It was only a short visit, but veteran actor Scott Hylands covered a lot of ground when he came to the Georgia Straight a couple weeks ago. Hylands was here to discuss his small but crucial role in the local film Becoming Redwood, a VIFF audience favourite that’s been keeping them busy at the Cineplex International Village box office since it opened on Friday. (And let’s not forget his creepy role in last year’s Beyond the Black Rainbow.) But with such a long and impressive career behind him, the 70-year-old Vancouverite naturally went off- message occasionally. And who are we to ignore the historical record? Hylands’ first ever on-screen role was a “too young looking” pool shark in classmate Larry Kent’s short “Hastings Street”, for Christ’s sake!

“When I was at UBC, he was like a new cosmopolitan force,” Hylands recalled of the pioneering local filmmaker. “He’d actually been on the street, and we were so wet. He got us involved in a bunch of things, and one of them was that he got us into making movies. We were playing people living on the East Side and we were too healthy looking... That was in 1962. I go back a bit.” As Hylands noted, “American entertainment right then was Paul Newman, and then Paul Newman, Paul Newman, and Paul Newman—he was the man.” But his own acting heroes, like Richard Burton and Albert Finney, were British, so Hylands was pretty delighted when he made it to New York and landed the Tom Courtney role in a Broadway version of Billy Liar. Too bad it didn't last. “It wasn’t successful because I got in a huge fight,” Hylands said, chuckling. “I was hospitalized and had to leave the cast after a month. I got in a street brawl. I was in the hospital with my nose over here.”

Moving next to San Francisco’s theatre world, Hylands found himself in the heavy ferment of the mid- to late-'60s counterculture. “And the only thing that kept us straight was that we had to do Charley’s Aunt at eight,” he said. “Otherwise the whole fucking community was windowpaning for breakfast. I mean, Jesus Christ.” By ’69, he’d graduated to L.A., where director Mark Robson wanted to make him a leading man—although their first film together tanked. “Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting,” Hylands recalled. “Not everybody liked that one, but there I was. They offered me a job. I didn’t see [Robson’s] brilliance because he was in retreat from doing Von Ryan’s Express, and Frank Sinatra apparently had him for lunch on several occasions. He was a beat-up man by the time he got to me. That’s one of the reasons he chose me is that he wanted an innocent; he didn’t want a movie star with muscle tearing his nuts off.”

By that time, all the pretty boys were being pushed out of the frame by the likes of Pacino and “the American actors”, as Hylands put it, “who had verve and bravado. They all had their fingers up like this, and they carved a style out of it. And I admired them.” More to the point, Hylands settled into the theatre career he wanted, balanced with guest spots in pretty much every TV show that was made in the 16 years he subsequently spent in Hollywood. In total, it was a wildly impressive run in the only job the man ever had. Does he get nostalgic about it? “Do I watch? For a giggle sometimes. Or when my son says, ‘What did you do?’ But I don’t really make a habit of looking at them. Peter O’Toole said it’s the only profession where you can sit down and watch yourself rot. And he really lived up to that.”

Georgia Straight, April 2013