Versatile actor Zegers has starred in youth movies like Air Bud, and controversial movies like Transamerica
By
Mark Schadenberg
Kevin
Zegers has returned to U.S. network TV. That’s terrific news for the
32-year-old actor from Woodstock.
I
invite you to read a previous blog I wrote on the Zegers biography (below), as tonight I
finished watching an episode of the ABC crime thriller Notorious, and Zegers
performs a key role. His character’s name is Oscar Keaton and he’s billed as a
multi-millionaire who earned his wealth as a social media entrepreneur.
I
will not divulge the plot, but the storyline includes elements of TV news,
lawyers, deceit and blackmail, manipulation and crime solving. Needless to say,
its 9 p.m. time slot could have easily been a 10 p.m. placement. The show will
air on the CTV Network as well.
The
cast also includes Piper Perabo (Coyote Ugly, Cheaper By The Dozen), J August
Richards (Angel, Raising The Bar), Daniel Sunjata (Devil Wears Prada, Rescue
Me), and Toronto actor Kenneth Mitchell.
September
is always the month where new show premiere, and tonight (Sept 22) was this
show’s debut -- its first airing.
I'm not sure why there seemed to be very little fanfare locally for this new Kevin Zegers vehicle? His performance was on target for what you would expect from someone with an integral role, but not the star.
In
this day-and-age of streaming TV from a computer, it’s difficult for any show
to succeed as it must grab an audience quickly.
My daughter and I watched a DVD of a Boy Meets World episode (ABC) earlier today (Ben Savage as an 11-year-old), so home entertainment most certainly includes fare from yesteryear -- TV and movies.
It’s also quite a chore for an
accomplished actor to continue to earn roles and pay cheques as network TV (in
my opinion) has too much reality programming on television.
Read
my previous entry about Zegers and you will be astonished with respect to his
impressive long list of credits in movies and on TV. Plan also to look up Kevin on www.imdb.com.
No
matter if it’s Kevin Zegers, Andrea Roth, Evan Marsh, Donna Garner, Jenna
Polzin, Rique Franks, Gus Meglis, or behind-the scenes media people (Jeff
Geisel, John Nadalin) who grew up in the Woodstock area, it’s important to congratulate
each as I know from my many years in sports broadcasting that the road is tough
to walk and the ladder difficult to climb.
Donna Garner
Andrea Roth
LINKS:
TWITTER:
@ABCNotorious
@ABCNotorious
@KevinZegers
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POSTED:Friday, Oct 3, 2014:
Gracepoint newest acting project for Kevin Zegers
Woodstock actor has impressive list of movie and TV roles
It's been twenty years since grade-school basketball Air Bud flick
It's been twenty years since grade-school basketball Air Bud flick
By Mark Schadenberg
He certainly has grown up and is far beyond the past days of playing basketball on-screen with a Golden Lab.
Yesterday – before the debut of the new Kevin Zegers TV show Gracepoint on FOX and Global – I uttered a few spoilers on Facebook. These plotline revealing moments were not about the new intriguing who-done-it 60-minute series, but rather Kevin's 2013 movie The Colony.
In The Colony, Kevin plays one of the presumed last remaining citizens of Earth, which is a group of people living under ground and rationing any food (They have seeds to maintain a greenhouse) they have and sadly disposing of fellow colony members at they get sick as they don't want disease to spread. The premise also includes the fact the world has become absolutely frozen. There's a lot more to the movie and you can rent it for free at the Woodstock Public Library. As the storyline progresses we learn there is another group of living humans in a separate below-ground cavern a few miles away, and a journey over a bridge to visit this society is obviously integral to the story as Zegers, Bill Paxton (Twister, Titanic, Simple Plan and Spy Kids) and Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix, Hoodlum and TV's CSI) make the sojourn through blinding snow. I won't include the spoilers again.
The previous blog I wrote about Kevin Zegers was in April of 2013 (One can scroll back to find it easily) with the release of The Colony.
Why do I write about him? Simple. I promote everything Woodstock and in the day-and-age of reality TV shows flooding the airwaves, it's remarkable that the Woodstock actor continues to earn many good roles in both TV and movies.
Zegers is now 30 years old – having celebrated a birthday recently on Sept. 19.
Last night (Thursday, Oct 2), his new show Gracepoint debuted on Fox and it plans on being an intriguing week-to-week developing of a murder mystery as a 12-year-old boy is found dead on the beach – below a cliff – in a small California town somewhere between San Francisco and the Oregon border. Zegers plays a reporter at the local newspaper who (somewhat) inadvertently reveals the name of the deceased on his Twitter account after the boy's sister is seen on the beach dropping off a stuffed toy as a memorial. The show appears to have many layers, including an investigating female cop being overlooked for a promotion when the town hires a more-experienced law enforcer. The female cop has a son the same age as the dead boy – and the two were best friends. The cop's son certainly knows something about what happened, but others could hypothetically be involved.
The show – as you will see by reading the link below – is a re-make of a British program.
As for Zegers, his TV credits go way back to about 1993 and an episode of Street Legal.
Kevin's movie characters begin around that same time with a Michael J Fox picture called Life With Mikey (Also with the interesting ensemble of Nathan Lane, Victor Garber and Cyndi Lauper) so he's been busy memorizing lines and developing his acting craft for more than 20 years.
Everyone knows Zegers from the Air Bud movies and his character Josh Framm. It's truly hard to believe it's the same person as Kevin has grew up in the public's eyes. Kevin is no longer playing basketball, soccer or baseball with a Golden Lab, or the Steven Westover hockey player who skated with a monkey in Most Valuable Primate (MVP).
The long list of movies now include Virginia's Run, Treasure Island, Dawn Of The Dead, Wrong Turn, It's a Boy Girl Thing, The Jane Austen Book Club, Transamerica, and at least a dozen more. At the Cannes Film Festival, he won an acting award in the break-through category for the 2005 release Transamerica (He certainly was NOT an acting rookie, so that award is puzzling), while the other co-star Felicity Huffman won a Golden Globe for best actress.
A future release is a thriller called The Curse Of Downers Grove where he will star along with Tom Arnold and Helen Slater.
Gaining his countless small TV parts accounts for un-ending applications, casting calls, resumes, rehearsals, readings, and lots of hustling by both the actor and agent, but Kevin has had many network TV appearances.
I think many in Woodstock still recall the TV show The X-Files back in 1995 (Wow! 19 years ago) where Zegers played a 12-year-old boy with a strange bleeding palm or a stigmata. I wasn't a regular viewer of the series but Scully and Mulder were certainly perplexed by the possible religious connotations.
Zegers had a featured role on the short-lived Aaron Spelling NBC show Titans (Yasmine Bleeth and Jack Wagner; a poorly written night-time soap serial), Gossip Girl, Smallville and Titanic: Blood & Steel, plus anciently on Canadian fare Street Legal, Traders and Avonlea.
Here's my big congratulations to Kevin Zegers and my admiration for him and his continued determination to carve out a career as an actor. Kevin – you are making everyone in Woodstock very proud.
I do include some links below which delve more into Kevin's personal life, including his marriage to agent Jaime Feld, and an interview he does on the CBC show George. I could discuss excerpts from the interview, but you can discover (likely re-discover as it's been reported previously) them with a quick watch.
LINKS:
GRACEPIOINT:
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