TV is full of crime solvers with a twist. The Mentalist has a sixth sense about a suspect. Lie to Me’s expert knows how to spot a fib on a face. Castle can read a crime scene like a book.
Even House is basically Sherlock Holmes with a scalpel. So why not a Russian chess master as a savvy detective?
The idea occurred to writer/executive producer Avrum Jacobson. The result is Endgame, a new Vancouver-based drama premiering Monday at 10 p.m. on Showcase.
Jacobson, a showrunner on ReGenesis who had a hand in scripting Republic of Doyle last season, pitched the idea almost by accident. Late for a meeting, he arrived at a Vancouver hotel expecting to hear somebody else’s TV pitch. Instead he was asked for a concept and out of the back of his mind flew the chess caper.
Jacobson’s no chess whiz, but he does think a few moves ahead. He liked the idea of a protagonist who was tortured but brilliant. What about a guy, he thought, so traumatized he was locked in one place? A chess master who witnesses his fiancée’s murder in front of a Vancouver hotel, a place he now fears to leave?
He studied real chess grandmasters like Boris Spassky and Garry Kasparov. He saw how they go over and over every move, how they use pawns to advance their cause. He saw a stationary detective who manipulated those around him to do his legwork. He came up with Arkady Balagan, basically House stuck in a hotel.
His next move was to cast this character. He wanted Shawn Doyle, the Newfoundland actor who impressed him in as a guest on Republic of Doyle as well as the 2010 Canadian film Grown Up Movie Star. At first, Doyle, who had done his share of Canadian TV (winning Geminis for The Eleventh Hour) before heading to Hollywood (where he impressed on 24, Desperate Housewives and Big Love), turned Endgame down. Jacobson tried again, appealing to Adriana Maggs, the writer/director of Grown Up Movie Star, to see if she could get Doyle to read the Endgame pilot script. He did, and checkmate.
Flash forward to January in Vancouver and Doyle is Balagan. Dressed in a robe, barefoot, testing his Russian accent between takes, he wanders the impressive hotel lobby set like a modern-day Howard Hughes. The character generally has a glass of vodka in his hand. “I just thought of what I’d want to do if I was stuck in a hotel,” says Jacobson.
A lot of those touches, though, are pure Doyle, including the wavy blond hair on Balagan’s head. It was the 42-year-old actor’s idea to dye his naturally brown hair for the part. “I couldn’t get the image of this guy being blond out of my mind,” he says. Two or three days before the start of production, he ran the idea past Jacobson. My thinking exactly, said the producer.
Then Doyle came up with what he jokingly refers to it as his “Alberto V05 accent.” He did work with a dialect coach but didn’t want to get stuck behind a specific Russian accent, playing it broader, more eastern European.
Well into another 14-hour day on the set, has finally found time to squeeze in an interview in his trailer. Glued to the bottom of his feet were fur pads; walking the cold studio floors barefoot lost its charm a few weeks into the gig.
Doyle agrees that there is a little House in Balagan, “in terms of his brilliance and his arrogance and even his misanthropy,” although he feels this Russian has “a devilish, playful element to him and an Old World charm, which I think House doesn’t have.” He also sees shades of Columbo and even Sherlock Holmes.
He loves the humorous byplay opposite Patrick Gallagher (whose security manager character is always trying to toss Balagan out of the hotel), but it is Balagan’s dark side that keeps Doyle keen. “He’s working so hard to run away from his own pain,” says the actor. “At some point it is all going to catch up for him and something has to break — as it does for all of us.”
The next day will bring a special visitor to the set: an actual polar bear. A memo warns all on Endgame to keep out of the bear’s sight line like he`s Al Pacino. The craft services table is being moved 30 metres further outside.
The episode calls for a rock star who has a polar bear as a pet to crash the hotel. Doyle sees Balagan identifying with the polar bear. “The bear becomes a metaphor for how I’m trapped as well,” he says.
Jacobson sees Balagan more as the rock star. “To me, the fun of this character is that he’s liberated from what most of us have to put up with.” Balagan breaks the rules and that’s as it should be, says Jacobson. “Some people get away with stuff because they’re rich, or they’re a rock star or a movie star. He gets away with things because he’s smart.”
Replica set.
