Even if you don’t know the name Julian Richings, you will almost certainly see him in several projects over the years. The Devonshire born actor, who relocated to Canada in the eighties, is one of the busiest actors on the circuit and currently has a total of 213 credits to his name on IMDB. Over the years he’s appeared in Wrong Turn, Urban Legend, The Witch, Orphan Black, and Man of Steel, although he’s best known to many for his turn as Death in television series, Supernatural. Richings is one of the few actors that can traverse mainstream blockbusters, low-budget indies, and television, and is easily one of our favourite working character actors.
His latest project, Anything for Jackson, has just arrived on genre streaming platform Shudder and places Richings as one half of a married couple desperate to save their deceased grandson, whatever the costs. In the film, Richings stars as Doctor Henry, who along with his wife Audrey (played by Sheila McCarthy), turn to Satanism to try and bring their grandson back from the dead. They find a spell that essentially works as a reverse exorcism – transporting a spirit into a vessel, rather than removing it. Needing a body, the pair abduct one of Henry’s pregnant patients, but after their spell goes awry they find themselves with a house full of spirits, all of whom have designs on using the unborn baby as a host.
Anything for Jackson is a breath of fresh air, offering several unexpected surprises, whilst casting the underutilised older generation into the central roles. It’s a fascinating choice, and one that enables both Richings and McCarthy to showcase their immense talents. We sat down with Richings to discuss the production in more detail as well as getting his views on the Canadian genre scene, and of course about his time playing Death.
Anything for Jackson is full of surprises, it must have made for an entertaining read when you were sent the script?
When I read it I immediately thought, “well what a great premise, what a great script”, but tonally it was so delicate. It’s on the brink of being almost comical. There are many moments that are so extreme that you go, “this is beyond belief”. For me, one of the many issues was about the approach and knowing that the director and writer kinda were in strong control of that. I met with them and they certainly were. Their whole idea of casting, and their whole idea of the way that they were going to shoot it, was really encouraging and I was excited.
The director, Justin Dyck, is better known for his work on Christmas movies, not horror. What made you so sure that he could pull off something like this?
I always respect people that know their industry. I’ve been working in film and television for a long time, and I love it, and I’ve worked with people who have an auteur spirit, which is great, and there are people that are pragmatic DIY practitioners. I always enjoy people that have limited resources, but know their craft inside out and can utilise anything that they have and make it work. Justin and Keith [Cooper] are those two guys. They work. They learn from working and banging out material. But they’re also always getting better and better and better in what they do. They understand formulas. They bring a lot to a genre show where they understand the genre, but they also understand that there are certain constraints and certain parameters that they have to operate within. They actually made what was potentially really a movie with a big reach, they made it possible.
The horror genre is often seen as a young person’s game; often placing teenagers or college students at the centre, Anything for Jackson opts for an older demographic, something not seen regularly. Was that something else that appealed to you?
Very much so. I like horror. I do a lot of horror. I think what I like about it is the way that it kind of inverts the Hollywood myths and dreams and fantasies and it actually looks at the underbelly, the fears, the societal dread that we fear. It gives voice to that in many ways. I like films that kind of seep with unease and you go, “there’s something wrong here, what’s happening?” Not necessarily something that’s going to jolt you, and give you screams and scares, but something that operates on a more insidious level. This film does that very much. I like the complexity of the two central characters who are committing terrible, terrible actions in the name of terrible personal loss, and in many ways for each other. In order to help each other through a relationship and a very terrible period in their lives. I find in that, a very strong sort of metaphor in many ways about age and youth, in the era of Brexit and era of so many issues of agency and equity that is what older people are doing to a younger generation. To actually focus on those older people and the mistakes that they are making rather than the aspirations of the younger people, I think is very interesting. There’s something right about that.
What a great scene partner to have in Sheila [McCarthy]…
She’s fantastic. We’ve known each other for a long time, but never really worked a lot together. As soon as we knew that the director was thinking of the two of us, of pairing us, we just thought, “that’s right”.
When I was watching I felt a lot of similarities to Pet Sematary. There the viewer pulls away from Louis Creed as he goes mad and starts trying to bring everybody back, here you start to root for Henry and Audrey. They might be doing something awful, but you can sense their good intentions.
Henry does enable madness. Like a mad kind of attempt to remedy grief and remedy a problem. Audrey really takes the lead. I think that, of the couple, Audrey is the powerful one that makes decisions and Henry does his best to do everything in the name of their relationship. That’s very interesting territory I think. They genuinely love each other. They genuinely care for the child and grandchild that they’ve lost. What’s fun about it too is that there’s sort of a Stockholm syndrome where they actually really care for the woman that they have kidnapped and they don’t wish to do her any extra harm. They’re terribly polite and terribly apologetic about the whole thing. If they could, it would be a lot cleaner than this. They wouldn’t be jeopardising someone else’s life.
Am I right in saying that the film finished shooting as everything was closing down?
Literally the day that we wrapped, Ontario shut down and it was lockdown. I think we finished shooting at about 4:30, and lockdown was 6pm. We just came in under the wire. The whole shoot was like that. It was a very, very short shoot where we knew we had to accomplish each day a whole bunch of different things. So there was a sense where we were a little rushed at the end. Justin, because of his experience working in formulaic, low-budget, Christmas movies, he knew exactly how to plan the whole three weeks. But by the end, we were struggling and especially with impending Covid shutdown. In fact I think, I can’t really tell you as I don’t know too much about it, but I believe we adjusted the ending to fit the fact that we were no longer able to be as mobile as we were. There’s not as much exterior and spectacle about the ending that originally was planned.
A lot of the film takes place in the house, which I guess is something that a lot of people who are now sitting at home watching the film can relate to. You’re sat trapped inside your house watching a film about these characters that are essentially trapped inside a house. It adds that extra layer of immersion.
Very much so, and very Canadian in that way, that it’s winter and you are thrown into your own resources. You sort of hibernate with your own mess around you and your own frustrations and your own desires. The house belongs to the writer, the house that we were in. Pragmatic, low-budget film, you utilise every resource that you’ve got. He had an interesting house and he could construct specific gags and could figure it out ahead of time. So that incredibly Gothic house that we shot in belongs to Keith the writer and we did one bedroom sequence in Justin, the director’s house too.
Going back to the pandemic, this year you’ve also appeared in Hall, a film that feels eerily prophetic…
It’s very much, alarmingly prescient, although with Hall too it’s not necessarily just a pandemic movie. It’s about a relationship, which again what I love about horror is that it speaks to something that’s on a deeper psyche. It’s about a failed relationship, an abusive relationship, and the fallout from that. There’s a pandemic of non-communication and as a result there’s a little girl wandering around vulnerable. That I find very, very interesting.
Watching it with all the news reports about the fictional virus all felt scarily familiar to what we have been living through.
The only reference I had before that was 12 Monkeys and so that was my cultural reference point, but suddenly when I did it and then Covid came I thought, “goodness, how art and life are so interconnected”.
I’ve seen you in a lot of films this year: Hall, Anything for Jackson, Spare Parts, and Vicious Fun. They’re all very different projects, what is it when you get a script that makes you go, “I wanna do this one”?
Different reasons. Sometimes it’s the script specifically, because I don’t know the folks involved. Sometimes it’s other actors, sometimes it’s the actual director. I really enjoy the independent spirit of filming, but it tends to be in Canada sort of low-budget genre shows that can survive with a very specific premise. With a DIY sensibility and a crew that isn’t very big. All of the shows that you’ve mentioned there are part of this aesthetic and part of this energy that’s emerging in Canada, which is kind of like the surly little brother of the US. There’s a great kindness and a great social awareness with Canadian, but there’s also a kind of punk spirit about the voice. Who am I? What am I? That excites me. Maybe it’s my age. Maybe it’s because in the seventies that was my excitement in the UK. I feel it artistically here. I feel that there’s some great ideas. In the same way as in the seventies in England, you could pick up a guitar and be a one-chord wonder; here you can have a phone, a great idea, you can learn on your feet and you can create.
I’m kind of at the point in my life, in my career, where I’m who I am. I’ve got experience and people sort of know my body of work and go, “oh we’ll use that guy, we know who he is.” It’s fun for me to be part of all of this new sort of emerging stuff that’s going on. I also do more mainstream stuff, but for me, this is the future of the Canadian film industry and it’s a voice that’s very important and vital.
As much as I’d seen you in various projects prior, Urban Legend, Wrong Turn etc. it wasn’t really until Supernatural that I properly ‘discovered’ you. You played Death in a recurring guest role for just a handful of episodes and yet the character was embraced really passionately by the fans. Could you ever have realised that all these years later there would still be so much love for this character?
I didn’t have a clue. I was so surprised. I’m a working actor so I’ll do a show with really big names and then I’ll go and do something else and often I’ll ask my kids, “I’m working with ‘so and so’, are they famous?” and they’ll go “yes!” With Supernatural, I was actually working in the Prairies on a rock ‘n’ roll film and it was a very exciting project and I’d put a lot of energy into it. My agent called and said, “you can’t return to Toronto, you have to go to Vancouver and shoot this show Supernatural“. I’d already auditioned for it, I’d put myself on a self-tape about six month previously, and I had forgotten all about it. Suddenly there it was as a gig, so I went to Vancouver, very much in the mode of the film that I had just been shooting. I got there and did that opening sequence, which has become quite iconic now, and then did the episode and thought, “this is a really good show, the stars, whoever they are, are actually nice guys and really good actors.”
I started to find out more about it, and it was the first time with my daughter particularly. I think at one point I went to meet her from school and suddenly all her friends in the corridor all went, “oh my God it’s Death!” Suddenly I had credibility with my daughter because all her friends actually thought I was in a hip show as opposed to these weird off-beat things she’s been seeing me in for so many years. That trajectory continued with each episode that I did and then I became aware of not just the show, but the Supernatural extended family and community, which is massive.
The sensibility of always keeping fighting, in many ways it’s what I’m expressing about the Canadian film industry, there’s a sense of being proud about being members of a family of almost misfits. Even though the boys themselves are such beautiful, iconic people, there’s this sense that the community has adopted them. I’ve been to conventions and met people, and conventions have become this throwback to theatre where you actually get up and you talk to people, answer questions and you have a back and forth. It’s gone full circle from me being a theatre actor, to me doing Supernatural to then doing a whole bunch of Supernatural conventions in which theatre becomes the primary thing. It’s been a big surprise and it’s definitely in terms of recognition, even though I think I died like five years ago, but people still go, “oh my God, it’s Death!” It’s definitely got reach and impact.
The role itself was so well written and such fun. It played with the humour and played with the menace very, very well. The boys as good actors made me that way. Every scene I was with them, they weren’t trying to steal the scene, they were actually playing the fact that they were terrified of me and it was a really good dynamic, so that was fun.
It really is a great role and it’s easy to see why people always remember it.
That’s the life of a character actor. My wife likes to call it journeyman acting. She likes to call me a journeyman actor and I think it’s true. There’s sort of a pride in that where you go, “yeah that’s what I do” and I’m not mistaking my craft and my skills for celebrity. It’s about doing the work, and I enjoy the work. I enjoy being busy. I’m not thinking, “what’s the right strategic move here, how am I going to become famous?” I’m a journeyman actor, so you are going to see me popping up here, there and everywhere. Sometimes I’ve done films or moments on TV shows literally to pay the rent, you go “okay, I’ll go in and be the guy that reads the exposition for that series”, that’s just the way it is.
I realise too that I’m getting older and I’m getting more comfortable in who I am, so I don’t have to try and conform to what a career person would tell you about, “oh you should do this as an actor, you should make that choice”. It gets to the point where you go, “I really like this show, I think I’m going to go work here, work there” that’s very liberating for me now. I’m able to do it and I’m fortunate that I don’t have a body of work that I’m trying to emulate the way I looked when I was thirty-five. I can just be who I am, and that’s very freeing. It’s easier for men, I hope we get to a point where it’s easier for women.
Fortunately here I am with Sheila who is an example of a woman who has come through doing all this stuff that men have done and has equal agency. She is respected as a full-on, fully fleshed character, but she also is able to be quirky and odd, or whatever she wants to be. She’s not just pigeon-holed. The industry is changing, and again this is where I go back to why I do horror, well you’re going to get a female DOP, you’re actually going to see a horror film through a woman’s eyes. Which is not something you get in the mainstream yet. Through diverse eyes as well. Even though in many ways it’s such a conservative medium it attracts a lot of people who are reinventing and re-calibrating.
Anything for Jackson is now on Shudder across the globe, what do you hope viewers take from it?
I hope that they enjoy the film. It’s a warm horror film. It’s got the things that are unsettling, and just plain odd that keep you on the edge of your seat. But there’s a warmth to it, a humanity to the film that I really like. Everybody has it, right down to the ghosts. The ghosts can’t be just dismissed as just creatures or monsters. They need to be there. They’ve been requested. I just hope people enjoy it. It’s one of the few projects that I’ve done that I felt that it spans the ages without being bland or pandering to reach a wider audience, I think it’s very specific. I think it’s very identifiable for many people.
You say the ghost’s all have a reason to be there and one of their reasons is clearly purely to give people nightmares.
That’s Troy. Isn’t he extraordinary? Absolutely incredible. All of us were there, because it was such a short shoot that it wasn’t like I’d fly back to my residence and then fly in. We were all there watching the different scenes, which gave it a great energy, and Troy came in and we just squealed with delight. Delight and fear. Again, everything that a horror film should do, challenge your assumptions of the normal. You go, “oh my God!” He was so polite too. He would come out from under the bed and go on top of Konstantina [Mantelos] and bend double and go down towards her and then he’d go “oh, are you okay?” Such a gentle man, able to have this extraordinary ability. It was just like letting him loose – “well what can you do here?”, “how about I do this?” and it was truly collaborative and fun. We were sort of celebrating his extraordinary ability. He was a lot of fun and gave us a great….once all of us witnessed what he brought to the film, we realised that on a shoe-string budget, you can produce all kinds of meaningful shocks and scares.
Anything for Jackson is available on Shudder now.
