Dan Jeannotte (Sense and Sensibility - Hallmark Channel)

[00:00:00] Hi, I'm Brian and I love Hallmark movies.

[00:00:06] I'm Dan and I despise Hallmark movies.

[00:00:09] I'm Dan Janot.

[00:00:10] I make Hallmark movies and I'm going to change Dan's mind about them.

[00:00:13] And this is the Deck the Hallmark podcast.

[00:00:16] Deck the Hallmark.

[00:00:17] It's his podcast.

[00:00:18] Bring Dan and friends host his podcast.

[00:00:21] We hope you like this Dolly podcast. I know that you think old Jane Austen novels are the same because you hate women, but I just, I hate most women that put it on the record. Dan, I can't be on this show. Put it on the record. Dan, thank you for joining us while you're still here. Thank you so much. We're so excited to have you. Are you currently in Canada?

[00:01:41] I know you're Canadian.

[00:01:42] Are you currently in Canada?

[00:01:43] I am.

[00:01:44] I am Canadian and I'm currently in Canada being a good Canadian.

[00:01:46] Yup.

[00:01:47] Yeah, you are.

[00:01:48] Congratulations. Awesome. No, but yeah, let's go like, where'd you grow up and what were you like as a kid? Were you a kid that was always putting on for the people around you or did that kind of come later in life when you found out about movies and whatnot? Yeah, well, yeah, I was born and raised in Montreal. And yeah, when I was a kid, I mean,

[00:03:02] maybe I was a little bit of a little bit of a. Like as I became a teenager I became kind of obsessed with movies and yeah that kind of helped pave my way towards working in that field I guess. Do you remember the movie that kind of unlocked like your love of cinema? Is there a moment

[00:04:21] you can think of as a teenager then there were like these crazy dumb comedies that I remember my brother and I watching over and over again like Ace Venture or like this movie called UHF.

[00:05:40] Oh, Weird Al where he's got the TV station.

[00:05:43] Are you kidding?

[00:05:44] Yes.

[00:05:45] Dan, are we best friends?

[00:05:46] This is fantastic.

[00:05:47] I think we are.

[00:05:48] Dude, I love UHF. whatever was playing at the movie theaters and then as I got kind of late later into my teens started getting into comedy like sketch comedy shows on TV British stuff weird kind of yeah loopy sketch comedy and that kind of culminated I with I ended up joining becoming friends with a guy in college

[00:07:03] who told me he was starting an improv troupe shout out to my boy Matt Goldberg 15 years. Oh wow. Yeah for a long time and with the same group of guys, group of people that I met in college, we started performing at college and then you know left and kept doing our thing and refined our thing and started touring. We did shows all over Canada and in it those those people are my best friends

[00:08:24] now still and we went on to write sketch comedy as well and yeah it was a big my gang because their show was, yeah, like mid-90s. And yeah, just kind of, they were doing something that was quite different and edgy, like Kids in the Hall got a lot edgier than SNL. Of course. Never did. But it got weird. Oh, super weird.

[00:09:46] And yeah, that was definitely part of my growing up. SC wasn't entirely sure. All I knew was that I liked writing. I thought when I was younger that I might be a writer when I got over like an author. And that was a vague idea. And then I went into, you know, when I liked certain,

[00:11:04] I liked studying certain things, I was, you know, started an agent come along or did you get an agent to start taking auditions for, for screen stuff? Where's the transition? Eventually. Yeah. Eventually I did like for a while, as I say, it was indie theater in Montreal and, and improv and sketch stuff. And then, uh, yeah, I eventually had a couple of agents, um, and started

[00:12:22] auditioning for commercials and for kind of lower tier stuff.

[00:13:27] job that I got my first on-screen gig because I was reading for a movie, I was reading you know all the other lines for this movie that was casting in Montreal

[00:13:32] and the director was there for some of the auditions and eventually he said

[00:13:37] something I was there when he said it he was like maybe we could get Dan in

[00:13:42] there somewhere maybe we can get him a little part you know when I was It's like, hey, damn, we need you to come do some film work. Or what is that? Well, the first thing I did for Ubisoft, the first Assassin's Creed game that I did, it was for I auditioned to play the main character, the player character in the game. And so that was like usually for the bigger roles in video games.

[00:15:00] Now it's an audition process pretty giant empty warehouse kind of space. And you are mostly just imagining what you're seeing, you know, as an actor with some, some things are physical, like they're going to give you like, okay, here's a foam sword, you know, and here's like a table for you to shove the guy up against. And the rest of it, you're just imagining. So it's kind of like theater and improv in that way. And

[00:16:23] that was so much fun to work on that game. And yeah All right, cut, Dan. Now this is the abdomen. We're going to really need you to kick it up a notch, all right, buddy? Yeah. So you said you worked on that project for a year. Were you able to do other stuff during like a-

[00:17:40] Oh yeah.

[00:17:41] It was like a year just here and there, you know, because it's not like a movie that shoots

[00:17:47] for a month or two straight. And that, yeah, that's kind of the holy grail for couple of years, and I knew about Rain because Rain shot right next door to us, so we'd occasionally see, like, the actors from Rain in their costumes and stuff, you know? And I was like, oh, that looks like fun. And then when I auditioned for it, you know, any kind of period thing is really fun because it's really playing dress up, you know what I mean? And Rain was a crazy show. It was really like melodramatic in a really fun way. Every episode seemed to be about like the fate of the nation hangs in the balance

[00:21:42] and there's always someone getting betrayed

[00:21:44] and someone getting imprisoned and someone killing someone. And that was definitely, I mean, that's not even subjective starstruckness. Do you know what I mean? He's a global superstar, right? And so like, that's Bruce Willis. And I remember, I had a small part. And you know, when you're on set, you kind of have to know your, after one or two takes I was like it seemed to me from the way we were leading him to the car that we were gonna like be bringing him to The driver's side door like we were gonna be letting the prisoner drive And and I said that after a couple takes I was like it's like we're gonna let you drive and he actually like chuckled

[00:24:22] And I'm like, oh my god. Yeah, I did it. You did I made Bruce Willis laugh. I did it. I can retire now

[00:25:21] it becomes an offer situation. So like it's, you audition, you audition,

[00:25:23] and then at some point it's like,

[00:25:24] Dan, we got a movie for you.

[00:25:25] Like, is that where that happened?

[00:25:27] You got on Good Witch and have 25 episodes,

[00:25:29] or did you have to do a couple movies first?

[00:25:32] So no, I did Good Witch first.

[00:25:34] That was my first thing with Hallmark.

[00:25:37] And yeah, I auditioned for that.

[00:25:40] It's funny, you know, sometimes audition processes

[00:25:44] are really drawn out, and sometimes they can be really quick, if you want, but light and it's positive. And I think I learned, I learned on set, watched the pros, the Catherine Bell and Jamie Denton that I was working with, watched them doing their thing and they're so good at it. And yeah, I did that for a couple of years. And then ended up, like,

[00:27:02] cause we were talking about I got onto rain.

[00:27:04]