Spotlight

Aaron Abrams, fly boy

Aaron Abrams arrived back in his hometown of Toronto and they held a parade in his honour.

Well, not exactly in his honour, rather in honour of Slim Gordon, the real-life pilot he plays in this month’s bio-pic Amelia, which stars Hilary Swank as the famed 1930s aviatrix Amelia Earhart and was filmed partly in Toronto.

“My first day on set they blocked off four blocks of Yonge Street and had a parade,” says Abrams on the phone from his home in Los Angeles. “I just drove four blocks and then they rolled the car back and I drove again. That was the whole day, driving in a parade sitting beside Hilary Swank.”

Gordon was one of the two pilots who flew Earhart across the Atlantic Ocean in 1928. Earhart didn’t actually fly the plane — she simply kept the flight log — but that alone was enough to warrant a parade as no woman had ever been part of a Trans-Atlantic flight.

Anyone who’s seen photos of Earhart can’t help but notice the striking resemblance between her and Swank.“It’s unreal, she’s a dead ringer for Amelia in every aspect, it’s bizarre,” says Abrams. “And Hilary flips into Amelia Earhart with such grace, it’s baffling, you’re like, ‘Wow, she must be some sort of weird savant.’”

The Toronto native was also blown away by how the film’s set designers transformed the city he knows so well.

“It’s amazing to see how they turn back the clock, and Amelia does it on this massive scale like I’ve never seen before,” he says. “It’s weird when you’re dressed in full costume and everywhere you look people are dressed in 1930s clothes, and then you bump into a guy with a Blue Jays hat and you look at him like he’s the weird one.”

Ingrid Randoja