This week’s Tabletop is DREADfully good.

Every season of Tabletop, I feature a roleplaying game. I’ve done this, because my not-so-secret wish all along was to do a spinoff show that was a season-long RPG adventure with persistent characters.

We’ve done Fiasco and Dragon Age, and this season, we’re playing DREAD.

I. Freaking. Love. This. Game.

We have a great group of players: Molly Lewis, Ivan van Norman, and Laura Bailey (who I cast in Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana).

This was intended to be a single episode, but I liked it so much, and I am so incredibly proud of the story we told and the way we told it, I decided to make this a two-part episode.

Here’s part one:

I really hope you like this as much as I do, and I hope you’ll be happy to know that we aren’t doing a gag reel next week; we’re going to do part two, so you don’t have to wait.

If you’d like to learn more about DREAD, or get your own copy, you can find out more at their website. SPOILER WARNING: We played an adapted version of the Beneath A Full Moon setting. If you read that part, it’ll probably wreck some of the drama and suspense for you.

Dark Matter

If you don’t follow me on Twitter (good idea, by the way), you don’t know that the show I’m working on this week is Dark Matter, which is coming to the network formerly-known as Sci-Fi next month.

Here’s the trailer:

The basic premise of the show is: some people wake up from stasis on a space ship, and they have no memories of who they are or why they are there. As they uncover the truth about themselves … it gets complicated (and they have lots of secrets). It’s based on a comic book that I absolutely loved, and though I can’t get into specifics about the character I’m playing (SPOILERS!) … but the creator can!

Wil will be playing the part of Alexander Rook, President and CEO of Dwarf Star Technologies and…well, I can’t say more.  Suffice it to say, you’ll love him in the role because Wil is positively tearing it up, delivering a performance that is cool, controlled, compassionate, canny, confident, with a touch of creepiness and a dash of Angostura bitters.  I was truly heartened by the fact that he clearly gave it a lot of thought prior to his arrival, crafting a charmingly nuanced character in preparation for his scenes and then positively wowing us with his take.

I have had an absolutely wonderful time bringing Alexander Rook to life. In fact, yesterday was the most satisfying dramatic, on-camera acting work I’ve done in years. I mean, I’ve been very lucky to do a lot of comedic work recently, and over sixty episodes of Tabletop is nothing to sneeze at (do people actually sneeze at things to, like, disdain them? Is that a thing? I’ve never seen a person sneeze in derision at something, come to think of it) … but for the last year or so, I’ve honestly wondered if I would ever get a chance to do serious on-camera, dramatic acting again.

Well, it turns out that I can do some tremendously satisfying work, making complex (yet simple in execution) choices, when I get to work with great writing, fantastic actors, and a wonderful director.

Maybe I’m not finished being an on-camera actor, after all.

Maybe …

at home, thousands of miles away from home

I was in most of the scenes we shot yesterday, including a scene where I talked for almost three pages.

Three. Pages. Of. Dialog.

It was a lot, and we were filming right next to an airport so there were constant interruptions from airplanes, so I messed up more than I would have liked … but the cast and crew were really awesome and understanding, and we got through it.

Actually, we didn’t just “get through it.” We did some really great work together. You see, I break down my scenes into actions, intentions, goals, and a few other specific things. Just like in real life, I may want to Let Them Know I’m The Boss, or Put Them At Ease, or Make A Generous Offer. I may need to do all of those things in the span of a few lines, because my primary goal that ties all of that together is To Get Them To Go Along With Something I Can’t Live Without.

Being able to take all of that work and put it into a scene, but then also throw all the preparation away and keep it simple and in the moment is a challenge on in the best of circumstances (it’s easy to get wrapped up in the process, to go into my head and lose my connection to the character and the scene — this is what an actor like me goes to school for years to learn how to overcome) but when there are airplanes a few hundred feet away ever two minutes, it’s even more challenging than usual. It would be very, very easy to be so distracted by the noise and so concerned with just getting through the scene, that I could lose all the levels and character choices … but the director and the cast made sure that didn’t happen, by reassuring me that the performance was layered and communicated all the things I wanted to communicate. (I usually have a good sense of what I’m doing, but there was so much to think about, so much information to convey, and so much noise distracting me, I wasn’t able to know if I was on point or not — and this is where  a good, engaged director and cast is the difference between a performance that is meaningful to the audience and a performance that doesn’t quite hit the mark).

So it was a very long day, and a very challenging one, but I’m proud of what we did and happy with the work.

I’ll be honest: I keep thinking that I’m done being an on-camera actor, but then I have an experience like the one I had yesterday, and I remember how much fun, and how artistically satisfying it is, to take the words off the page and bring them to life with some other people.

I’m in a lot of stuff, again, today. I get to work with an actor who I instantly liked tomorrow, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what we discover together in our scenes.

In which a scene from a movie is recreated (or: further confirmation of the benefits of being easily amused.)

I’m in Toronto for a couple of days, working on a show, before I go to Ottawa later this week.

I’ve had a nice time while I’ve been here, though I wasn’t prepared for how profoundly lonely I would feel after just 24 hours away from my family. I guess after months of spending as much time with my wife, kids, and dogs as I want, I’d grown accustomed to their faces.

To help ease my loneliness, I went for a big walk all around the city today. I took a lot of pictures, and I shot a lot of video, with the intention of making a short thing that I could put on the YouTubes about my day and the stuff I saw. Being creative while I was also being a tourist engaged my brain and my soul in a very good way.

Toward the end of my adventures, I wandered into a train museum thing by the CN tower (TRAINS INTO TUNNELS…) and I got inspired to make this really stupid-but-amusing-to-me thing:

Not bad for something I put together in iMovie in about 15 minutes, I must say.