Cinderella story: Winnipeg-born actor desperate for work in Toronto shares a movie scene with Russell Crowe and Renée Zellweger
Sun May 15 2005
By Randall King


Aaaron Kim Johnston and Alicia.
JOE BRYKSA / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS

YOU'RE a Winnipeg-born actor in her mid-20s trying to find work in Toronto. But work is scarce. You wait tables at a couple of local restaurants to maintain the apartment in the Roncesvalles area you share with two roommates, also actors. You came from Winnipeg because the opportunities are supposedly in Toronto, but given the precipitous drop in the level of film and television production, it's difficult and discouraging, until... for one glorious week in 2004, you find yourself sandwiched between a pair of Oscar-winning actors -- Russell Crowe and Renée Zellweger -- performing for Oscar-winning director Ron Howard. It's just five days work, a small speaking part. You're playing the role of Zellweger's younger sister in a real-life Depression-era drama about a boxer who stages a glorious comeback. But you know the conventional wisdom going back from your Grade 7 drama class at St. Norbert Immersion School: There are no small parts. It is from such small moments that careers can find a foothold.

The movie is Cinderella Man.

So call Alicia Johnston's achievement a Cinderella Story... with a twist. Because for Johnston, the Handsome Prince and the Fairy Godmother bearing the invitation to the ball were the same person.

* * *
Johnston, in town this week for her younger brother's graduation (and a few auditions), is sitting at the Fyxx coffee shop in the Exchange District, checking the Winnipeg Free Press story on Zellweger's surprise wedding to country singer Kenny Chesney. She affects mock outrage that she wasn't invited to the wedding.

She's joshing, of course, although she had a lovely time working with Zellweger on the film and admires the Texas-born movie star's refusal to act like a movie star. "Everybody focuses on the weight issue and the hair colour and everything, but they fail to mention that she happens to be the biggest sweetheart ever," Johnston says. "I have huge respect for her. She just walked up to me and stuck her hand out and said, 'Hi, I'm Renée.'" "She was very kind and very approachable," Johnston says. "She told me about the good old days when she had to drive herself to auditions and all sorts of stuff.

"I sort of choked down my peanuts and said: 'The good old days? Are you kidding?" As sweet as Zellweger was (they exchanged letters afterwards), Johnston might have been even more comfortable with Crowe, who earned his A-list status with a series of critical hits, including The Insider and L.A. Confidential, and his Oscar-winning turn in Ridley Scott's Gladiator.

They go back. In fact, they go all the way back to the Australian Crowe's first North American gig on the 1993 film For the Moment, shot in 1992 in the vicinity of Brandon and directed by Alicia's dad Aaron Kim Johnston.

* * *
Alicia, about 15 at the time, was recruited by her dad to be an extra for the dance hall scene in that Second World War drama.

"It was like the best time ever," Johnston says. "That was the first time I met Russell."

At that point, nobody really knew who Crowe was, but Alicia was sufficiently impressed, and asked him for career advice.

"He was a good actor, I knew that much," she says. "So I said to him: 'I want to do this, too. What does one do if one wants to go about this? What do you suggest?'

"And he said, 'Go to school in Australia, they've got the best theatre schools around.'"

Alicia didn't go to Australia, but when she turned 19, she did attend the prestigious National Theatre School in Montreal for three years.

After that, Alicia briefly moved back to Winnipeg, but opportunities were scarce and she opted to move to Toronto. Ironically, her subsequent screen work mostly required her to come back to Winnipeg, including a role in last year's TV miniseries Category Six: Day of Destruction, in which she played a National Weather Administration intern opposite Brian Dennehy. The previous year, she took the female lead in local director Oscar Fenoglio's yet-to-be-completed low-budget horror-thriller Rushes.

In the meantime, Alicia's dad Kim sustained a relationship with the fiercely loyal Crowe. (Crowe was a struggling actor himself once, after all, and it undoubtedly counts for him that Kim Johnston was one of the first filmmakers prescient enough to see his star quality.)

In fact, it was Kim who invited Crowe to Winnipeg when he was touring the U.S. with his since-disbanded rock band 30 Odd Foot of Grunts. When Crowe accepted the invitation and performed at the Centennial Concert Hall in August of 2003, Alicia came from Toronto to join the inevitable Crowe-powered after-party. "I'd been in Toronto already for a couple of years and I sat down with him and said, 'So Russell, you know, 12 years ago, I did take your advice, I didn't go to the one in Australia, but I did go to the National Theatre School here in Canada and I'm in Toronto now.

"I said if you ever come into town, make sure to let me know what's going on.'

"And he said, 'As a matter of fact, we're shooting Cinderella Man next summer, I'll pass your name along to the casting director and see if I can get you an audition.'"

No actor would let an opportunity like that slide. In a world where heiress Paris Hilton can take an acting gig in House of Wax from more qualified thespians, solely on the basis of being Paris Hilton, well, it's a good idea to use any connections you have.

"It's the way you've got to do it," says Alicia. "You've got to take your pride and put it in your back pocket for a minute," adding that Crowe could only take the opportunity so far, a sentiment he himself expressed.

"He said he would show me the door but he wouldn't come in the room with me," she says. "And that everything after that was my doing."

Crowe's recommendation, however, undoubtedly carried weight.

"I always describe it as 'Crowe-tinted glasses,'" she laughs. "The casting director would see me through 'Crowe-tinted glasses,' which always helps, I think."

Kim Johnston, a proud father, says her success was a kick for Crowe, too.

"I think Russell was as happy as Alicia was," he says. "It was pretty exciting that it worked out. The odds of that are... It's a huge thing."

But as a filmmaker himself, Kim says Alicia's success will ultimately be an affirmation of what she knows, not who she knows.

"On a movie that big, no one is going to cast anyone who isn't right or the part," he says. As for the moment Alicia shares with Crowe and Zellweger, it may be a small scene, but it's a good scene.

"It's the climactic part of the film," she says. "It's serious as all hell, and it was unbelievable to be standing there with two Oscar-winners."

Intimidating?

"Just a little bit," she says. "You try to keep up, but there's lots there to learn from."

Cinderella Man opens in Winnipeg June 3.

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Thanks, Doug