CHANGING THE GOOD COP-BAD COP FORMULA CAN BE A HARD SELL
DAVID BERRY / david@vueweekly.com

Grimy, tobacco-stained fingers stub another filter into an overflowing ashtray. A single light dangles just overhead, haloing the victim with clinical, invasive, pure white fluorescent light. Beads of sweat on everyone’s forehead as two gnarled, spitting veterans roll up their sleeves and lean in on the puke in front of them. Chairs get tossed, the hapless patsy bounced between good cop and bad cop like a rag doll’s ping-pong ball. If it’s true that prime time television shows almost five acts of violence per hour, it probably also shows about three police interrogations, and that might just be the Law & Orders.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that Mark Stubbings and Dave Clarke’s first reaction to playing police officers in Craig Baxter’s swirling interrogation-room drama Hard Sell was to bust out some classic hard-line cop questioning behaviour.
“I love those police scenes, where they’re leaning on the guy, trying to make him crack,” admits Stubbings with a wide-eyed smile. “When I was first reading the script, I was just thinking, ‘yeah, this is a boy play with guns, and I’m going to get to come in and toss a chair … ’”

“Yeah, they were ready to turn into them yelling, you know ‘you-want-the-truth-you-can’t-handle-the-truth-aghhhh,’” interrupts director Trevor Schmidt. “I just said, ‘Okay, guys, you can’t do that. You have to find something else.’ Then when we did, it got a lot more interesting and exciting.”

Good on Schmidt for reeling in the Hollywood reaction: as fun as busting some balls can be, to play Baxter’s dizzying morass as straightforward prime time drama wouldn’t just be missing the point, it would be almost impossible. What starts as a seemingly simple questioning by old-school near-retiree Filth (Clarke) and earnest upstart Pig (Stubbings) quickly evolves into a hands-full two-hander as the two attempt to solve a murder mystery by role-playing it out with half the facts and a full-blown rivalry.

“Just figuring out who I’m supposed to be when I say a line is trouble,” says Stubbings with a laugh. “When I swear at him, is it actually Pig saying it, or is it one of the characters he’s playing? Or is it just me, because I’m angry I’m not exactly sure who’s supposed to be saying it?”

“There is a lot of that for us, never mind the audience,” agrees Clarke. “I don’t know if I would say it’s complex, but maybe dense is the better word.
You’re trying to figure out not only what’s going on, but what exactly the characters are figuring out, or trying to figure out, too. And I’m not even sure if we’ve got it figured out, yet.”

“Well, they’re working entirely in hypotheticals, they’re going through all these possibilities of what could have happened, but the instant they decide to go one way, not only do you have this other way which you’re putting aside, you have all these other things on that hypothetical path that could be happening, and you have to figure out why one of them wants it to go that way,” continues Schmidt, almost breathlessly. “The whole time, you’re asking yourself, ‘Now, is this what they think happened, or is that what actually happened, or is this just what is happening right now? What’s the reality of what we’re seeing?”

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