Gleeful! by Amy Rickman

Author:Amy Rickman [Rickman, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-52520-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-27T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

DUMB JOCKS

Cory Monteith and Mark Salling are both twenty-seven—ten years older than the high-school seniors they play in Glee. But they’re by no means the first actors to play kids much younger than themselves. Rachel McAdams was twenty-four when she portrayed the fantastically evil Regina George in Mean Girls (2004). And they’re both still younger than Trevor Donovan in 90210, who is thirty-one and playing an eighteen-year-old.

“I love it,” said Cory. “I never really got to experience high school so [the show] is like giving me a second chance.”

Cory has never hidden the fact that he dropped out of high school after only one year. “I flipped off high school at a very young age,” he shrugs, talking to the Toronto Star. “I had bigger fish to fry, getting in trouble with all my friends and running away from home and bulls—t like that.”

In fact, he would never have enjoyed the full-on American high-school experience, had he stayed in school, for one simple reason—he’s Canadian. Born in Calgary, Alberta, his family moved to Victoria, British Columbia, when Cory was just a small boy. After dropping out of school, he worked a lot of odd jobs. His first was on a car lot when he was only thirteen. After that, he worked as a people greeter at Walmart, as a school bus driver, as a roofer, and as a cabdriver.

His biggest love was music and Cory classifies himself as a drummer. You can see his skills in the pilot episode when he takes over the drums during “Don’t Stop Believin’.” When he was seventeen, he played in a progressive new metal band in Victoria called New Westminster. “It wasn’t anything terribly compelling,” he told the Toronto Star. “Kind of King Crimson meets Queens of the Stone Age. Interesting stuff. It sure wasn’t Glee.” In fact, the band even had some interest from Atlantic Records, who sent up their A&R team to check them out. It wasn’t meant to be, although he remembers being incredibly excited at the time, but back then, something about his life just wasn’t fulfillling: “I was getting by, for sure. I was making a good living. But it really wasn’t a life, per se.”

Destiny had other plans for Cory. While working as a cabdriver, someone told him, “You know Cory, you should be an actor.” To such a free spirit, the idea of being able to act for a living must have had its appeal, but it was an impossible dream for someone living miles from any casting opportunities. So when Cory was twenty years old, he boarded the ferry to Vancouver Island and settled in the big city itself, Vancouver, B.C.

Vancouver is known as Hollywood North and a lot of big-budget American films and TV shows are shot there to save money. One major example is the Twilight franchise. While the original Twilight movie was filmed in Portland, Oregon, director Chris Weitz chose to move proceedings up to Vancouver for New Moon.

Of course, acting success

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