by AMY BARRATT

Slashers, Samhain, The Beast… Neil Napier's film résumé reads like a catalogue of locally made horror pics. More recently, and in just a few years, he's also become one of the busiest theatre actors in town.

Napier studied theatre at John Abbott in the late '80s and got serious about acting as a career in 2000. A good number of the years in between were lost, he admits, to "partying." But in 1996, he went on the wagon and, as he puts it, "started reclaiming the areas of my life I had let fall."

One of those areas was athletics. Napier started playing rugby again and getting into his current buff shape. The real turning point, though, came in 2000, when Napier had to have spinal surgery to remove a tumour that was slowly stopping him from walking. "I had to spend two weeks in bed," he says. "Something like that gives you time to re-assess." He decided it was time to find out if he could make it as an actor, and if that was something he still wanted.

"I grabbed a Mirror and went to the auditions section," he recalls. "One ad was for a no-budget independent feature. I auditioned and got the lead. After the first day on the set, I realized that's what I had to do." After that, he quickly built a résumé through his new-found policy of "say yes first and then panic about it."

Napier had never done Shakespeare before Gravy Bath Productions asked him to work on their Coriolanus. Ditto mask work when he was approached by Mask On! He says he was terrified both times, but jumped on board. Earlier this season, he made his Centaur debut in The Shape of Things.

"I learned a lot from those experiences," Napier says. He brought a lot to them, too.