PHOTO CREDIT: Movember Canada
The day that I chat with Noah Reid, a.k.a. Patrick from “Schitt’s Creek,” it’s Remembrance Day, so we’re both thinking about war and how devastating it must have been to live through a world war as compared to our current problems.
But as Noah says, “No matter what you’re going through, you can almost be certain that somebody has gone through the same thing or worse, but that doesn’t mean that whatever you’re going through is not difficult in its own way.”
And that is the point of the conversation: that whatever struggles people are having, particularly men with mental health, they deserve to be brought into the open and talked about — which is why Noah is sporting un-Patrick-like facial hair for Movember, the charity that raises funds for men’s health, in part through asking guys to grow moustaches in November.
Noah, a 33-year-old Torontonian, plugs into the topic of mental health in a couple of ways: his wife Clare is a psychiatric nurse and researcher who’s doing a master’s degree so “conversations around mental health have been a big part of my life in the last several years.”
He’s aware not only of the gaps in the health-care system when it comes to mental health treatment but the statistics that show men have a far higher rate of suicide than women.
There is, he says, “this sort of ingrained masculinity mask that men feel like they need to wear and not talk about, not share (feelings), bottle it up and keep a strong face.”
“As an artist, as an actor and a musician, I feel like a lot of my work and my job has to do with exploring the notion of vulnerability and what people share and what they don’t,” he says.
It should come as no surprise that mental health issues like anxiety and depression have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
One of Noah’s messages is to encourage people to check in on others in these strange times. “Now that we’re not occupying spaces in the same way, you might not have the same signals that somebody is struggling or having a tough time,” he says. “It’s on all of us to look around in our communities and our social worlds, and make sure that nobody’s feeling left behind and feeling isolated. It’s an easy thing to do nowadays, to just be sort of inwardly focused.”
When the lockdown first hit, Noah was in Chicago, eight shows into a 25-date concert tour, his first one. “We were on the way to Boston to play a show and the word came down that Tom Hanks and the NBA were basically COVID-positive and that sort of changed the game. I think March was a difficult time for a lot of people figuring out what this was going to mean and everybody had to adjust,” he says.
He’s disappointed to see places like Toronto’s Mod Club close because of the pandemic and can’t wait to get back into a venue for a concert or a play or even a movie, but “I’ve been grateful I’ve had a couple of real lovely moments of celebration this year, releasing my second album (“Gemini,” in May) and certainly the Emmys were another highlight.”
You can say that again, considering “Schitt’s Creek” won every comedy award going at the Primetime Emmy Awards (you can read my column about that here), becoming the first comedy or drama in Emmys history to sweep its category.
Another TV writer described “Schitt’s Creek” as perfect pandemic viewing and Noah understands that. “We’re living in a world that seemed to be sort of backsliding into the darkness in many ways and the timing of ‘Schitt’s Creek,’ I think for our audience, could not have been better,” he says. “And certainly, as the show finished up and came out during the early stages of the pandemic, I think people relied on the show to get them through with some light, some laughter and some love.”
The show has been a particular beacon for the LGBTQ community for the matter-of-fact way in which it dealt with the love story of Patrick and David, played by series co-creator Daniel Levy.
“We would hear from fans all the time about the experience of coming out being approached with a little bit more ease, a little bit more courage. Just knowing that people were sharing this show with their families who might not have the same beliefs, but that was a way that people could get into conversations. And I think that’s incredibly meaningful when a cultural output can impact people in their day-to-day lives,” Noah says. “Those opportunities don’t come around all that often, so I’m incredibly proud to have been a part of such a show.”
(And for the record, Noah has done a bunch of TV stuff that isn’t “Schitt’s Creek,” starting when he was just a youngster, and he’s also an accomplished stage actor. But he laughs when I suggest that he’s now famous.)
Noah’s own way to process life’s difficult moments is through music. He’s been writing songs ever since he was a student at the National Theatre School of Canada; first as a way to explore the characters he was playing, then as a way of “exploring my own character . . . for me it’s been a pretty major way to process my goings-on.”
I ask him, somewhat tongue in cheek, if he’s an actor who plays music or a musician who acts.
“For a long time I thought of myself as an actor playing music as a sort of hobby. Recently that’s changed as I’ve found the experience of writing and playing and recording music so rewarding.”
He likes being able to do both, he says, but when you act “you’re working on somebody else’s creation . . . music has become something for me that is fully mine and I get to decide what that is, and it’s largely based on my own experience, and my own reflections of where I’m at in my life and what I’m seeing happen around me.”
“On my last record I have songs about being away from home for a long period of time and dealing with that, being away from loved ones, not loving the city that I’m in (he’s talking about Los Angeles there), not being able to sleep, dealing with doubt and isolation, and also experiencing love and togetherness and community and the joys of life. It’s definitely always been a major way that I can process what’s going on around me and . . . even when I wasn’t sharing these songs I would just sort of write things to put them somewhere, to say them out loud, to have some container for that idea or that feeling.”
And that brings us back to where we started: the idea that feelings need to be expressed, that it’s OK to be vulnerable.
Noah went to the Etobicoke School of the Arts, which was relatively “free of the kind of traditional trappings of masculinity in high schools.” Even so, “I still had a lot of work to do to figure out that being vulnerable at all was acceptable. And that’s a lifelong journey, figuring out what kind of a man I wanted to be; I’m still involved in that,” he says.
“It takes a lot of reflection . . . to recognize that vulnerability is a major part of masculinity. If you can’t be open, especially in your closest relationships, if you can’t feel like you’re able to share your experiences and the things that are happening in your head and in your heart, then other people won’t share their experience with you and the more that we share our experiences the more connected we feel.
“Once that door opens up, then you start to realize that there’s a little bit more common ground there than you might have thought.”
To find out more about Movember Canada or donate to the campaign, go to ca.movember.com.
Recent Comments