Paul Spence is a chameleonic renaissance man. An actor, writer, producer, musician and composer affectionately known as the Governor of Givin'r, he has taken his commitment to performance and turned it into a 20-plus year career filled with memorable characters, lines and films.
Perhaps best known for playing Dean Murdoch in two FUBAR movies (2002's FUBAR and 2010s' FUBAR: Balls to the Wall), as well as the 2017 TV series FUBAR Age of Computer, Spence is back in Deaner '89. Directed by Sam McGlynn, the film traces Dean's headbanging origins, from his love of hockey and introduction to metal to his hidden Indigenous roots in a rowdy, hilarious and surprisingly tender story.
After learning about his own Métis origins back in 2010, Spence was inspired, even compelled, to write Deaner '89, using comedy to explore the complicated histories of Dean, Canada and himself.
"My dad didn't really know he was Indigenous or where he was from," Spence tells Exclaim! over Zoom. "He knew he was Indigenous because he looked in the mirror — he looks Indigenous — but his mom told him his whole life he wasn't, because it was easier back then to try to be white passing."
He continues, "[Deaner '89] explores that relationship, and exploring the journey that my dad went on as he came to discover what he was, who he was and where he was from. That helped me understand that I could tell an Indigenous story as a way of taking back what had been taken from us."
With his trademark hesher humour and a surprising amount of vulnerability, Spence adapted his own experiences to Dean's, adding an unexpected level of depth to the character. Tackling Indigeneity, identity, family, suburban life and metal, the film is Spence's first foray into solo writing, and his sincerity and dedication run through every frame. He plays the titular Deaner, both in the present and as a teen in the '80s — which is, of course, hilarious, and makes for some great visual humour. Portraying Dean's adoptive parents, Mirna and Glen, are Lauren Cochrane and Will Sasso, respectively. Chatting with Spence and Sasso, it becomes very clear very quickly that there is an unmistakable energy and connection between the two performers.
"Well, Will's a couple months older than me, so it was really easy to play his son," Spence says, as the three of us all laugh at the absurdity of Spence playing a teenager. "I'm a lot smaller than Will is, and he's doing an old-school, old-timey Canadian dad voice, a bit gruff, and so the father-son chemistry was instantaneous."
He continues, "That 'big guy/small guy,' Chris Farley/David Spade kind of energy was there right off the hop. You never know if you're going to connect with somebody, but we were shooting the breeze within seconds, just laughing it up and being stupid together. Then the camera started to roll, and he's in his ridiculous makeup, and I've got braces on and my hair's all scraggly. It was so easy to do! I think we need to do a 'Dean and Dad' movie next. They go to wine country."
Sasso concurs, laughing. "I've been a fan of Paul's for a long time, and it came out of left field when Paul and Sam hit me up and said, 'We'd like you to play Dean's father.' I knew the script was going to be fantastic, so it was not a surprise when it was."
Sasso reflects on his character, a functioning alcoholic who wants to raise his kids right but is grossly unprepared to do so: "Glen is a psycho. He's a good dude, but he's also a dick, and we just hit the set with that energy. It was very easy to order around an entire hockey team and fall right into the father-son relationship with Glen and Deaner. It was a luxury and a treat, and it was just so much fun to get into."
With Deaner '89, McGlynn, who has spent the last 20-plus years directing digital and real-time video content for video games, live television, broadcast, music videos, films, documentaries and commercials, finally stepped behind the camera to direct his first feature film.
"He was just laser-focused on maintaining [the authenticity and integrity of that '80s world]," Spence says of his director. "I'd never written a feature script on my own before, and he had never directed a feature before, so there was a lot of first times going on. But I think that that's part of what made this film experience really magical. We were always challenging ourselves. It made us work really, really, really hard, and we would never say 'no' to an idea because we didn't know that we couldn't do it."
Sasso adds, "Sam has a sort of a savant knowledge of this terrain. Seeing the movie shot through his scope is a perfect fit. Paul uses the word 'skid,' and it's in Sam's Instagram handle, @skidmullet. He knows this terrain, and so everything that he would come to me with, I was so stoked, because it would just be the silliest little detail that is so late '80s Canada. It was all there for me to just step into Glen. He couldn't wait to show me the wig. I get off the plane, I go to the production office, and I meet Paul and Sam. We'd never met, and we're throwing the wig on. It was like…"
He pauses, thinking of the word. I offer up "Coronation," to which they both laugh and nod. "It really was," Spence confirms. "It was like the coronation of the '80s God of Thunder. It was really funny."
While the bulk of Deaner '89 is told through a traditional narrative, the film itself is structured as a retelling of Dean's story by Dean himself. Having finally risen to fame and fortune, Dean is interviewed for a documentary about his life. He stands in front of his enormous house filled with some interesting memorabilia, including old photos and clips of Spence playing with his various bands punctuate his recollections. But while Spence acknowledges the importance of Van Halen, Black Sabbath and the bands of the new wave of British heavy metal, the film itself celebrates a relatively unsung member of the '80s metal community: Dokken.
"I thought it would be really funny and really interesting to make the movie about a band that isn't really that well known to the world today, but who at the time was absolutely massive," Spence says. "A band like Dokken could play the Monsters of Rock Tour with Mötley Crüe and Van Halen — they were on that bill back when rock was king — but they also did tours in smaller cities where they would play smaller venues. Van Halen would never play some of these cities, and we didn't have enough money to do an arena scene; that would be impossible. But we can get a big club, we can fill it, and then Dokken would play. 'Breaking the Chains,' 'Lost Behind the Wall' — those songs just spoke to me. If I had heard those songs as a teenager, I would have lost my mind!"
Spence continues, "And then songs like [Diamon Head's] "Am I Evil?" — the first time I heard them, I just wanted to go sprinting. I wanted to jump, I wanted to high five somebody, I wanted to shotgun a beer. I wanted to take a sabre and cut a watermelon in half! Just songs that make you want to do stuff."
He then sings a part of the chorus ("Am I evil? Yes, I am!"), and his excitement is infectious: "It's just music for those who love music. It's a beautiful thing that music is such an instant time machine. It's nostalgia for nostalgia's sake, closing your eyes and wishing you're in high school. That's dumb as hell, but rocking out to a song in high school while driving down the highway? That's cool as hell!"
Sasso nods, echoing Spence's appreciation for all things hair metal: "I grew up with Van Halen being at the top of that predictable list. Then it was Mötley Crüe and Def Leppard and Iron Maiden and Judas Priest. These were the bands that were on the radio! But then it gets deeper and a little bit harder, and then you're in high school listening to Pantera and Anthrax and trying to recreate the Vulgar Display of Power album cover."
We all laugh — that would hurt, but Sasso's not wrong. "I know that there are people of a few different generations and ilks that will dig the nostalgia in this film," he observes.
Deaner '89 is certainly fun, wild and anarchic: Spence's specialty. But more importantly, it has a heart, one that's concerned with telling a nuanced story about Dean's — and in the process, Spence's — Métis origins, and how he was finally able to connect with this part of himself late in life. For Sasso, it meant embodying a relatively unpleasant, well-meaning, but entirely ill-equipped character, one who isn't the typical overbearing '80s parent type.
"Every good comedy should have a fair amount of drama in it, or it's just cartwheels out the gate, and you won't know where the heck you are. I'm playing a character who definitely has some depth to him: how he's parenting his kids, what he has been told through the adoption process, and what he hasn't been told," Sasso notes. "There are a lot of levels to our history, with colonialism and Indigenous children ending up in in white families, and these two cultures coming together. Hopefully this movie will give people a viewpoint that I, just in reading the script, learned a lot from. There's plenty of darkness to tap into, which is part of Dean's story."
Spence agrees, noting that comedy is only funny if there are layers beyond the jokes: "[Glen's] not in half the movie, but he's in enough of it that he has a mini redemption arc that's serious and satisfying at the same time. I think that speaks to what I was trying to get to with the script as a whole, which is that, there are little things that you can do in your life to make the world a little bit better. Get your head out of your own ass every once in a while and look around and realize that you're not the only person in the world and that your perspective is not the only perspective."
For Spence, these contrasts — between funny and serious, light and dark, ridiculous and serious— were essential in telling a story that could potentially be quite traumatic for many people with similar experiences to Dean's.
"I grew up in suburban Calgary, Alberta. I didn't even know where my dad was from. He called himself California Cree until I was in my teenage years, which meant nothing," Spence recalls. "He invented it because he didn't know where he was from. It was sad when you think about it. Part of this movie is taking the power back, and this is me doing what I can to remind people of how heinous government practices were for adoption, where they would just parachute Indigenous kids into white families and just be like, 'Good luck! And, um, don't call me. I'll call you.'"
While Spence knows this isn't a universal story, there are elements that will resonate — both with those who were affected by these practices, and those who may be entirely unaware that they took place.
"I think that you can only tell your story," he says. "There's thousands and thousands of stories out there that need to be told. This is the one that I felt comfortable telling, because it was related to my family. I felt that Dean was the perfect lightning rod for that, because he can say things that other people can't."
He finishes, "To elevate these serious stories from our past with humour is really the only way that people are going to find out about our past. To widen people's perspectives through comedy has always been what I wanted to do, and hopefully we did a little bit of that here in this film."
Mission accomplished.