TORONTO – Just like Ben Affleck and Philip Seymour Hoffman, actor Christian Lloyd has two films playing at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. But unlike Affleck and Hoffman, Lloyd will probably ride his bike home after the screenings.
The Toronto actor has roles in the feature drama Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang and the short film Broken Heart Syndrome.
“I realize what an incredible opportunity it is to have two films at TIFF,” says Lloyd, sitting at a Parliament St. coffee shop. “There is that moment where you think, ‘I see movies at Cineplex all the time,’ and to see my head that big on screen in a role that I’m not just telling someone, ‘He went that way,’ is exciting and an opportunity Canadian actors don’t often get.”
Lloyd found out that Foxfire will be a Special Presentation at TIFF while checking the festival website for a friend’s film. “It was a very surreal moment to realize that I’m going to be in a film at TIFF,” he recalls.
In Foxfire, which is set in the ‘50s, Lloyd plays a prosecutor trying to exact justice on a gang of rebellious young females. He shot the film in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. for French director Laurent Cantet , whose 2008 film The Class won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
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“I’ll see it at TIFF for the first time,” Lloyd says. “There are some films where the director really gets involved with the cast and you get to see a screening before everyone else does. At TIFF part of the cachet is to have everyone see it for the first time in front of an audience, which is a bit terrifying.”
Foxfire screens Sept. 10 at 5:45pm at Ryerson Theatre and Sept. 11 at 3:30pm at Cineplex Yonge & Dundas.
Lloyd hopes the audience will be a mix of friends, family and movie industry decision-makers. “I’ve heard stories where films at TIFF are programmed at the same time as George Clooney’s film, for example, and the media and everyone else shuts out the film and the audience is half-filled and none of the industry people come,” he says. “It doesn’t get a distributor and just lies flat. So you have it on your poster that you played at TIFF but there’s absolutely no buzz about it.”
Lloyd plays a doctor in Broken Heart Syndrome, a 16-minute film by Canadian director Dusty Mancinelli that is part of TIFF’s Short Cuts Canada program.
“It’s a very different role,” says Lloyd, whose character diagnoses a man whose girlfriend dumped him during sex. “I realize that he’s going to die and there’s nothing I can do to help him… and I won’t ruin what happens.”
It screens Sept. 10 at 6:45pm and Sept. 11 at 12:15pm at TIFF Bell Lightbox 4.
Born in England (he won’t say how many years ago), Lloyd moved with his family to the Ottawa area when he was five years old. He caught the acting bug after being chosen to play Friedrich in a local production of The Sound of Music and pursued the craft while attending Ashbury College, a private school that counts Matthew Perry among its alumni.
Lloyd opted to study at the University of Guelph, where he earned an Honors Bachelor of Science in Human Biology, before he enrolled in the theatre program at Toronto’s George Brown College.
He went on to work with Soulpepper Theatre Company and landed the role of gunman John Hinkley Jr. in the TV movie The Day Reagan Was Shot, starring Richard Dreyfuss. He’s appeared in films like Repo Man opposite Jude Law and TV shows like Covert Affairs as well as commercials for A&W, Molson and McCain.
Lloyd is fiercely proud of Foxfire. “I think there is this thing that happens within our subconscious that Canadian films have bad lighting, staggered acting and long sweeping shots of the prairies,” he explains. “That has been, in the past. But now we’re ready to trick people into thinking it’s an American film.”
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