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About 20 minutes into our phone conversation the other day, Rossif Sutherland said the interview was going places he hadn’t expected it to go. He wasn’t complaining, he added. Just surprised.
The places it went had everything to do with the death of his father, legendary Canadian actor Donald Sutherland. Sutherland Sr. died on June 20 from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He was 88.
The ostensible purpose of the phone call was to talk about Murder in a Small Town, a B.C.-shot series that recently debuted on Global TV in Canada and Fox in the U.S. It’s a likeable murder-mystery drama in which Rossif Sutherland plays police chief Karl Alberg, who has moved to the small town of Gibsons, which in the series is supposed to be somewhere in the U.S. It is based on the series of novels by the late Canadian author L.R. Wright.
We did eventually discuss the new TV series, but not before Sutherland took a deep dive into what his life has been like since his dad passed away.
Rossif Sutherland was born in Vancouver but grew up mainly in Paris where his mother, Québécois actress Francine Racette, was pursuing her career. His dad was often away from home because his film work took him all over the planet. Rossif didn’t grow up in Quebec but he has a deep attachment to the province mainly because the family has had a home in Georgeville on the banks of Lake Memphremagog since the late 1970s. Sutherland said he spent the entire month of July at their place in Georgeville with his eight-year-old son as he tried to come to grips with the loss of his father, who was one of the most noted actors ever to come out of Canada, thanks to films like M*A*S*H, Klute, 1900, Ordinary People and Fellini’s Casanova.
“Everybody processes grief in their own way,” said Sutherland. “I knew that stepping foot into to that house would be an emotional trigger, but I didn’t shy away from the experience. I wanted, if anything, to be there with him. I do speak to him and I do feel him. So I was there amongst his things, trying to create some order in the mess that he had left when he was taken to hospital, so that the rest of the people from my family that would come wouldn’t have to walk through a capsule of a time and a place that didn’t really represent the entirety of who my father was. He’d had an extraordinarily vibrant life so there I was trying to clean up. And I was doing things that might’ve pissed him off because he was quite a hoarder. He liked things where they were even if no one else but him could make sense of the mess. But mess was just in the eye of the beholder, I guess. And it was interesting being there with my own son because this was a place I went to to be with my dad. And my son has been the one in all of this who has held my hand.”
His son had come to Florida when it was clear that Donald Sutherland wasn’t going to live much longer.
“He was there the day my father died,” said Sutherland. “He hopped on to a plane all by himself so he could be by his granddad’s side. He’s only eight years old so it was quite an adventure. A thing that was quite common for us, but nowadays seems to be quite a wild proposition, to put a little man on a plane all by himself. But he did it. He was scared but also very proud of himself. And my mum and I picked him up from the airport and held him in our arms. It was just so beautiful to see this sweet young man starting his life with such pride.”
Right then, his phone rang and it was the hospital informing them that his dad had taken a turn for the worse.
“So this day of play I’d promised my son, a day of going to swim in a pool, turned into another sort of day,” said Sutherland. “And he was the one, when the reality of what was happening was becoming a little too much, took me aside and said, ‘Dad, this is going to be a beautiful day.’ And I told my son, ‘Do you know, we might be losing your granddad today?’ And he said, ‘Yes dad, I understand. But this is going to be a beautiful day.’ He made it a day of life and in that, honoured my dad and this extraordinary life he’s lived and it was one of the most painful days of my life. But it was also a beautiful day.”
Murder in a Small Town brought Sutherland and his father closer together. Sutherland was shooting a TV show, Plan B, in Montreal when he was asked to audition for Murder in a Small Town. He began reading the Wright novels and he found the character quite engaging.
“He reminded me of detectives of years past,” said Sutherland.
When he got the job, he started describing the character to his father, and Donald said it all sounded very familiar and remembered that decades back he’d been signed up to star in a movie based on the first of the books by Wright featuring this detective.
Father and son talked frequently during the production of the series. It was like coming full circle for Rossif.
“I became an actor because he advised me to, seeing in me something I hadn’t, which I guess was something that resembled what he had, which was the ability to piece together a character and become possessed,” said Sutherland. “It was always a great source of conversation for my dad, which I never shied away from because it was maybe why I became an actor — so I could be close with him.”