Hallmark Media recently announced their upcoming lineup of original movies that will air during the holiday season and Steve will star in one of them! You can find all the details about the movie below:
Premieres: Oct. 29, 10 p.m. ET/PT, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries
Stars: Erin Cahill, Steve Lund, Charlie Weber
Contains: Missing military man, missing military man’s wife trying to raise their daughter
Official description: “When Danielle’s husband goes missing in action during his deployment, she is left to raise her daughter on her own. Three years later, as she acclimates to life without him, she begins to tell her daughter bedtime stories of her father.”
VanCourier.com — The verdict is in on the Canadian courtroom drama “Street Legal.”
The CBC announced recently it has decided not to continue the series beyond six episodes.
The show debuted in March and was a reboot of the original Gemini Award-winning series that ran from 1987 to 1994.
Cynthia Dale starred in both the original series and the new incarnation, which saw her lawyer character working at a small upstart.
While the original version was a hit, the CBC said the reboot didn’t pull in the ratings it had hoped for.
“We are proud of ‘Street Legal,’ which had a strong creative and producing team and cast led by the talented Cynthia Dale,” Sally Catto, CBC’s general manager of programming, said in a statement.
“After thoughtful consideration, we have made the difficult decision not to continue beyond six episodes. While the series resonated with a smaller audience than we had hoped, the finale on Monday is a must-see for the show’s dedicated fan base.”
Airing on CBC-TV and the CBC Gem streaming service, the new “Street Legal” also starred Cara Ricketts, Steve Lund, and Yvonne Chapman. Other returning cast members included Eric Peterson and Anthony Sherwood.
“I will always be head-held-high proud of this show; I will always, always know in my gut that it was a really good show; and I will always, always, always hold the incredible joy we had when we filmed this deep in my heart,” Dale tweeted on Saturday.
Former CBC News anchor Peter Mansbridge, who is married to Dale, expressed disappointment with the cancellation on Twitter.
“I’m biased, but it feels like killing a quality Canadian show in a one-and-done fashion is short-sighted,” Mansbridge tweeted on Saturday.
“Good content can build support over time, by peer-to-peer influence. Smart investment in quality needs to be patient, otherwise the CBC loses the plot, not just a show.”
Sabsah.Libsyn.com — One things for sure – we at SEA AND BE SCENE have certainly enjoyed watching today’s guest over the years – from guest starring on shows like HAVEN, Reign and Frankie Drake Mysteries to starring roles in shows like the SyFy smash BITTEN and all kinds of truly romantic leading roles for the Hallmark Channel – Nova Scotia born actor STEVE LUND has given us plenty to celebrate over the years. So you can imagine how thrilled we were to hear he’ll be starring in the forthcoming CBC series STREET LEGAL – indeed the mega award winning long running drama is returning to prime time TV Starting Monday, March 4 and once again starring Cynthia Dale as the always fierce Olivia Novack but this time she’s got a a brand new team of lawyers to practice with and face off against – Steve Lund will star as the brash young lawyer Adam Darling – So we’ll talk about that new project and so much more – including what hockey brought to his life, his stance on social media and his great respect for the fans. We’ll also play an enlightening round of Insights IN 10 and get to first things first. BUT FIRST i gotta tell ya this whole interview was a first for SEA AND BE SCENE… AND HEARD now given the nature of this show and the crazy busy career of my guests so often in lieu of the ideal sit down we catch up over the phone – that’s not new – the fact that the guest was calling me – all the way from the tip of the southern most tip of the African Continent… that my friends is a first! Here’s my super-far, transatlantic phone call with the one and only Steve Lund.
TheCoast.ca — Steve Lund is a cliche. At first glance Lund seems about as rare as a three-leaf clover, or a piece of hay in a haystack. A Steve, after all, is just a variation on a Chris, a Ryan or, heaven help us, a Tom. A Steve is exactly who you’d expect to fall in love with a Sandra or an Emma. A Steve drives fast cars, flies to the moon, works for the CIA or gives Hitler a sock on the jaw. A Steve is unquestionably the lead actor in a CBC legal drama. But here, in his own words, is the thing that sets Steve Lund apart: “I still to this day never feel more myself, never feel more comfortable or more able to access more of my entire being than when I am on set.”
Ha! Just kidding. What a fucking cliche!
If you just look at Lund, it would be as easy to make him the new Batman as it would be to shrug him off as “that guy from Bitten” while paying him $40 for a photo at a fan convention. He’s tall, he’s white, he’s handsome. He has all the ingredients to fall up a ladder and into a Cinematic Universe or up a totally different ladder into 20 years of Supernatural.
But when you actually watch Lund, there is a spark of something else: A reminder that we are the ones who shouldn’t be so obvious, that we are the ones who need to ask for some nuance from our Chrises, our Ryans and our Toms. And when you really watch, there he is—a Steve!—offering it to us.
Lund grew up in Manor Park and Halifax’s south end. His first acting role was the role of Banzai, a hyena in a production of The Lion King at Shannon Park Elementary School. He was in grade four. “I think I stole the show,” he says. His voice warms with humour whenever he talks about his family and childhood. He has two sisters, one older and one younger. “I’m the jelly in that doughnut.” He liked to dress up as Indiana Jones. “I had the hat; I had the whip; I had the cap gun; I had the leather jacket. Oh yeah. I even had the satchel. I believe it is still in a birch tree in Dartmouth.”
In grade five, Lund was cast in Jafar in what sounds like a Guy Ritchie production of Aladdin, but the play was cancelled. “It was going to be my big break, for sure,” he claims, obviously serious. That play’s cancellation dovetailed with his first year of rep hockey. (Competitive minor league hockey that is more competitive than community-based house league.) “It all kind of fell into place before I really realized or had made a conscious decision and eventually hockey was everything. It was my entire life for a very long time.”
Lund, who says he is “not a natural athlete” with the same breeziness of Tyra Banks saying she was an awkward tween, was picked fifth overall in the 2005 Quebec Major Junior Hockey League draft. He played defense for the PEI Rocket (now Islanders) and Halifax Mooseheads until 2008. A series of concussions (“I was living in a fog for most of the year. It was really awful”) and a sucker-punch at a pick-up game (“It was really bad, I was lying unconscious in a pool of my own blood at centre ice while someone called the ambulance”) made him realize maybe a 19-year-old shouldn’t be facing the end of a career, but instead begin one. So he left the sport. Continue reading Photos/Interview: Steve Covers ‘The Coast’ Magazine
If anybody can come up with a punchline to that setup, it’s Halifax-born actor Steve Lund, who previously bared his canine teeth on the Syfy/Space horror series Bitten, and now trades his full moon fever in for a law degree on CBC-TV’s upcoming revival of its late-’80s/early ‘90s hit Street Legal, premiering on March 4.
“I think I have the answer,” he says after a few seconds’ thought. “The difference is a much better wardrobe.”
The Vancouver Film School-trained actor and former Halifax Mooseheads defenceman definitely looks sharp on the streets of Toronto in the new Street Legal, but his character Adam Darling is anything but a $1,000 suit shyster.
Instead, he’s part of a team of hungry young lawyers whose boutique advocacy law firm is working on a class action suit against big pharma over a highly addictive painkiller launched without the proper testing. As it turns out, they’re taking on the same pharmaceutical company that original series star Cynthia Dale’s Olivia Novak is after, when her Bay Street law firm implodes in a bloodbath of corporate headhunting.
Looking for a new challenge, and admiring her new partners’ energy and uncorrupted idealism, she agrees to bring her skill and guile to the table, joining Adam, Lilly Rue (played by Cara Ricketts) and Mina Lee (played by Yvonne Chapman). And so launches six episodes of the kinds of courtroom machinations and personal intrigue that were Street Legal’s stock-in-trade three decades ago.
Born in 1989, Lund was still a toddler when Street Legal was at its peak during its 1987-’94 run. When he got the chance to appear on the reboot, it wasn’t a name that registered with him immediately.
“When it was first mentioned to me, I thought maybe it was about a group of freewheeling auto mechanics,” he chuckles. “But when I looked into it, I realized there was a lot of history here, and it was one of the most successful Canadian TV shows of its time.
“There’s a lot of added responsibility when it comes to rebooting a series with such notoriety like that. But I also got the sense that there would be a lot of attention paid in the proper areas to do the original justice.
“I knew there would be a lot of integrity when it came to the scripts, with the tone of the show and putting a contemporary spin on a cherished classic. It seemed everybody would undoubtedly want to do a good job with it, and that was an alluring prospect, knowing they were trying to craft something great.”
In the first two episodes available to preview, Lund’s character Adam has a lot to cope with. The young lawyers realize they might be getting in over their head with a major case against a company that has further reach and more legal clout than they can shake a brief at, but Adam has a personal reason to go after the pharmaceutical corporation.
His parents — played by veteran actors Rosemary Dunsmore and Tom McCamus, both recently seen on Orphan Black — struggle with his mother’s addiction to the new painkiller that wasn’t supposed to be harmful. His father is a man of the cloth, but even this seems to be beyond his powers of understanding. It’s up to Adam to breach the gap, and when he got the script, Lund couldn’t wait to take on the challenge.
“Everything about this project and this character jumped out at me and attracted me to it very early on, and continued to do so every single day that we worked,” he says. “I was so happy to be given all this rich material and opportunities to do all these things I hadn’t really had the chance to do before.
“I’d been bursting at the seams to do more of this sort of thing, and then to be given these incredible castmates to work opposite, the work is already done in some respects. I just gotta keep the pace up.”
The new Street Legal hits the ground running with its very first episode, as Cynthia has to switch strategies while her former partners betray her at every turn. But the show’s emotional charge comes during heartrending scenes of watching Adam cope with his mother’s painful withdrawal symptoms.
Lund says those scenes required every bit of skill that he has, but he also felt empowered by the strength of the performances by Dunsmore and McCamus, which took him places he’d never been before.
“Part of the thrill of it all is trying to engage in a good rally between those two,” he says. “The heavy emotional side of it, the family aspect, is something I really relished in. I found tremendous joy in being able to access the love and the gravity that comes along with family.
“I’m very close with my family and we’ve been through a lot together and have come out the other side a very fortified bunch. I think it really lends itself to being able to access the emotions that are needed for this type of subject matter. My character goes through the wringer throughout the series, you haven’t seen the half of it yet. And yet it was so fun to do, I had such a ball, I wish I could do that every day.”
Some of the most powerful scenes have barely any dialogue at all, and Lund credits director Sturla Gunnarsson, with whom he’d worked previously on Schitt’s Creek, with bringing years of experience to bear on getting them just right.
“I remember one of the first really emotional scenes that I had, it was in the first week of shooting, and I was pinching myself and stepping back between takes. I was thinking of the genre stuff I’d been doing and thinking, ‘Wow, this beats the hell out of sci-fi, doesn’t it,’ and wiping the tears from my eyes, getting ready for the next take.
“I was right where I wanted to be, doing exactly what I wanted to do, and precisely what I set out to do and be a part of when I made the choice to become an actor.”
Lund’s on-camera career has built slowly but steadily since it began a decade ago, with enjoyable recurring characters on Haven and Schitt’s Creek alternating with major series roles on Bitten, Reign (CW’s series about Mary, Queen of Scots) and now Street Legal.
With this first round of the latter show wrapped, and his next adventure about to begin in Cape Town, South Africa on a horror film for the Syfy network, Lund appears to have no regrets about trading in his hockey stick for movie and TV scripts.
“Absolutely not,” he says with a laugh. “I was just reminiscing about being on the bus and all the travel we had to do. And the fact that you don’t really have a say in the matter. You have to play a certain schedule, even when you’re not feeling good, and the whole world of it all was something I was ready to let go of.
“And I have absolutely no regrets, I haven’t looked back and wondered about what could have been. I feel much more like myself, and like I’m doing what I was meant to do. More than I ever did playing hockey. I was fortunate to realize that early on, when I made the change, and it’s been a blast ever since.”
Steve is reportedly set to star in the Warner Bro. Home Entertainment and Syfy production of of the 1960’s show turned horror film The Banana Splits. You can read more below as reported by Deadline.com
Bingo, Fleegle, Drooper and Snorky, the zany collective better known as The Banana Splits, are coming back with a vengeance — and with a body count?
As revivals go, this one may be as audacious as it is unexpected: Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and Syfy are bringing back the Banana Splits, the trippy-dippy characters introduced back in 1968 as the anthropomorphic hosts of The Banana Splits Adventure Hour variety program. This time around, however, the Banana Splits are being served up in a horror thriller.
The original movie will premiere this year from Blue Ribbon Content, Warner Bros Television Group’s digital studio, via a Warner Bros. Home Entertainment release that will be followed by the television debut on Syfy. The official synopsis: “In the upcoming horror thriller, a boy named Harley and his family (brother Austin, mother Beth, and father Mitch) attend a taping of The Banana Splits TV show, which is supposed to be a fun-filled birthday for young Harley and business as usual for Rebecca, the producer of the series. But things take an unexpected turn — and the body count quickly rises. Can Harley, his mom and their new pals safely escape?”
The Banana Splits revival stars Dani Kind (Wyonna Earp) as Beth, Finlay Wojtak-Hissong (The Kindness of Strangers), Romeo Carere as Austin, Steve Lund (Schitt’s Creek) as Mitch and Sara Canning (The Vampire Diaries) as Rebecca. Danishka Esterhazy (Level 16) is directing the horror project from a script by Jed Elinoff & Scott Thomas (Raven’s Home). The Banana Splits is produced by Blue Ribbon Content in association with Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and SYFY.
For those who didn’t know, Steve took part of a short film last year titled Affection which he also helped produced. The film is about a woman that has been fighting with self-doubt all her life with nowhere to call home until she’s faced with a conquest that results in something much more, thanks to her facing a raw feeling she’s rarely faced before: affection.
The short film was written and directed by Tricia Lee who had this to say when asked about the casting of the film in an interview with IndieActivity.com
indieactivity: Did you start writing with a cast (You or any) in mind?
Tricia Lee: I did not have anyone in mind when writing. I like the characters to grow into who they want to be on the page before inhabiting them in a body and giving them a face. I am not an actor, so it definitely would not be me starring in it! But I did find the perfect people to play the characters of Laina and Tyler.
Steve Lund had an older look than I had originally conceived the character to be but when his agent sent his portfolio to me, I knew immediately that I needed to change the role to fit him. I wrote Steve a personal letter to convince him to be in the film and he wrote me back the sweetest letter, accepting. I later found out that he had written the letter without even reading the script! You would recognize Steve from Bitten, Reign and Schitt’s Creek.
You can watch the 9 minute short film below, in addition to the HD screen captures in the gallery now.
Premieres: Oct. 29, 10 p.m. ET/PT, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries
