From Class Clown to Actor, Director and Producer

To hear Lorne Cardinal, ’93 BFA, tell it, he didn’t know how to walk, talk, read or even breathe like an actor before he started the U of A’s fine arts program.

The Cree actor from the Sucker Creek First Nation in Alberta had been on stage often enough at that point to know he had found his calling — but not enough to know what he didn’t know.

At the time, he was rehearsing for “his first paid gig,” a play by poet, writer and eventual filmmaker Alison McAlpine that involved lots of “clown work and mask work and body work.” He assumed a bachelor of fine arts would give him more exposure to avant-garde performance styles.

“And when I got there it was like, ‘Nope. We don’t do that kind of theatre,’” he recalls. “‘We do classical theatre training. … You have to learn how to walk first.’”

Four years later, as the program’s first Indigenous graduate, Cardinal had developed those skills along with a special talent for finding the truth in the roles he plays. His authenticity is a big part in his success in more than 100 stage and screen roles over the last four decades. In addition to his portrayal of the loveable Davis Quinton on Corner Gas, he (or his voice) have been in the TV series Molly of Denali and FBI: Most Wanted. His theatre performances have included an all-Indigenous production of King Lear at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre and the Edmonton staging of The Tempest performed by a mix of deaf and hearing actors.

“I start with the script and I start reading, working my way through it. And then I pore over every description, everything the writer says, everything the characters say,” Cardinal says.

“I don’t think I’d be doing half the stuff if it wasn’t for the BFA training. It was the best tool box I could ever ask for.”

Schools of hard knocks

Cardinal’s relationship with formal education wasn’t always so positive. His earliest memories involve nuns at the day school in Fort Vermilion, Alta., who tied his thumb to a belt loop to stop him from writing with his left hand. His dad, a residential school survivor who raised Cardinal and his brother, sent the boys to schools where they were the only brown kids. “It led to a lot of fights and racist experiences at a young age,” Cardinal says. “But [dad] knew that if we were gonna live in this system, we had to learn how that system works.”

Acting while Indigenous

Today, Cardinal has drawn a firm line against roles that are blatant attempts to add brown faces to the scenery. “If it’s a stereotype of a Native person, if it doesn’t drive the scene, if the character doesn’t have an important role in the story it’s telling, I’m not interested,” he says. Instead, he cherishes opportunities like his 1993 role in Black Elk Speaks, a historical retelling of the near-extinction of American Indians. Newly graduated, Cardinal was one of 23 Indigenous actors hailing from 23 different nations; rehearsals were marked by periods of raw emotion as scenes replayed the true stories of many of the actors’ ancestors. “We would stop and we’d sit and we’d smudge and we’d pray and we’d talk about it,” Cardinal recalls. “And then we’d get up and we’d go back to work.”