An Interview with Paul Gross + Dustin Milligan

Paul Gross gets back on the horse for his new movie Gunless.

When the Western is transplanted from the U.S. into Canada in the form of the tongue-in-cheek film Gunless, the result is pure horsing around. enRoute speaks to Paul Gross, the gunslinging Montana Kid, and Dustin Milligan, the earnest Mountie, about filming in Osoyoos, British Columbia, wearing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police uniform and moustaches.

enRoute  Does starring in a Western mean you need to be saddle savvy?

Dustin Milligan  Have you ever put something on your resumé that you’re barely proficient in and then had to do it? For me, that’s horseback riding.

Paul Gross  I actually ride horses, so it was a completely revelatory experience to wake up every morning, get on a horse and ride past all this staggering landscape to the set. I mean, are you kidding me? You’re paying me to ride a horse to work?

enRoute   What did you think of Osoyoos – this fruitful wine country in the desert?

Gross  I’ve seen a lot of Canada, but I had no idea a place like this existed.

Milligan  My grandma has an organic farm maybe four kilometres away from where we were shooting. She came on the set one day wearing this really crazy wide-brimmed hat with reflective streamers hanging down to keep the horseflies away. How often are you shooting a movie on the northern tip of the Sonoran Desert that’s basically in your grandma’s backyard?

Gross  And it was hot. Our set was 45, 47°C, which is 320.15 on the Kelvin scale.

Milligan  The Kelvin scale. I gotta start busting that out at parties.

enRoute  How would Gunless have been different if Americans had made it in a Los Angeles studio?

Milligan  The film deals with a lot of American vs. Canadian themes. Paul’s character is sort of this lone American entering this strange Canadian world, and while there’s a lot of humour, it’s not necessarily slapstick involving buckets and cow-pies in faces.

Gross  Gunless is a predictable narrative: A man arrives, he’s a gunslinger, he’s offended, there’s going to be a duel and then it all turns on its ear because the townspeople happen to be Canadian. He’s basically a creep until he becomes enmeshed in the lives of these people and finds himself affected by the core truths of a particular Canadianness – the kind of effect Canada has everywhere.

Milligan  Gunless is more about this understated, subtle Canadian nuance in how we relate to Americans.

Gross  In some ways we are – bit by bit – affecting how America thinks of itself.

Milligan  Wow. That was profound.

enRoute Paul, how much squinting does it take to play an American gunslinger? Someone said you had a Clint Eastwood kind of thing going on.

Gross  It was probably one of the producers.

Dustin Milligan pokes fun at his inner-Mountie’s stiff upper lip.

enRoute  Well, someone said it. And if I were a male actor, I’d want the chance to play a gunslinger in a Western who gets to lope into town, squinting under my hat.

Gross  I love Westerns and kind of grew up on them in a weird way. But as an actor, I never imagined I’d get a chance to do one. I drove my voice down deep and whispered and stomped around with this really long hair, but there were times I thought, God, I could be really bad.

Milligan  Definite Eastwood presence. Now two people have said it.

enRoute Paul, you’re probably the most famous Mountie in Canadian pop culture, thanks to the television show Due South.

Gross  Due South – for whatever reason – has found its way around the world. And every time somebody comes up to me in an airport or in a palazzo in Tuscany, I still feel thrilled. But I can’t explain it.

enRoute Maybe it’s because you’ve got the Jimmy Stewart white-hat gunslinger as the masculine ideal in the U.S., whereas in Canada the closest thing we have is a tall handsome Mountie riding up on a horse with his shiny boots to help us out of a snowbank. When he calls us ma’am, it gets our pulses racing.

Milligan  It’s true, Paul. You’re basically the ultimate Canadian sex symbol.

Gross  I’m half a century old.

Milligan  Mountie-ness. It’s a state of being.

Gross  Canada’s got a peculiar iconography – the beaver, the Mountie. We’re a strange country. We’ve got a leaf on our flag.

enRoute  Paul, what kind of pointers did you give Dustin?

Gross  I remember our first scene together. Dustin was in this perfect uniform, but as he salutes, he gets his arm caught on a nail on the door and can’t quite get his hand up to his head. It was so funny – these beautiful white gloves, red uniform and him looking completely ridiculous.

Milligan   I was playing an overachieving junior Mountie with a uniform that was a little too big. And for lack of a better word, it was fitting that it didn’t fit.

Gross  When you’re wearing the red coat, you don’t really notice it. But when it’s on someone else, it really is striking. He wore it well.

Milligan  Thank you. It was an honour.

enRoute  Speaking of striking, that was quite a prodigious moustache you grew for the part, Dustin.

Milligan  Even after I shaved it, I was still haunted by the memory of fur on my face. It was like having a disgusting caterpillar on my lip. And it wasn’t as much fun as it should have been; nobody ever took me up on the moustache rides I offered. But since a lot of the roles I play are set in high school, it was at least a chance for me to appear like I was almost a man.

Gross  John Gielgud said he knew he had his part down when he figured out his nose. I thought the Montana Kid should have long hair, a jacket crusted with the right amount of mud... It took forever to get those extensions in, but then, suddenly, my walk changed and I started talking in this really deep register. Actors are funny: It’s all about getting your ego out of the way and letting the part come through, whether it’s thanks to a plastic nose or long hair.

enRoute  Or a really thick moustache.

Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net 

Hair and makeup: Anita Cane; Styling: Alon Freeman