Meet the UTM alumni who helped shape the award-winning show ‘Cardinal’
Mystery novelist and University of Toronto Mississauga alumnus Giles Blunt was on the shore of Lake Nippising, visiting North Bay, where he grew up, when a peculiar sight ignited his imagination. Through the thick fog he could see the silhouette of a mine shaft on an island in the distance. The sinister setting looked ripe for an evil deed. “What a great place to find a body,” he thought.
This is how the fictional northern Ontario city of Algonquin Bay, based on the writer’s teenage hometown, became the backdrop for his popular John Cardinal detective novel series. After six bestselling books, the series was adapted into the television drama, Cardinal, which is broadcast on CTV in Canada, BBC Two in the U.K. and Hulu in the U.S., and just finished airing its fourth and final season in May. Last month the show cleaned up for a third straight year at the Canadian Screen Awards, winning seven more trophies, including Best Drama Series, Best Lead Actor for Billy Campbell as Det. John Cardinal and Best Lead Actress for Karine Vanasse who plays Det. Lise Delorme.
Blunt calls the recognition “wonderful.” He’s served as a co-executive producer for the show’s entire run. The job title means actors and directors would consult him occasionally, but, really, he says, “it means I’m at home writing other books.” Blunt compliments the series’ “brilliant casting” — he says Campbell “looks pretty much exactly how I image Cardinal” and calls Vanasse “perfect as Delorme” — as well as its direction for capturing the atmosphere of his books.
Blunt, however, isn’t the only UTM alum with a prominent role in the award-winning show. Det. Ash Kular, who joined the Algonquin Bay Police Department beginning in Season 2 is played by Regina-born, Toronto-based actor Zach Smadu, who graduated from the UTM and Sheridan College joint Theatre and Drama Studies program in 2005. Smadu describes Kular as a younger detective who’s “keen, energetic, but also green.” He calls it a “great experience” to be in a show where, even in a supporting role, your character gets to grow each season.
Both Smadu and Blunt say their time at UTM helped them get where they are today. Smadu, who’s been acting since he was 10 years old, says the program was an important stepping-stone, just as Cardinal has been another. Blunt, who studied English literature and was already an aspiring writer during his undergrad, remembers a particularly encouraging encounter with one of his professors, the Czech-Canadian novelist Josef Škvorecký.
“I’d shown him a short story and he gave it way more praise than it deserved,” Blunt says. “But that sort of thing makes such a huge difference. That really kept me going.”
That’s especially fateful because, today, in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, the University of Toronto now holds the collection of all Blunt’s own papers and manuscripts.
Read more:
- Watching the Detectives: UTM theatre grad returns to role in Canadian crime drama
- New detective series based on books of Erindale College alumnus Giles Blunt