot. So I’m walking out there at midnight on a Friday night…
I have twelve blood packs on me, and I’m walking with a crane camera in front of me, and I sort of look down, and all these blood packs start going off. I look up at the sky, and the crane comes above my head, and then I go to my knees and collapse backwards, and all my blood is just pouring everywhere. One of the Downtown Eastside (DTES) residents starts yelling, “Hey! Hey, somebody call an ambulance. That guy’s not gonna make it. He’s not gonna make it”. It took all my willpower not to laugh because I had to be dead, as the camera was still on me and we were still rolling; the camera rose into the sky for a huge overhead shot. We cut, and all laughed our heads off!! Then, as I’m walking back to the trailer later, of course, all this blood packed inside my shirt goes down the inside of my legs and into my shoes. So as I’m walking, I am spurting blood out of my shoes, and I’m making this clear outline of footprints with blood surrounding them. It was quite amusing.
I was dressed in a full-on magician outfit with a cape and a top hat. The name of the episode is, and this is the real name of the episode, “Chris Angel is a douchebag.”
HNMAG: Another long-running Vancouver show was Stargate.
Alex Zahara: Here’s one for you. Like most of the gigs I did, I was in full prosthetic makeup. So I’m dressed as a lizard man, and my face is all glued, surgically. Well, I fell asleep one day. But the thing is, there are no nose holes to breathe out of.
I had a nightmare that I was suffocating because I was suffocating. All of a sudden, I just woke up and sucked in all this air, and I was like, holy crap, I had to calm down. I’m telling myself, Zahara, calm down. But nobody was around me, so nobody saw, and I was like, that’s the freakiest thing I’ve ever had happen to me in my life. From now on, if I fall asleep, I got to have a pillow under my neck. So my jaw will be forced open so that I cannot close my mouth, while in prosthetic makeup.
HNMAG: You were in prosthetics when you fell asleep?
Alex Zahara: Totally in prosthetics. We get to work at 330 in the morning, we get made up for four hours. Then we shoot another twelve- to sixteen-hour day, and then we take another hour and a half to get out of prosthetics. So you got a nap when you got a nap!
That was interesting, but no more falling asleep without a pillow under my neck.
HNMAG: You have a lot of great stories.
Alex Zahara: Here’s a real quick one. Daniel Radcliffe starred in Horns.
It was a horror movie written by Joe Hill, based on his novel. He is Stephen King’s son, so great pedigree! Danielle’s character’s girlfriend is murdered, but Daniel’s character has no memory of what happened the night before because she left him, and he got blind drunk, so everyone suspects him.
Well, one day he wakes up with little devil horns growing out of his head (The horns make people act out their deep, dark fantasies and things that they would not otherwise do.)) I play his doctor in it. The first thing he said to me was, ” Has everyone ever told you how much you look like Kenneth Branagh?
I said, yeah, well, you know, I get that quite a bit.
He was super nice. He took my materials, like all my headshots and resume, and he sent them to Kenneth Branagh. He tells Kenneth,
if you ever need a brother in a movie, Alex is your guy! He is SUPER NICE!
One time I cut my hair for a play; weirdly enough, Hamlet comes out, and I’ve got the same haircut as Kenneth Branagh in the movie. I’m walking in front of the Paramount Theatre downtown in Vancouver. This woman stops me, and of course, he’s in town promoting Hamlet at that time. The woman says, “Oh my god, you gotta give me your autograph”. I try to explain that I’m not him, but she is persistent: She says, “No, you are.” And she wouldn’t let me go.
I went, okay, fine. So I took it, I signed Kenneth, and then I realized I had no idea how to spell his last name. So I just wrote B-R-A, and then some squiggly marks, with a flourish at the end. Somewhere in the world, some woman thinks she’s got Kenneth Branagh’s signature, she’s met him, and I’m like, nope! But she literally would let me go!!
Alex Zahara is a wonderful, professional, and experienced actor in Vancouver. He is terrific to work with, has a great attitude, and is always ready to do whatever is needed to get the work done. Alex is one of many very talented performers based in Vancouver. We need our industry to grow so we can tell our own stories that showcase Canadian talent. The work in film and TV through the US service industry is nice, but we can do so much more.