"It’s funny,” says Greg Bryk. “I’ve stayed home and raised my kids for large portions of their life. And I’ve made cupcakes and volunteered for the tea at Montessori. And yet I play monsters.”
The 34-year-old Winnipeg-born actor is at his east end Toronto home on a day off from shooting next year’s The Incredible Hulk. He has a small role as an arrogant Delta Force commando who runs around with a gun trying to track down scientist Bruce Banner (Edward Norton).
It’s just the latest in a long list of unpleasant characters Bryk’s played since getting his first screen role as a Gestapo clerk in the 1998 TV movie The Rescuers.
The father of three freely admits his angular northern European features — or as he puts it, “high cheekbones and, at times, cruel eyes” — helped him get that first role, and many of the other callous, unkind and downright evil parts that followed.
He played despised curler Alexander “The Juggernaut” Yount in Men With Brooms. This month’s Toronto International Film Festival features him in two movies, as a Satanist in Weirdsville and a homophobic racist in Poor Boy’s Game. But most famously he played Billy, one of two crooks that kill the owners of a motel — and their little girl — in the shocking opening sequence to David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence.
Even as one of Christ’s followers in the 2003 bible film The Gospel of John, Bryk’s character had an edge. “I was one of the disciples,” he says, “but I was Simon the Zealot, so I was the most temperamental, sort of violent…the guy who when the Romans come picks up the stone and is ready to go to war.”
The gun-toting character he plays opposite Clive Owen and Paul Giamatti in this month’s thriller Shoot ’Em Up doesn’t promise to be a pushover either. “I play this very mysterious, morally ambiguous character called The Lone Man,” says Bryk, who describes the movie as “one beautifully choreographed gun ballet from start to finish.”
The film starts when Owen’s character saves a baby in the middle of a gunfight, and the rest of the movie has Giamatti’s character trying to chase down and kill that baby.
Bryk’s Lone Man also wants the child, “but you don’t know why I want the baby until the very end,” he says. “You don’t know if it’s for good or for bad, or if I like to do clown impressions at kids’ birthday parties.”
For the real Bryk, it would probably be the latter. Ever the complicated guy, he moved to Kingston, Ontario, in the early ’90s to play for Queen’s University’s football team. (His dad, Don Bryk, was the president of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers for a while.)
“Even though, at the time, I was a 220-pound, shaved-head linebacker, I’d always written poetry, I’d always liked to express myself that way and had a sensitive side that I kept well-hidden from my football mates,” recalls Bryk.
In third year he took a playwriting course, which led to an invitation to try out for a production of Hamlet. He got the title role.
Sensitive, yes. And yet this Montessori dad says there’s just something that keeps drawing him back to the bad guys. “Real life is messy,” he says. “People can be wonderful human beings one minute and flying into a rage the next. I don’t mind being like that on film. I think some actors like to protect their image, or they like to have the idea that they would never behave abominably, but I know that I can behave abominably, and I think that you create a more interesting character if you allow all of the colours to come out.”
—Marni Weisz