Joe Cobden has supporting roles in The Stunt Driver, Villeneuve: The Rise of a Legend, American Hostage and Being Heumann.Supplied
In 2014, Brady Corbet – back when he was an actor, and not the award-winning director behind The Brutalist – set a Guinness-level, if not Guinness-certified, record, appearing in five features at the Toronto International Film Festival (Clouds of Sils Maria, Force Majeur, Eden, While We’re Young and Escobar: Paradise Lost). At this year’s TIFF, Corbet is sitting things out, but Canadian actor Joe Cobden has managed to get himself within spitting distance of the film-festival record.
With supporting roles in four TIFF premieres – the Canadian comedy The Stunt Driver starring Jay Baruchel, the Quebec Formula One biopic Villeneuve: The Rise of a Legend, the MGM+ series American Hostage led by Jon Hamm, and the festival’s opening-night film, the disability-rights drama Being Heumann featuring Mark Ruffalo – Cobden is walking into Toronto feeling like decades of hard work have paid off. Even if he’s completely aware that this is likely just a serendipitous moment in the life of a character actor, which is more valleys than peaks.
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“I’m not very savvy at, you know, maintaining any kind of momentum. I just do the audition and hope that it works out. But sometimes you just have these great years,” the actor says in an interview from his hometown of Montreal, from where he also splits his time between Toronto, Los Angeles and Halifax. “I’m in a suitcase, basically. I’m a regular at coffee shops with four towns with four bikes. It’s just an unpredictable kind of life, so you have to keep moving, to keep hustling.”
First in Montreal, then Halifax, Cobden grew up with a love of performance – but not necessarily acting. It was more street-level than that, with busking, clowning and dance, passions that led him to study theatre at Concordia in the late nineties.
From there, he’s had the typically peripatetic life of a supporting actor – someone who is consistently on the periphery of a scene, essential to its composition but not No. 1 on the call sheet. After years of working with everyone from Ari Aster (Beau Is Afraid) to Denis Villeneuve (Arrival) to Lee Daniels (The United States vs. Billie Holiday), Cobden has figured out that he can work with whatever material is given to him, for however long he’s onscreen, wherever the shoot might require him to be in the world.
“We all have our lanes. But this has been a great little roundup of projects for me: two Canadian, two American, which is kind of timely given the situation between our countries. But the movies don’t share anything other than they’re all period pieces. And, well, I’m in them all,” says the actor. “And I’m still getting used to auditions. Especially now, because they’re all self-taped instead of walking into a room and adjusting your performance to some intuitive response you’re getting from people on the other side of the table. Now, sometimes you get Zoom callbacks, which are pretty weird.”
At the same time, Cobden has been always pushing his own projects, including his Bell Fibe series Breaking Bread, in which he sits down with Halifax restaurateurs; his late and lamented sketch-comedy series Toothpix; and his forthcoming feature directorial debut, which he recently shot, about a man dealing with the fallout from his deceased father’s last will and testament. “God, features are weird,” he says. “It is not easy.”
Joel Plaskett/Supplied
There is a bonus to Cobden’s TIFF moment, too, that might push him over the top of Corbet’s run: At the same time that the festival kicks off its 51st edition this weekend, Cobden is busy occupying multiplexes across the country, with the actor providing the blocking and movements for the duplicitous Foghorn Leghorn in the new Looney Tunes movie Coyote vs. Acme, which was directed by his longtime friend Dave Green, with whom he made Toothpix back in the day.
“My dear friend just said, ‘Come to Albuquerque and play that character for a few weeks, and next thing I know I’m in a giant fat green suit, trying to mimic the cartoon character while standing next to John Cena,” Cobden recalls. “I also was mimicking Wile E. Coyote’s facial expressions for the actors to bounce off of – when he blinks, when he shifts his gaze, those sarcastic looks. It was absurd fun.”
As for taking the time to savour the festival spotlight, Cobden is, as always, realistic about the industry and its sporadic opportunities.
“I plan to be at all of the premieres, but it’s kind of awkward. Are you supposed to stand on the stage? Do you dress up? Are you trying too hard? Film festivals are like bad blue cocktails in a plastic cup with bad music just standing there, but it will be an opportunity to see all the people from these productions, and it’s a huge moment for them,” says Cobden. “For Michael Dowse, The Stunt Driver is a long, crazy journey for him, and even just to stand next to him while he goes through that, it’s good enough for me.”
The same sentiment goes for whatever roles might come his way next.
“I don’t think I’ve ever walked off a set and said to myself, ‘Another triumph!’ I’m just not sure. But if somebody sees one of the films and says to themselves, ‘Oh, you know, maybe I need a guy who looks like that,’ then I can catapult off of it,” he says.
“I do love the life of a supporting actor because you can jump from one job to the other and still get to go to the grocery store. When you’re young, you might think, oh, maybe I can be the next Robert Redford. But when you get to this age, you think, oh, maybe I’ll be Walter Matthau’s stand-in. You play the hand that you’re dealt, and it’s been a pretty amazing one so far.”