Local actor Keith Morrison gets physical in Hobo With A Shotgun

Anyone who caught the one week, one performance a night run of “Hobo With A Shotgun” at our local cineplex may have found themselves saying, “Hey, that tall blond guy getting clobbered on looks familiar.”

It was Glace Bay actor, playwright, and director Keith Morrison performing his own stunts as one half of a “bum fight”.

Morrison moved to Halifax a couple of years ago after acting in many local theatre productions, writing popular one-acts like “4 For Tarabish”, helping to organize and participate in several guerrilla film weekends and performing in locally shot films like the Gaelic language short, “The Wake of Calum MacLeod”.

“Hobo with a Shotgun” is a 2011 Canadian action exploitation film starring cult movie icon Rutger Hauer and directed by Jason Eisener and written by John Davies, that began its cinematic life as a fake trailer included in the Grindhouse double feature created by Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodríguez.

“To be honest, my role in Hobo was a two second fight with another CBer, Jason Collier, who worked with Jason Eisner before on Treevenge and was the one responsible for getting me the gig,” Morrison says. “At the time Jason was training me for wrestling and working as a wrestler himself. Oddly enough I first met Jason when I did a magazine article on wrestling.”

“My experience was very short. I was there for about four hours on the first day of shooting. I had injured my neck two days before and had very little strength in my right side, but was able to fake a pretty good fight thanks mainly to Jason’s experience and abilities.”

“I did get a few minutes with Rutger Hauer, which was neat. He actually filmed a few seconds of the fight rehearsals on his own camera for some reason. Seemed like a cool guy. Though I only spent a very short time there, it was a fun experience.”

As for theatre work, Morrison recently finished up Thomas Middleton’s “A Chaste Maid at Cheapside” and “The Revenger’s Tragedy” for Vile Passeist Theater, a Halifax company that produces drama from the periods around the Elizabethan era. He is currently rehearsing with VPT for Ben Jonson’s “Bartholomew’s Fair”, scheduled to run in July.

“I’m am still writing a bit,” Morrison says about his own creative projects, “but seem to be jumping around a lot from project to project and will hopefully have at least two more in the can by the end of July.”

“Despite the fact (my work in “Hobo”) was only a very short scene, it’s cool how many people have contacted me about it online and via facebook,” Morrison says.

For more info on the movie, visit Hobo With A Shotgun online.