Rossif Sutherland On ‘Murder In A Small Town’ & His Dad Donald’s Death

After production on Fox‘s upcoming series Murder In a Small Town wrapped on the southern Sunshine Coast of Canada in mid-May, star Rossif Sutherland headed to America’s Sunshine State to be with his father, Donald Sutherland, who would die a month later. Rossif was actually scheduled to do voice-over (ADR) work for the show from Miami on the day his father died — one of several elements that tie the two men to Murder In a Small Town, a passion project of Donald’s for 30 years. Reflecting that, the series will include a dedication to the late actor when it debuts on Fox on September 24 with a 90-minute premiere.

“There was a lot of serendipity around this project,” Rossif, in his first interview since his father’s death, said about the series based on late Canadian author L.R. Wright’s Alberg novels, which follows big-city detective Karl Alberg (Sutherland) as he solves murders in a quiet coastal town.

Rossif had no idea about his dad’s history with Murder In a Small Town when his manager flagged the role for him to audition.

“It was just another audition in the beginning,” Rossif said. “I had played a bunch of detectives, and I was quite reluctant at first, but the material was nice. It was a Zoom audition, and I’m not particularly good with those, but I just told my son to be brave and do things that scare him. So I followed my own advice, and I did the audition.” (Rossif’s son is only 8, so it’s too early to tell whether he will continue the family’s acting tradition. “He jokes that he wants to be an agent because he likes to make deals,” Rossif says.)

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Two weeks later, his team got a call that Fox and the Murder In a Small Town production company, Jeff Wachtel’s Future Shack, were interested in him for the role.

“It was unlike any audition that I’ve been on, because usually it’s a circus of callbacks. But here were these people who saw that audition and saw in me, trusted in me the actor to play that part,” Rossif said.

He then shared the news with his dad.

“I described his character to him, this detective who wasn’t going about doing his job with the tropes of intimidating people with his badge, his gun, his uniform, but instead got to get the truth out of people with his humanity, he’s somebody who wears his heart on his sleeve, and he’s not possessed by demons,” Rossif said. “When I said that to my dad, he asked me what the project was, with some excitement. I said it was this thing called the Alberg series.

It‘s then I found out that he was all too familiar with those books because 30 years ago was when the journey began for him of trying to get a movie version off the ground. He befriended [producer] Nick Orchard and Ian Weir, the writer, and they tried to get it produced. Unfortunately, it never happened.”

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Weir was a young screenwriter when he was hired to adapt The Suspect, the first book in the Alberg series, to which Donald Sutherland became attached as the ritual character, the prime suspect George.

“It really was a dream of a lifetime, a chance to work with and learn from someone like Donald,” Weir said. “He had read the feature script first. Then he went and read the novel, and several more novels in the series, and completely fell in love with the books.”

The collaboration carried on for years. In the beginning, “one of his concerns was that he was still considerably too young to play George,” Weir said. “But as time went by, the gap began to close.”

That is how, almost three decades later, the two-hour script, with Sutherland still interested in playing the curmudgeonly George, got to former USA Network president Wachtel when he was launching his production company Future Shack two years ago.

Wachtel liked the script and submitted it to several places including Fox. The network expressed interest as part of a new international content strategy, with the Canadian-made project fast-tracked last year as it could proceed during the Hollywood strikes. Fox initially asked for three movies, subsequently opting for an eight-episode series. (The original two-hour script was condensed into the 90-minute premiere for Fox, with a two-hour version available internationally.)

“Now, Donald got older, and even though [George] was a guest role, it’s a significant guest role,” Wachtel said. “His health was failing, and so he had to withdraw from the project, but we loved it anyway.”

The greenlighted series was able to land James Cromwell to play George, with the idea for Donald to do a cameo as the guy who gets killed at the beginning of the first episode. But as his health further deteriorated, “he couldn’t make the trip,” Wachtel said.

***

As The Suspect feature script became the series Murder In a Small Town, the focus shifted from the suspect protagonist in the first book to Detective Karl Alberg, who became the series’ lead character, with four to five of the Alberg novels used as kickoffs for the first season and three or four books left in case there is a second season.

Fox and the producers set out to cast the lead by reading Canadian actors starting with Rossif Sutherland, whose half-brother Kiefer has a long history at the network as the star of the 24 franchise.

“We auditioned him, and he was fantastic, rugged but soft, had this shambling kind of sex appeal and was exactly the right age,” Wachtel said.

The actor then did chemistry read with five actresses. Smallville alumna Kristin Kreuk landed the female lead, Cassandra, with Wachtel calling the romance between the characters “the secret sauce” of the crime procedural.

Rossif landed the role of Alberg after the first Zoom audition with the series’ casting directors.

“I never auditioned for the producers, which was odd,” he said, bringing up a topic that has been the subject of a lot of debate lately about second-generation actors following in their parents’ footsteps.

“I don’t know how much nepotism played into this, I have no idea,” he said. “Certainly they had a relationship with my father, so the romantic idea that I would star instead of him, I’m sure it was quite seductive to them.”

Added Rossif, “Listen, I’m thankful for it, for it all, and as far as nepotism goes, if nepotism is to get to do something because of somebody in your family, then my entire career has been nepotism. I wouldn’t be an actor if it weren’t for my dad, I wouldn’t have gone down this road. He’s the one who saw in me something that I hadn’t growing up; he saw somebody who belonged in that family of his that he left our family to go be with that troupe of actors, that troupe of storytellers.”

Rossif was studying to be a writer at Princeton when a classmate approached him about directing her short film senior thesis.

“And there I was directing. Not that I’d ever expressed any desire for doing it, but I guess my last name was enough to seem to give her the impression I was qualified,” he said. “On my first day of shooting, my lead actor decided the project was beneath him, so I ended up having to play the part, and that was the first time I ever ended up in front of a camera. When my father saw that, he was convinced that’s what I should do with my life.”

***

While Donald ultimately couldn’t play George, his influence is still felt on the show.

“Donald and I spent a lot of time talking about the character of George when we were developing the feature film, and Donald’s input certainly played a big role in helping shape that character,” said Weir, Murder In a Small Town‘s writer/executive producer.

Added Rossif, “He would have loved to have played him.”

There is a line George says in The Suspect novel, which was used verbatim in the original feature script, that once you’re in your 80s, your body is a bag of bones, the whole sh*ttery is wearing out fast; any second something essential could go on you. (The line was adjusted in the Fox series to comply with broadcast standards.)

“He used to recite that line like he was reciting Shakespeare,” Rossif recalled.

His father didn’t give him notes on how to play his role in Murder In a Small Town, though the two were chatting during filming, with Donald calling him to find out how the work was going until he fell quite ill by the halfway point of production.

“I wouldn’t welcome them, but he had this absurd trust in me,” Rossif said. “My father’s advice to me as an actor was always really quite simple: It was either you played the quality of things, or you played the truth of things. And what he meant by that is you either play what you hear when you read it on the page, what you expect, what it sounds like, or you dig a little deeper and you look for the place where surprises come from, because as human beings, we’re not necessarily predictable, it’s all those contradictions that make us who we are too. It was that exercise that’s kept me going, and I think has defined his career.”

Early in his career, Donald helped his son prepare for auditions.

“At first, taking words off the page with him was nerve-wracking. I kept wondering what he was thinking,” Rossif said. “And I don’t know when that changed, and if it was because he’d flattered me enough, or that I just stopped caring, but I stopped being hesitant with my choices and we just started to play. A casting director admitted to saving an audition of mine a few years ago. I was flattered. As she kept speaking, I realized she wasn’t trying to flatter me — it was because my dad’s voice was off-camera playing the female love interest my auditioning face was undressing with its eyes.”

Even though Rossif admitted that “I became an actor to be all that closer to my father,” he and Donald only got to work together once, on Risa Bramon Garcia’s 2010 film The Con Artist.

“I don’t remember much about the days dad and I had on set together, just that there was an ease,” Rossif said.

In the last three years of Donald’s life, Rossif assisted his father on a couple of features he wanted to do as his declining health was making work challenging for him.

“I got to witness this treasure of an actor — my dad — work,” Rossif said. “To him, performing was a ritual of sorts. Once he’d exhausted his research, he’d let himself be possessed. Sometimes he’d ask me for direction. I’d whisper something into his ear, and the flame in his eyes would flick at me, and the master would turn the seed of an idea into a flower in full bloom. It was like magic.”

***

The idea to pay tribute to Donald with Murder In a Small Town came from Rossif.

“People were asking what they could do to honor dad and, since dad had such an intimate relationship with the birth of this project, I proposed that they dedicate it to him,” he said.

Weir, who called the opportunity to work with both Sutherlands on the same project “absolutely magical,” loved the idea of the dedication.

“Apart from the fact Donald was so important to the industry, and, of course to Canada, perhaps the best Canadian actor ever, in terms of the project itself, Donald was so, so, so very important to the project from its inception, the way the script grew in the early days of development as a future film, and the way the characters grew. I can still hear his voice discussing things in script meetings.”

***

Because of the timing of his death, Donald was not able to see Murder In a Small Town and his son headlining his passion project.

“He was so happy to know that I was going to be playing this man. And I’m sorry that he’s gone, because he, he would have loved to have seen it,” Rossif said.

But even after his passing, Donald left a sign for his son.

“I spent the month of July in Quebec at the house that that he’s called home in the country that he so loved. I was alone there with my son,” Rossif said. “It’s the place where my father would spend his summers, and so many of my memories with him as a child were there. And there I was with my kid, and I was alone in this big house full of memories. My kid went to this camp that I used to go to as a kid, and while he was away, I took it upon myself to start cleaning the house. I did it room by room, and I ended up in dad’s bedroom, and there on his bedside table was a stack of all the Alberg books. That’s what he had been reading.”