Luke Macfarlane Online

Thanks to Karen, we have the clip shown on M-Net, on their new entertainment show, All Access. This clip features Luke Macfarlane and Dave Annable from their posh living at the “One and Only” hotel to dining at the classy restaurant, Ginja. This is definitely a great clip for everyone to watch.

The video is available in the Video Player which can be access via the above “Media” navigation link. The video will later be moved to Media Centre in about a month or so.

So, please enjoy. A better version may come along, but for now, please make do with this version.

(Note: File is 79.8 MB big, so it will take some time to load (ranging from 30 seconds to 1 minute depending on your speed of your bandwidth)).

Rank: 6,460

His starmeter on the Internet Movie Database has gone down < 1% since last week, and it now stands currently at rank #6,460 down from rank #6,447 last week.

Luke's IMDB Starmeter Ranking past 4 weeks were:

14-Jun. : #6,447
07-Jun. : #6,234
31-May : #6,076
24-May : #5,731

A new article posted by South African press, Tonight, talking about Luke and Dave’s visit to South Africa. The mispelled last name is the reporter’s doing.

Source: Tonight

Brother, what nice guys
June 15, 2009

By Terence Pillay

I’ve come to realise that my friends are either quite dim or they have other things to occupy themselves with than sitting in front of the television for inordinately long hours. The realisation dawned on me when I excitedly told them about my interviews with Dave Annable and Luke McFarlane, and all they could say was: “Who?”

And if you’re reading this and reacting the same way, then you have obviously not watched Brothers and Sisters, one of the finest American drama series to have emerged in recent years.

Annable (who plays Justin Walker, a drug-addicted war veteran) and McFarlane (who plays Scotty Wandell, a gay chef) were on a small tour of South Africa to promote the award-winning show, season three of which airs here in August.

So I headed off to Cape Town to hospitality king Sol Kerzner’s plush new palace, The One and Only, to hang with the actors. Incidentally, there’s a reason it’s called The One and Only, because there’s really nothing like it, but I digress.

Both Annable and McFarlane have got to be two of the nicest people I’ve ever interviewed. And their cheery dispositions were definitely heightened by the fact that they’ve never been to South Africa before and were more than a little enthusiastic about the country, even though they had only just seen Cape Town. Why wouldn’t you think this is the most amazing place on Earth – you can lie in a bath tub and look out on to Table Mountain through your floor-to-ceiling windows, I think, silently. But again, I digress.

Annable, as I found out, used to be a jock growing up in New York and played hockey, baseball and rugby. But he discovered he wasn’t very good at any of the sports and went off to university to study media and communications. He later dropped out to study acting with Richard Pinter at New York’s famous The Neighbourhood Playhouse, whose alumni include The Practice’s Dylan McDermott, Sex and the City’s Chris Noth, The West Wing’s Alison Janney and star of the big screen Dianne Keaton.

Annable was handsome enough to land a number of commercials, but it wasn’t until he was cast in the movie Little Black Book, then a short-lived series called Reunion, that he was brought to the attention of both television producers and directors, and the American public.

He describes Brothers and Sisters as his real big break.

An interesting titbit about Annable is that he only just completed his degree in communication, which he did online after promising his mother at his sister’s graduation that he’d do it.

McFarlane also considers Brothers and Sisters to be his big break, even though he studied at Julliard and was quite an accomplished musician, singer and stage actor before making the transition to television.

And being an openly gay actor he also made international headlines when cosy pictures of him and Prison Break’s Wentworth Miller appeared in tabloids, sparking speculation that they were romantically involved. But he’s very private about his personal life, and understandably so. I mean, why should we care with whom he shares his bed?

Just because someone lives his life in the public eye doesn’t mean the public has a right to invade that life.

Anyway, McFarlane says although Brothers and Sisters has raised his public profile, he still likes his relative anonymity and relishes going mountain biking or doing some other extreme sport without the glare of hundreds of cameras.

His role on Brothers and Sisters, though, is a benchmark one, in that it’s the first gay marriage for a recurring role ever to be screened on American TV. His kiss with Matthew Rhys, who plays Kevin Walker, was also the first gay kiss in a prime-time slot in the US.

Both Annable and McFarlane wax lyrically about their fellow cast members, especially Hollywood legend Sally Field, who apparently is something of a matriarch both on and off screen.

In the finale in season two, Kevin and Scotty get married and there are a number of other plot-turns concerning the rest of the characters. Both actors don’t want to reveal anything about the new series and, frankly, I’m glad for it.

I can’t wait for August.

Here is the first review of the mini-series of Iron Road by a Canadian press, based in Toronto, “The Star.” At the end of the article tells when mini-series will be aired on CBC.

Source: TheStar.Com

Iron Road goes to dark past

Shakespearean love story stars Sun Li and Peter O’Toole

Jun 12, 2009 04:30 AM

Nicholas Keung
IMMIGRATION REPORTER

For Chinese railroad workers and early migrants to Canada, the new movie Iron Road rivals in significance to what The Pianist means to Jews living with memories after the persecutions during World War II – both dramas give a face to those nameless and voiceless who perished en masse in history.

Premiering at York University’s Price Family Cinema Sunday, Iron Road does that in a Shakespearian fashion – through the romance between a young Chinese woman, Little Tiger, who, disguised as a boy, goes in search of her railroad-worker father in British Columbia a Canadian playboy James Nichol, whose father runs a company that builds railroad.

The movie – with a budget of more than $10 million and an international cast that includes American stars Peter O’Toole and Sam Neil, Canada’s own Luke MacFarlane and Charlotte Sullivan, and China’s Sun Li and Tony Leung Ka Fai – is the first big based on that dark era of Chinese-Canadian history at the turn of the late 18th century.

The events shamed Canada and forced Ottawa to issue redress and an apology to the effected community in Parliament in 2006.

The movie title, a literal translation of “railroad” from Chinese into English, symbolizes the interface of the underdog lured by the “Gold Mountain” dream who ends up abused and exploited as cheap labour. The antagonist is a growing Canada in need of labourers to do the dangerous job of building a transcontinental railroad.

“It’s an amazing story of bravery and courage and a cross-cultural love story set against historical facts that many people do not know about,” says producer Anne Tait.

“It touches the audience’s heart and helps them go through the experience. And you do that through stories, especially love stories that pinpoints the dilemma of cross-cultural connections. That’s the way to show attraction and problems.”

The crew spent 31 days filming in “Chinawood,” Hengdian World Studios, five hours from Shanghai. They also shot for 10 days across in Kamloops, Kelowna and Lynn Canyon, B.C. The beautiful natural landscapes are juxtaposed with human hardships – constant verbal abuses, inhumane living conditions, life-threatening jobs to set explosions to break ground for the rails and isolation from families and loved ones.

Those human tragedies are painted subtly, with the close-ups of callused hands driving the spikes to secure the rails and the panning across the grave markers dotted along the railroads to signal the Chinese lives lost in the process.

The hostile chants – “Chinamen” and “We don’t want you here. Go home!” – that greeted the railroad workers are haunting.

Tait, a Toronto-based producer and casting director, said she was initially inspired to make the movie by the Chan Ka Nin opera of the same title eight years ago. The music and lyrics imprinted in her mind’s eyes “an image of a Chinese woman disguised as a guy setting dynamites in the rock cliff.” She called her friend, scriptwriter Barry Pearson, to discuss a film story. Writer Raymond Storey was later brought in.

But the filming wasn’t possible until May 2007 with the feature’s executive producers Arnie Zipursky, Tiger Hu and Han Sanping lined up, as well as funding from the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Canadian Television Fund, Film Initiative British Columbia, Ontario Media Development Corp., Astral Media, Cogeco Cable Fund and Shaw Rocket Fund.

So, is the movie a chick flick?

“Yes, a bit,” said Tait with a chuckle. “But an epic, historical chick flick.”

Tickets for the June 14 premiere and fundraiser are $88 and $100, available at www.yorku.ca/perform or by calling 416-736-5888. There will be a screening July 21 at Royal Cinema at 608 College St. A two-part miniseries of the TV-adopted version of the movie will be aired on CBC Aug. 9 and 16.