Image courtesy of Shaw Media.
Continuum, the mind-bending sci-fi series that is part time travel adventure and part procedural, is nearing the end of a successful second season on its native Canadian channel Showcase. Meanwhile, south of the border it is halfway through the same season on Syfy.
The show stars Rachel Nichols as tough cop Kiera Cameron who has come back from the future with members of a terrorist group to stop them making mischief in the present. Helping Cameron is earnest Vancouver cop Carlos Fonnegra, played by Victor Webster.
Thanks to Continuum's action-packed scripts, Fonnegra sees a lot of action. The well-built Webster has no problem with the physical demands of the show, however, as he revealed when TMR chatted with him recently.
"That's one of the things I love about the show is how much action we have," Webster said. "A stunt day for me is not a work day; a stunt day for me is a day to come and play. I do all of my own stuff unless they are absolutely adamant against me not doing something. But so far that hasn't happened."
Webster is no stranger to physical activity being a black belt in Tae Kwon Do. Yet, fighting in a TV show is a completely different ball game from fighting in sport, he explained.
"I started training when I was around nine years old and I still train and still compete now," Webster said. "But doing stunts is more than just fighting. Doing something over and over and over again and throwing yourself, being flipped onto a table and being thrown through a wall, is a workout. At the end of shooting for three or four hours you are tired, you're sore, you're bruised up, you're bleeding. It's not easy but it's incredibly enjoyable. And the way we write action, it's not typical action. It's very dirty. Stuff is getting broken, people are getting smashed with things."
In the episode "Split Second" Webster had one of the most challenging fight scenes he has ever had to do in the series when he was trapped in the back of a police van with Travis Verta (Roger C. Cross), a physically enhanced member of the terrorist group Liber8. It was all in a day's work for Webster, though.
"That was brutal," Webster said. "Carlos is flying all over the place. You've got Travis's super-soldier, who's twice or three times as strong as Carlos, just literally picking him and slamming him into walls and throwing him around. When we were doing that stuff I was just launching myself into walls and just jumping in the air and smashing my head, face and body against the side of the van. I loved it."
