Sitting in his home office in Squamish, B.C., movie star Lorne Cardinal talks over Skype about his acting career.
He is Cree from the Sucker Creek First Nation in Alta., and is probably best known for his recurring role in the Corner Gas TV series.
Cardinal also lends his voice to the Corner Gas animation show which just aired its third season.
When asked what is was like seeing himself as an animated character?
“I said whatever you do just give me a waist because the first drawings I saw was like this, I was like ‘ummmm nooooo!’” he said laughing.
Cardinal is one of Canada’s most celebrated Indigenous actors and he’s won numerous awards including a Gemini award for best ensemble performance in the Corner Gas franchise.
More recently, he won the best actor award at the prestigious American Indian Film Festival for the film Kayak to Klemtu. – and he’s also recipient of the August Schellenberg award from the Imaginative Film Festival in Toronto.
He also has an honorary Ph’D from Thompson Rivers university in Kamloops, B.C.
But before finding stardom he played rugby and had dreams of playing on the national team – he also worked as a tree planter and photographer in Alberta before moving to Kamloops in the late 1980s – and it was there that by chance he stumbled upon an acting class at the local college.
“I asked my teacher, I asked Dr. David Edwards, I said how do I make a living at this how do I become a professional actor and do this all the time? His best advice he gave to me was get training find the place to get the best training you can get so I did I ended up at the University of Alberta and dedicated three years of my life learning the craft of acting classical theatre classical Shakespeare training and it was the best investment I’ve made in myself and paid it itself off numerous numerous times,” he said.
Soon his name will be up in lights permanently at the Roxy Theatre in Edmonton when it renames the black box theatre after him.
With such a storied career, Cardinal says it got even better when he got cast last year on FBI: MOST WANTED on CBS.
“Not every day you get Dick Wolf coming to call on you. I never auditioned for it he just got a hold of my agent.”
