What would you say is the power in this show’s particular brand of sci-fi spy fiction?
I’ve been a fan of espionage fiction since I was 13. I started reading James Bond, and then as I got older I read more complex stuff, so I was a fan of Le Carré. I was fascinated by the world of loyalty and dilemma of loyalties, because my parents are Holocaust survivors — and because I’m fascinated by what patriotism can do and what nationalism can do, and what unchecked idealism that turns fanatical can do. It’s part of my dealing with generational trauma, which I guess every culture has. We all have victims, we all have perpetrators, we all have bystanders, heroes, cowards in all of our backgrounds, but because my parents survived the Holocaust and because I was born in a refugee camp . . . I was fascinated by the script.
But way before the script, I was fascinated by what are the restrictions morally — are there any? — when it comes to protecting your country? Flag-waving is a dangerous thing in my background. Because when people wave flags, my people run for the hills.
How does The Copenhagen Test stand out from other offerings in the genre?
It’s a very intricately plotted, beautifully mitigated story that does not talk down to the audience. It’s a propulsive thriller, yes, but it also is challenging the audience at every turn. When you think you’ve figured out what it is, it takes the ground out from under you — not just for entertainment’s sake as cliffhangers, but it does it on a deeper level because it’s undermining the audience’s sense of what is right and wrong. There aren’t a lot of shows that do that. When you watch espionage shows, you’re told pretty much who the bad guy is, and you’re waiting for redemption and some kind of catharsis where the bad guy’s going to be blown away — hopefully viciously and dramatically, with a lot of explosives. We want justice, because we sure as hell aren’t getting it every day in our lives . . . so we want to see it on our television sets. But this isn’t going to do that. It’s going to challenge your ideas in a very entertaining and very thrilling kind of way.
You have an interesting, pre-existing connection to this show’s leading man, Simu Liu . . .
Simu Liu, I feel kind of an odd father ownership of — because maybe 16 years ago one of his first jobs was to be Bartender No. 2 on a series I did called Warehouse 13. I wasn’t in the scene where he was Bartender No. 2, but I know that’s one of the things he did before he broke out in one of the most successful situation comedies in Canadian history, which was Kim’s Convenience — where he learned his craft — and then doing Marvel, and from then on becoming very famous, [gaining] the notoriety that’s earned by very hard work and talent.
I’ve been doing series for over 45 years, and I can tell you the key to leadership is to realize that you’re there to support everyone else — not to be supported by everyone else. You’re a hub on a wheel. There’s only one reason for a hub, and that’s to make the wheel go round and to support the spokes. Many leaders don’t realize it or don’t have the personality for it, but we were very lucky on this show because Simu, whatever he’s learned from Kim’s Convenience and his background, this is a leading actor who is supportive of everyone around him.
Speaking of Warehouse 13, was that a rare experience for you? Actors mostly just jump from role to role. But you got to spend half a decade with a single character, telling a single story, as only a TV show can really offer.
Not only a television show, because it’s not the only place you can do it. I’ve just experienced it; I’m doing a one-man [stage] show called Playing Shylock, which I started last year in Toronto. And there’s a cliché in theatre, which is that your very best show in your first week is not 10 per cent as good as your worst show in your last week. The French have an interesting word for audience: l’assistance. An audience teaches you from performance to performance what it’s about. I would imagine that some very good movie star who’s never done theatre gets convinced to do Broadway, and maybe they’ve never done a play since high school. I would imagine that those actors are now thinking to themselves, “What the f***? I’ve got to do this eight times a week for four more months?”
They’re going to learn what you just said about doing television series: that the nature of your craft as an artist is transformed by the more you play the role . . . It transforms you as an artist, if you let it transform you. It doesn’t necessarily happen. Some artists are not transformed by the experience of doing a series weekly for years, by doing a play for four months. It could be a great performance even if they’re not allowing that transformation. But for me, all my life, I have been interested in taking chances. I’ve been interested in risking abject failure — because I was taught that way from the time I was a child.
Can you talk about Playing Shylock, and the cultural commentary this production makes regarding this historically hot-button character?
The character I’m playing is an actor who’s playing the role of Shylock in Merchant of Venice, and it’s a one-man show. The Merchant of Venice has been cancelled by the theatre because it’s considered anti-Semitic, and there’s pressure from the Jewish community to stop the run of the show, and the cast finds out during intermission. This character of Shylock is considered a lightning rod for anti-Semitism for 400 years, and I say [to the audience], “Well, why would I be doing that?” The actor’s name that I’m playing is Saul Rubinek. The same name as mine, who’ the child of Holocaust survivors. Why would I be doing an anti-Semitic play?
Not only that, my father was an actor in Yiddish theatre who always wanted to play Shylock, but Hitler stopped him from doing Yiddish theatre, and so I’m playing the character as if my father’s playing it — with a Yiddish accent and as an Orthodox Jew. And I’m playing him very Jewish — whereas most of the time Jews don’t play this role. It’s played as a metaphor. “Jew” becomes a metaphor for whatever “other” is currently the most oppressed in whatever community is staging it. Directors have to figure out a way to make literature’s most infamous Jew as inoffensive to Jews as possible, usually by making sure the character of Shylock is not presented as Jewish.
You also have a new book out, All in the Telling. It’s a sequel of sorts to another book you put out in 1988, So Many Miracles, about your parents’ experience surviving the Holocaust. What can you say about that?
I’d written a book between 1976 and 1985, which consisted of 10 years almost of interviews with my parents about their lives before, during and after the war . . . and this friend of mine said, “You’re not done with this story.” I was really upset with him. I said, “I interviewed my parents for 10 years, I took them back to Poland, they had a documentary film [made in conjunction with the book] they could show people . . . I’ve done my duty as a nice Jewish son. Leave me the f*** alone!” And my friend Rick [Cleveland, Emmy-winning West Wing screenwriter] said, “Saul, you’ve told everybody’s story but your own. You haven’t told your story, and you haven’t told your sister’s story, and you haven’t told your daughter’s story . . .”
[The new book] is a way of telling a story mostly about the relationship between me and my parents, and their biblical reaction to me not having a Jewish girlfriend — and the lies that were told because of it. It relates to many cultures, so it’s really a book only for people who’ve had parents. If you don’t have parents, then I wouldn’t read this book!
It is about the fact that all cultures have perpetrators and victims and cowards and heroes and bystanders — and sometimes those qualities are in the same person, on the same day. It tries to reach its hand out to other children of parents who have tried to overcome intergenerational trauma, by using humour as a way of bonding.
The Copenhagen Test airs on Showcase
MEMORABLE ROLES:
Across a decades-spanning career, Mr. Rubinek has been nothing less than prolific — appearing in iconic films like Unforgiven, Nixon and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. He’s been equally visible on TV, notably recurring as Daphne Moon’s love interest Donny on hit sitcom Frasier, plus a five-season run on supernatural action romp Warehouse 13. Also a frequent treader of the boards, Rubinek just wrapped an off-Broadway run in subversive one-man show Playing Shylock. What’s more, the man’s an author, having penned 1988 memoir So Many Miracles about his parents’ experiences in the Holocaust — a saga he recently expanded via new tome All in the Telling: a somewhat true story, about his own life as the child of Holocaust survivors.
CURRENT GIG:
Espionage thriller The Copenhagen Test centres on Alexander (Simu Liu), a haunted soldier turned intelligence analyst who learns his brain has been hacked — everything he sees and hears now being transmitted to an unknown enemy. Canadian Saul Rubinek plays Victor — an ex-spy, current restaurateur who serves as a mentor to Alex, while also concealing a few secrets of his own.