Scary monster

>> Luc Picard plays the evil cult leader Roch Thériault in Savage Messiah

by MATTHEW HAYS

Luc Picard looks a wee bit anxious as we sit down to discuss his latest role. It’s certainly been one of his most difficult, he concedes, while sipping on a beer in a funky St. Denis pub. He decided, sometime last year, that this would be his year for creating baddie roles. With Roch Thériault, the central figure in Savage Messiah, Picard hit a veritable gold mine of evil.
But this role proved different for the seasoned thespian. His other big-screen baddie came in the form of a serial killer in Le Collectionneur, released earlier this year. But that was a fictional character. With Savage Messiah, Picard was faced with the Real Thing. And he didn’t always like that.

“I didn’t take the role at first,” the star of the immensely popular Omerta TV miniseries recalls of Messiah. “I was very troubled by the fact that it happened for real. I took a few weeks to think about it. He’s really vicious. I was pretty troubled by the character. He scared me.”

Harems and homicide

Thériault scared a few people in Quebec and Ontario when he had his own harem/commune outside of Lindsey, Ontario. There, calling himself Moses, Thériault had eight wives and 26 children who he lorded over. Savage Messiah is the story of one social worker (Polly Walker) who learned about the death of one of those children and became suspicious. Thériault managed to fool many of the locals while maintaining control over his harem, as he viciously assaulted any of his wives when they didn’t do his bidding and also sexually assaulted his children. After a lengthy trial, Thériault was convicted of murder (though he’s up for parole within a few years).

While Picard found Thériault unsettling, he says that “after a while, the challenge of the character got me into the mood. I thought it was a really interesting role. It’s a challenge for an actor to try and put into one piece, on the one hand the horror, the violence, on the other, some type of charisma that would make you understand why those women went with him.”
Picard says he didn’t think to get in touch with Thériault as a means of getting into character. “I didn’t want to get near him. He scares me. I did a serial killer before, but it was fiction. I had a lot of fun with it. But this part, because he really exists, was much more troubling. I read everything that was available, but I don’t know if a meeting would have been possible. I wanted to distance myself from the reality and build my own Roch.”

Mining Manson

Picard did think of other big-screen psychos as he prepared for his role. “The classic is Hopkins as Hannibal, of course. But Ted Levine was also amazing in Silence of the Lambs. Everyone talks about Hopkins, but Levine was amazing, he was this very scary mix of despair and rage.

“I thought a lot about [Tom Gries’ ’76 made-for-TV movie] Helter Skelter. I saw it when I was young and it scared me a lot. Then I went through every serial killer movie I could get my hands on. I was in bad company for most of the year. I thought a lot about killers and psychotics.”

As troubling as Thériault was for Picard, the actor acknowledges that audiences often do have fascination with violence and murder. “I don’t know why that is. Maybe it makes us feel alive. When you’re confronted with death it can make you feel alive. Fear makes you feel alive. Which explains why horror movies are so popular. We’ve created this world for ourselves in the West, we live relatively safe lives. We seek out fear. We want the luxury of experiencing fear without actually being in danger. It’s like going to an amusement park; you know you’re not going to get hurt, but you can touch fear.”

Picard has touched fear enough this time around. “One of the reasons I found this so troubling was that I’ve got a son now [Henri, who’s nine months old]. There were a couple of scenes that really scared me. There’s the scene where Roch tells a child to slap his mother. Even though the child actor was laughing in between takes and knew it was just a game, it was still difficult. Then after that, I’d go home to my son. I found it disturbing and sad.
“Now I’ll take a break from serial killing. That’s enough. I’ve touched it. I won’t go back to it for a long while.” :

Savage Messiah opens Friday, April 26