Meet Marcel Jeannin, as Ned Land

Posted on: Tuesday, June 13, 2017

Marcel Jeannin plays the tough, freedom-loving harpoonist in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, June 7 - July 1 at Asolo Repertory Theatre.

Where are you from?
Montréal, Québec, Canada

Some of your career highlights include…
Performing at the New Victory Theatre in the greatest city in the world(!), shooting a mini-series in Moscow for a month, touring a play in France for two months, and being in two different shows in two different theatres at the same time.

Describe your most memorable onstage experience of all time…
It was actually an OFFstage experience. My first year out of school and I was playing a Mariner in the first scene of The Tempest at the Stratford Festival. They gave me this cool stunt in the storm scene where the boat would list suddenly, hurling me across the stage and before I went “overboard”, I was supposed to grab two ropes from the rigging and go sailing over the heads of the audience. One night, I ran full tilt at the ropes but just as I was about to grab them, they got pulled to the side in the chaos and I went flying offstage, right INTO the audience, landing at the feet of this very nice old lady who became not-so-nice when she realized that I had unfortunately crushed her purse.

Name one thing you do in your daily routine to lessen your impact on the environment
For a while, I would wash only once a year to save water, but my friends stopped hanging out with me. So now, whenever possible I try to buy only locally grown fruits and vegetables, and meat that hasn’t been factory farmed.

Tell us about your favorite sea creature…
The Ogopogo. A mythical Sea monster that lives in Okanagen Lake, in British Columbia. It is said to be a cousin of the Loch Ness monster only much more polite, eh.

What does the phrase “Love of theater” mean to you?
I have to break it down. The “love” part is abandoning yourself to something outside yourself and letting it change you. The “theater” part is when an actor tells the audience “I’m going to pretend I’m a King now and I’d like you to believe it” and the audience says “We know your just an actor but for a couple of hours we will pretend that we believe you are a King.” So I think “Love of Theater” is knowing you may end up entertained, a little more enlightened, and have a slightly different perspective of the world to take home with you, simply by abandoning yourself to a story for a few hours.