By Mike McCarthy
Charlie Carrick has been around the film world for a few years now, but has recently found his stride with his role as Robert Dudley on the hit show, Reign. Carrick being from North-East England has a pretty thick English accent and we asked him to talk with a North American accent and he directed us to his newest film, Ally was Screaming. Carrick is a down to earth dude that can’t dance and spends more time reading about soccer than anything else. You can see him on Reign on the CW on Friday nights. He didn’t get his license until he was 26, which is crazy to think about here in the U.S. when you can get your license at age 16.
Wingman Magazine: I hear that you started your own wrestling federation when you were a kid.
Charlie Carrick: Yeah me and my little brother discovered our own wrestling federation. It was called the PWA (Professional Wrestling Association). We used to love the WWE so we had this huge roster of our own wrestlers that we made up and then like we would write into the storyline that all these WWE wrestlers have joined our federation. So by the end, we had hundreds of wrestlers that we organized and had lots of match ups, on my moms bed of course.
Wingman Magazine: If you weren’t an actor, what would your career be?
Charlie Carrick: I think I would be a writer. I still do some writing now but in school I was a very good English student and a very good history student and my mom is a journalist… I have always been the guy that people go to, to edit their stuff. I used to edit my mom’s newspaper columns when I was a kid and just edited my cousin’s PHD. I get a kick out of polishing other people’s writings and also doing my own writing.
I wish I could write some novels. I often try to write scripts but they all turn into short stories. So most of what I have written up to this point has been like little short stories that I just keep to myself. With script writing, I have many friends who have sent me their draft to be edited or for my notes and I am pretty good at doing story editing. I am just not good at coming up with ideas but I think if someone gave me a good idea I could write it pretty well.
Wingman Magazine: You are on this season of Reign as Robert Dudley. Tell us about your character and when we can see you next on the show?
Charlie Carrick: Yes. So, I have had four episodes so far and we are shooting episode 12 this week. It’s going in a few different directions this season, which had previously been set in the French ward from the split between France and England. Queen Elizabeth who previously had just been sort of talked about, is now a rival to Mary and is now taking up half the show. Robert is obviously with Elizabeth and they are childhood friends who have known each other their whole life and she trusts him more than she trusts anybody else. They love each other and they wish that they could be together and be married but Robert is not of sufficient stature to marry the queen and also he’s married to somebody else which is the main stumbling block they have faced so far in this season.
Wingman Magazine: The Devout just premiered last month in the Vancouver Film Festival. What is the film about and what drew you to it?
Charlie Carrick: The Devout actually was premiering in Vancouver and was also premiering at Busan Film Festival in Korea. I was actually at that one. It worked out really weird, we were almost showing at the same time in the two cities. The Devout is a super different movie to anything that is happening in Reign. It’s a story about a young family in a small Christian town. I play the middle high school science teacher whose life and faith is kind of upended when his young daughter is terminally ill with cancer and he starts to believe through a series of events that his daughter is being reincarnated. As she gets sicker and sicker, she starts to talk about a previous life and my character Darryl starts to believe that she has had a previous life and she’ll come back as somebody else. At the same time it gives him something to cling on to as she goes through this awful time and also sends him away from his family as he goes down this kind of quest that ostracizes him from his whole community.
Wingman Magazine: What got you started in the world of entertainment…besides your previous wrestling career?
Charlie Carrick: Yeah, I know I have retired the Toy Boy, that was my character, but he has long been retired. When I was in school I started being in all the school plays and I couldn’t put my finger on what I enjoyed. I just started to really love that feeling and there was this small group of us sitting in class and just collaborating with people and it felt like an escape from school. It was weird, we would go into the theater at school and we would just be doing all this crazy stuff while down the hall people were doing math and physics and stuff. It just felt like cheating, like this bonus that no one else was privy to.
As I got older I started to love movies. I started to watch a lot of movies. I went to the cinema all the time and I just started to be really excited by the possibilities of it. Everything just seemed so much more exciting and more real in a way than in a boring day to day school boys’ life and I started to just get really addicted to that.
Wingman Magazine: Do you think there is one movie that pushed you into wanting to be an actor?
Charlie Carrick: I love movies, I see so many movies. There was one Toronto Film Festival when I saw like forty movies in the ten days of the festival. It was like heaven to me. The movie that I would say pushed me towards other films that I like is a film called Kes by Ken Loach. It takes place in the late 60’s, about a boy with a really tough life in a small town in the north of England and finds a Kestrel (a bird) and he learns to train it like you would a hawk. This whole life opens up before him. That is still the kind of film I love. A film that combines recognizable, traces and people with limited possibilities of life.
Wingman Magazine: Without revealing the show or film, what is one funny or horrific audition story?
Charlie Carrick: Yeah. I have many awful auditions but the one that comes to mind is my very first professional audition that I did. It was in Vancouver and I was probably like 21 or 22 and it was a commercial audition. I stopped going to commercial auditions almost immediately after this because they were too horrific. It was a clothing line or a department store where they bring you in with a bunch of other people. It was all these urban kids, and all these other awful cliched words on the breakdowns; Cool, hip, urban youth. Then there is me, 21 or 22, almost 6’3 and gangly and then there’s all these 16, 17 year old cool, skater kids, breakdancers and everything. I had to stand in a line and was towering over everybody and the producer comes out and says, “Hi there guys so I am just to say action and you guys just sort of have a chat about what you did over the summer or whatever.” To me, that’s the scariest thing ever, when you just have to riff on nothing. Then he said, “So just talk about your summer and at some point I’m just going to turn some music on and you guys just have to dance for a couple of minutes and that will be it.”
Again, I am a 6’3 gangly guy with no rhythm whatsoever so my dancing was awful. We started talking about what we did over the summer and this nice kid next to me was just telling me about how he was playing golf over the summer. I just turned bright red. Then all of sudden, at a crazy volume, “Hey YA!” by Outkast comes on and everyone just starts doing these crazy moves. There was literally a kid breakdancing, people are just dancing all over the place and I’m still dancing there like 45 year old man at a wedding. I was almost crying from embarrassment and what seemed like 10 minutes later the song finished. It was pretty bad.