This playful six-part mockumentary tackles Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson’s infamous Olympic doping scandal with absurdity and humanity
Canadian comedian Anthony Q. Farrell remembers runner Ben Johnson’s 1988 Olympic race like it was yesterday. “We were jumping up, we were high-fiving, we were excited.He kind of put Canada on his back and we were all along for the ride,” says Farrell. “It was the biggest, beautiful-est thing in the world. Everyone was like, ‘Well, [American rival] Carl Lewis, he’s kind of full of himself,’ so we were happy that he got put in his place. And then everyt hing changed.” Indeed, just days later Johnson would be disqualified after it was discovered that he had the banned steroid stanozolol in his system. “But those two days,” says Farrell, “we were on top of the world.”
When production company New Metric Media was looking to tell Ben’s life story, having a writer from shows like The Office, Shelved and The Parker Andersons adapt it was perhaps not the first strategy that came to mind. But New Metric had tried to turn the story into a scripted drama and, “It was just too sad,’” Farrell recalls being told. So, they wanted to know if the Toronto funnyman could approach this infamous saga more in the vein of I, Tonya. “The first thing I did was talk to my wife,” says Farrell. “Her family is Jamaican and Bajan. She was like, ‘Don’t even think about it. You just leave Ben Johnson alone.’”
The scribe, whose own family hails from Saint Kitts and Nevis and still felt warmly about the Scarborough athlete, decided he needed to take a stab anyway. “What I wanted from the show was to put a little bit of shine back on Ben’s name, having it be a redemption moment for him,” Farrell explains. “She read it and she was like, ‘All right, you have to do this show.’”
Johnson himself has also seen the six episodes. “He feels good about them,” says Farrell. “Even just from talking about him, it’s very clear that Canada still loves him. When I’m out with him, I’m just like, ‘Oh, people miss you, man. Let’s put you back on the map!’”
Having an actor who wasn’t even alive in 1988 relate to the living legend could have presented a challenge, but this was not the case for Shamier Anderson, best known from his work on Invasion, Wynonna Earp and John Wick: Chapter 4. “I’m Jamaican. That’s the first connection. I’m from Scarborough. That’s the second connection. And he’s Black and that’s the third connection,” says Anderson. “But truly, as a proud Canadian, he’s one of my heroes and someone that I have known through his legacy and also his unfortunate events. Because of those things, I was very fond of him, and being given the opportunity to play him was a gift.”
Despite Johnson’s involvement in the project, and availability to him as a resource, Anderson decided he would do his research first before meeting the real-life person. “I wanted to really understand as much as I could before sitting down with him,” the actor explains. “The reason I did it that way is because I didn’t want to be too influenced by where he’s at now and what that could do to all the work that I’d done. So, when I met him, I invited him over and my family — my mom, my aunt, everybody — had dinner. We hung out in the backyard and I felt like [he was] a family member . . . The man is a real hoot!”
Being able to relate to Johnson’s upbringing didn’t take away from the true challenge: portraying the athlete at every age — the framing device of the show being that a modern-day Johnson has, himself, commissioned a documentary film crew to tell his story and “set the record straight.”
“What was really cool is that I got to play young Ben, adult Ben and senior citizen Ben,” says Anderson. “The senior citizen version of Ben was me having to shave my head and go bald. I transformed how I walked, gave myself a bit of a gut. So, it was definitely a beautiful arc physically, mentally and emotionally.” On the flip side, this also meant transforming himself into an elite athlete for much of the shoot. “I have to give respect to the folks that do this for a living. I do not train for a living. I trained for a living for this part, but I have so much respect for professional athletes because they put their bodies through so much more than I did in six months,” he says. “That levelled up my body fat, flexibility, mobility, speed, power, strength . . . Yeah, I’m fit by the standards of my family doctor, but then there’s elite fitness — really bringing your body to a place where you can be optimal and look good, feel good and perform well.”
And what about those scandals? “One of the things you see from the disclaimers and stuff is that this is his point of view, so we had Ben tell his side of things,” says Farrell. “We brought him into the writers’ room and a lot of the stuff that you’re like, ‘That’s not a true story’ — it’s a true story. We embellish a lot of things and we make it fun and silly, but there’s some stuff that’s in there where you think, ‘Well, that’s definitely embellished,’ and I’ll be like, ‘No, that happened.’” This includes addressing the doping scandal, head-on. “We get into how he got caught, the idea of there being an American athlete that drugged him while he was waiting to take his test,” says Farrell. “The drug that was in his system, scientists say that that drug tightens your muscles. That’s not a drug you take when you’re going to race. That’s a drug you take when you’re training, when you’re trying to build your muscles up. So, how did it get into his system? Ben said they drank eight or nine beers while he was waiting to pee, and when the 30 for 30 doc asked that guy, ‘Did you put something in Ben Johnson’s drink?’ he said, ‘Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t’ — stuff like that we get into in the show in a very funny way.”
While Farrell promises lots of surprises — from sports world cameos to shocking revelations — Anderson teases that viewers are about to get the full Ben Johnson story, warts and all. “I think in some biopics [the focus is,] ‘How do we amplify this human? How do we make this human look shiny? How do we make this person look good?’ In this one, we see all the sides — the good, the bad and the ugly. We don’t shy away from the things that people know about: the steroids, the women, the money. But it’s like a chocolate-covered vitamin. You get the sweet, but underneath it is all the goodness. That’s where you get to see his foundation with his family, his mom, his upbringing and his love for this country — because this man loves this country.”
The six-part miniseries begins March 26 with two episodes airing on cable channel GameTV (Thursday) and streamer Paramount+ (Friday), debuting two more per week through April 9 and 10.