Troy Mundle is an actor, writer and producer living in Vancouver, BC, Canada. He was Louis Ferreira’s stand-in for both seasons of Stargate Universe and season 1 of Motive. He is currently in pre-production for his own series “Ghost Unit” in which Louis will also star.
Troy joined The Friends of Louis Ferreira in August 2015 with an interview, originally featured in Ferreira Fest 68 and now posted below.
AN INTERVIEW WITH TROY MUNDLE
Troy is a young actor and film maker living in Vancouver BC, and he has been a good friend of Louis for many years now, since he worked as his stand-in during the filming of Stargate Universe. Many thanks to Louis for lining up this connection!
We’ll let Louis introduce Troy Mundle!
Listen to the sound clip here:
LF – Troy Mundle. My boy, my brother. We met on Stargate, where he stood in for me for a couple of years, and quickly became friends. He then, also, stood in for Motive for the first year, before deciding that he was ready to venture out and pursue his own path, which I only supported and encouraged. He’s gone on to do a web-series which has gotten a lot of notoriety here in Vancouver. I’m really proud, I’ve seen it, it’s awesome, he’s excellent.
And he’s about to do a second possible web-series and asked me to be in it, which I’ve happily said yes to. So we’re shooting that next month.
Just a sweetheart of a beautiful man and brother who is passionate about his dreams and is following them and he’s filled with integrity and I love that about him.
We did a road trip together. So disciplined.
And, great admiration for him.
Truly one of my best friends here in Vancouver, so I’m happy that you got to interview him and people are going to get to know my buddy Troy.
And here’s Troy Mundle!
Listen to the sound clip here:
FF – Hi Troy! This is Ferreira Fest, and we’re so glad to have you in an interview today, and welcome!
TM – Well, hello, thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
FF – All right. Well, let’s dive right in. So, let’s start with something relatively simple. Who is Troy Mundle? And, what gets you up in the morning?
TM – Troy Mundle is just a regular guy who is trying to make a career in the film world. Basically that’s exactly what gets me up in the morning, and it drives me. That’s the big driving force for me.
FF – Okay. Straight to the point! Looking at your resume and at the body of your work, you’ve done a lot of different jobs in the film industry. What is your true passion and what would you like to do more of, given the chance?
TM – My true passion is acting, it always has been acting. I love it, there’s nothing else that I get that high from when I’m on set or when I’m performing or when I’m taking on a different role. For me, that’s what I would love to do and I would love to do more of. That’s it for me, basically.
FF – So, when did you get bitten by “The Bug”?
TM – The Bug? Okay, so, the bug is kind of a two-part answer. I am from a small village on the east coast, actually, myself, Pointe-à-la-Croix, Québec, so, after the university, I was kind of sitting around, everybody was going in their career directions, and I had no idea what I wanted to do. I did some small theater pieces, community theater and variety shows and stuff, but nothing that would make me say, hey, you know, maybe you should try acting as a career.
Then one afternoon I was sitting down in front of the TV and doing the same thing that I would normally do, just imitate the actors on TV, and it finally dawned on me, maybe it would be cool if I tried acting.
Unbeknownst to anybody, because I certainly wouldn’t have voiced my ambitions back home because I would have laughed out of the village, but I decided to pack a bag and head to Toronto.
And that’s where part two hit. My cousin had said, “Listen, why don’t you do some background [work], see if you actually like being on a set, and you can take it from there.”
So I said, okay, cool. So, I’ll give that a whirl.
So, my very, very first day was on a set for a movie called Last Night, it was directed by Don McKellar. So, we’re out, we’re down at the DVP, I think there was a group of maybe sixty to eighty extras out there. And then there was a guy who was kind of looking through the crowd and he made eye-contact with me and he started looking at me.
And I figured… I didn’t know what was going on, I figured I might be in trouble, I didn’t know what the hell the deal was. So finally he leaves, then he comes back with another man and they both start pointing at me and then they tell me to come over.
So, I figured that I was either going to get kicked off set or… I just didn’t really even know what was going on. I was so naïve back in the day. So, when I walked over to them, the gentleman said, “Okay, listen, you’ve been actually picked out of the crowd, we’re going to use you for the scene.”
FF – My gosh!
TM – So, anyway… yeah. So, I got picked out of the eighty extras. And then there was about six of us who went down to where the scene was going to be taking place, and again, first day on set, I had no idea who anybody was, what anybody was, what was going on. I was just doing what I was told to do, basically.
So, then, another gentleman comes over, and says, “Okay, so you’re going to be the guy that hands the bad guy the golf clubs. So, end result was, this car comes speeding in, we jump in front of it, the car stops, the main actor, bad guy/ stunt guy, hops on the car, I hand him the club and he starts smashing in the windshield. And out pops Sandra Oh, and I didn’t realize it was Sandra Oh back at the time, but at that moment, at the end of that day, when that was going down, that was the instant that I knew there was nothing else that I wanted to do.
FF – Talk about in at the deep end!
TM – I know, seriously isn’t it? Yeah!
FF – Well, that’s fantastic. Wow! Did you ever find out why they picked you out of the crowd? Did you just have the right look? Or why do you think?
TM – I’m going to say maybe, I honestly don’t know. But, yeah, it was that moment that cemented the entire deal for me.
FF – Wow, that’s fantastic. What a great story! As you’ve gone into that direction and developed your skills as an actor, at Ferreira Fest we’re very interested in how people get to where they are and who has helped them along the way. So, mentoring is a big thing for our organization here. Who were, or possibly even still are, your mentors? And do you yourself have an interest in mentoring?
TM – I would love to mentor. I love passing on that knowledge, or helping someone else work through the finer details as much as I possibly can with my limited experience, of course. But as far as mentors for myself, I never actually had like a “mentor” mentor, per se.
But there have definitely been key individuals in my life that have had very significant impacts.
I guess some of them would be an acting teacher named Bruce Clayton, who I used to study with back in Toronto, I’m actually taking a class with him right now.
There’s another one, John Riven, I studied Meisner with him for an entire year. He had a huge impact for me in my acting.
Another would have been Nancy Sivak, another teacher, Andrew McIlroy, and on a personal level, Louis has actually been a tremendous rock for me, in my personal life.
FF – That’s great, because the thing that we’ve discovered about mentoring, talking to various people, is that you’re never too old and never too young to mentor or be mentored by someone. It’s a constant give and take.
TM – Exactly.
FF – You just mentioned Louis. So, you’ve worked as a stand-in for Louis on Motive. And for how long did you do that? What exactly is the job? And one of our members wanted to know, how do you get to be a stand-in? Assuming that physical resemblance is somehow an issue. So talk a little bit about that. What’s life as a stand-in like?
TM – Life as a stand-in, I honestly stumbled into it by complete accident, to be perfectly honest with you. Yes, I did stand in for Louis on Motive, but I also stood in for him two seasons on Stargate Universe as well.
So I was actually able to work with him for three seasons, it was fantastic, it was a really, really, really, really cool job. But I started off with… have you watched Stargate Universe, by chance?
FF – I’ve pretty much got it memorized, yeah.
TM – (laughs) Okay! Awesome, awesome! Okay, so then you know the pilot episode, everybody comes through the gate? And then Colonel Young is kind of thrown and he’s unconscious and he’s lying towards the back of the Gateroom.
FF – Right, right, pants on fire, yeah, we remember that scene.
TM – Yeah, okay, yeah, so they wanted a photo double that day. So basically they hired me to come in and be Louis’ photo double, so that he didn’t have to lie on the floor all day. And then at the end of the day, they were just like, “Hey, listen, we need a stand-in for Louis, do you want to stand in?”
I’m like, “Yeah, sounds like a great job!” I mean you get up every morning and you go to work in a spaceship for two seasons. It’s really really cool. But being a stand-in, you’re right, you have to match the actor somewhat in height, I guess body size, hair color. It is a very cool job. It’s almost like a paid acting course because the amount of knowledge that you can get if you’re present and if you’re on set and you ask questions and you do your job properly is invaluable.
Basically what a stand-in does is we will watch the blocking of the scene, and then once the camera ACs lay down the marks, and the director is happy with the way rehearsal has gone and the actors are released to go back and prep and go into makeup and get their audio all rigged up, the stand-ins will stand on the marks so that the lighting crew can properly light them, the camera boys can work out their angles and their camera moves.
Once that all gets done then they do something called a second team rehearsal.
So basically the stand-ins will go through the motions that the actors will take and hit all of the marks in the scene so that all the details can be worked out before, of course, they call that first team in, and then the lights, camera, action, go and the scene gets shot.
FF – Right, wow, that sounds like on the job training, in many ways, too.
TM – You know what, it was. It’s really different, especially when you’re setting up certain shots where the actor is only in front of the camera for a few seconds, but you have to stand in front of the camera, for sometimes, for fifteen minutes, ten minutes, where the camera is literally inches from your face and you’re staring just off to the side. It was a little unnerving, the first couple times it happened. But like anything, you get used to it and it’s just another day at work.
But yeah, no, it was a fantastic job. Stargate Universe was like a family. It was a really, really, really amazing set to work on.
FF – And then you worked how long on Motive?
TM – Motive was one season.
FF – One season.
TM – Yeah. Season one.
FF – Right. Do you have any funny memories, being a stand-in? Any funny stories that you recall?
TM – For me, standing in, I don’t think so. I do have two funny stories of Louis, actually though. Because Louis is a character. Louis is hilarious. There was one time, it was just after we broke for hiatus, I can’t remember if it was season one or season two of Stargate Universe, they’d wrapped Louis for the hiatus, and it was supposed to be his day off but they needed him to come back for some reason. And he was like, “Yeah, sure I’ll come back but I’m on my way to the beach.”
They’re like, “Yeah, it doesn’t matter, just come as you are.”
And so Louis shows up in a pair of sandals, crazy shorts, crazy Hawaiian t-shirt, this massive straw hat, big sunglasses and of course a coconut with a straw in it and he’s doing one of his characters, it’s absolutely hilarious.
FF – Oh my god, you know what, I think Joe Mallozzi took a picture of that.
TM – He probably did. Joe would have been around for that, absolutely, for sure.
FF – Yeah.
TM – Yeah, he was, it was hilarious. Everybody was roaring their asses off on set, it was hilarious. Now, the second one was, Louis, again Stargate Universe, Louis created a character based on one of the breakfast menu items at the catering truck, the catering guys ended up by something called huevos rancheros. So Louis completely created this character called Huevos Rancheros.
And he talked with a thick accent and he had the poise of a veteran Matador. Or, you know, a Latin dance teacher who’s been teaching forever. And then he’d show up every morning in breakfast line with some other very interesting object taped to his lip, you know, to mock a mustache. It was absolutely insanely, ridiculously funny.
FF – Well, while we’re talking about Stargate Universe, can you tell us a little bit more about making the jump and being a stand-in for most of the time and then actually being a character. What was that like for you?
TM – It was, it was a little difficult. I’ve been standing in for, I think Alliances was season two.
FF – Yes.
TM – So, basically, you’ve been standing in for X amount of time, then, I just found out the night before, actually. They said, “Listen, we haven’t been able to cast this role, can we pop you in?”
I’m like, “Yeah, for sure!” But it was an absolute blast to have a chance to work with Lou Diamond and Ming-Na in that scene. So, yeah, no, it was really, really fun, I really enjoyed it.
FF – Well, that’s wonderful. More recently than Stargate Universe we’ve heard about Single & Dating in Vancouver, how did that come about?
TM – That came about… I actually started writing Single and Dating in Vancouver while I was still on Motive, during hiatus and during the weekends. It was towards the end of that season of Motive, I’m like, “Okay, you know what, standing-in is great and I love it, but I didn’t move to Vancouver to stand-in. So I’ve got to take my career in my hands and actually do something with it.”
And that’s kind of how Single and Dating popped up. There was myself and my buddy Michael, we were putting together sketch comedy skits, and there was one that I came up with, it was a small sketch comedy series about bad dates gone horribly wrong, loosely based on my personal life when I first moved to Vancouver.
I liked the series enough that I didn’t want to waste the idea on small skits that featured the same actors playing different characters.
I wanted to make it more of a series where the audience could pop on and go along a ride with the characters and develop relationships with them and all that jazz.
FF – Right.
TM – So, it was around that time where there was a lot of press about how bad the dating scene here was in Vancouver. It was in newspapers, it was in news segments in the evenings.
So, believe it or not, for the first time in my existence, I was actually the right guy with the right idea at the right time. And it snowballed. Because we’ve had a lot of media coverage, actually, here in the last little bit.
FF – Yeah, yeah, absolutely. When I first watched the pilot, I’ll tell you one thing, though, I was howling. There’s this one scene where you… it’s about stand-ins and what stand-ins do, and you come running down that hill and you fall and you can hear the camera guy say, “I’m pretty sure Louis didn’t fall during the rehearsal.” Do you remember that?
TM – Yeah, I do!
FF – And I was just howling at that. Because it was kind of a little bit of an inside joke but I totally got it.
TM – Well, you know, there are times where it does happen, on set, and you think you know what the actor did, and then you do it and you hear that voice in the background. And, it’s not so much that you even hear them say it to their AC, and you’re like, yeah, Louis didn’t do that. You know, you do have those moments, so that’s what I was trying to parody with that. Yeah, you caught it, that kind of stuff does happen on the set once in a while.
FF – I was just wondering, it was such a good joke, it was like, that must have been based on a real experience, or something similar that happened. It’s just too good, it was so perfect. It was a great moment, and after that I was hooked. I just kept watching as stuff came in.
Let’s move on to Ghost Unit, so you’re working on Ghost Unit right now and the trailer looks fantastic, it’s beautiful, it’s exciting and it’s really awesome, very action packed. Is that going to be a web series or TV?
TM – That was actually the first project that I wrote, way back in the day. It was initially supposed to be a comedy, but over the years it morphed into something that it is what it is now, which is, wow, it’s taken on such a different life right now. It’s pretty crazy when I think about how far that it’s come. But in any case, it started off as a web-series, but now it’s being pitched as an hour dramatic, so that’s the direction we’re moving in with it now.
FF – Okay. So, is the filming for the pilot complete?
TM – No. We haven’t actually started. It’s been a little bit of a trying period with us, as far as scheduling is concerned. We were supposed to shoot on the twenty-third of May. But right now our new tentative shoot date is September twelfth. So that’s what we’re aiming for right now.
FF – Okay.
TM – Luckily it’s a two day shoot. And basically it’s a little bit smaller. It would have been a web-series pilot but because we’re shooting this now as the hour dramatic, it’s basically a demo that we’re shooting right now.
FF – Gotcha. Okay. Okay. So, who else is involved in the production right now? Besides you.
TM – The production team consists of myself, we’ve got Chad Riley who plays Chad on Single and Dating. And we’ve also got Jon Warne who is fantastic and then Marco Bossow is also involved as well. He was our DOP for SADinVAN.
FF – Yeah, gotcha, gotcha. And then in terms of who did you snag for characters, I read somewhere that you had Eugene Lipinski?
TM – Eugene Lipinski is in there. We are in talks with several other people, right now I can’t actually mention their names, just in case.
FF – Oh, please don’t! Don’t get yourself in trouble.
TM – Yeah, yeah, no, exactly, exactly. Our fingers are crossed that it goes through because some of these people have some absolutely ridiculous talent. I just get excited when I start to think about the possibilities. There’s also myself, again, Chad, we’ve also got a few other people, we’ve got some stunt boys in there and Marcus Rosner who’s a new face to our productions, right now.
FF – I’m hoping you’ll keep us updated on that because certainly we’re going to keep an eye on you there. And what’s going to happen with that series. So please keep us in the loop.
TM – Oh, absolutely.
FF – We’ve already talked about that you’ve known Louis for a number of years now because of Stargate Universe. Is there any particular memory that you have that you would like to share besides the two funky stories, but maybe a memory that you had from working with him, directly?
TM – Um, let me see here, working with him directly. Most of my fond memories with Louis is hanging out with him. He’s an amazing guy. I mean, the guy is so charismatic, he’s so present, and he’s just fun to be around. He’s got that energy that people just want to be around.
I think my fondest memory is, Louis and I did a road trip, back in January. I was down in L.A. and he had to get his truck up here and drive up with the dogs. It was basically him and I and the dogs. We drove from L.A. to Vancouver. And I think that was probably one of my fondest memories. It was just fantastic.
We got a chance to hang out, we got a chance to talk. We ate breakfast, it was just a really really good experience. Yeah, yeah. I think that’s probably my fondest memory right now.
FF – Did you have to sing Karaoke in the car?
TM – You know what? We did. I have to admit, that was one of the things that Louis got me over was Karaoke, because the first night we were there I just wouldn’t do it, I was just too embarrassed. But now, several Karaoke sessions in, I don’t really have any qualms about singing Bon Jovi, or anything like that.
FF – We’ll call that a major breakthrough here, okay.
TM – It was, it was. Yeah.
FF – Oh, that’s wonderful! Well, we’re almost at the end here, Troy, so here comes the difficult question that all of our interview guests get confronted with: If you could describe Louis in four words, what would they be?
TM – You know, it is difficult. Four words, I think for a guy like Louis, is kind of limiting. I would almost dare to say, to describe him… because I know him both, as most of the Friends of Ferreira know him, both sides, personally and professionally, but, you know, I think as an actor, the man is extremely talented. He’s incredible.
I’ve worked with him enough to see him come on set and to work his scenes and just the character depth, he’s present, his work ethic is incredible, just being charismatic with his characters.
Knowing him on a personal level, he’s a man that’s true to his word. You know what I mean. He’s very loyal, he’s very friendly, he’s very devoted. He’s an amazing dad, his relationships with his kids are tight. One of those things where, god, I hope I have that kind of relationship with my kids, when that time comes.
But I think the thing, one of the things that strikes me with Louis is that… and not a lot of people are like this, especially people who have worked in film as long as he has and have reached that level that he has, but he will talk to the homeless guy on the street the same way that he talks to someone at a restaurant or to the janitor or to a CEO. To him, everybody’s a human being and he has this tremendous amount of respect when he talks to people. In today’s society, everything’s hierarchy, some people have beefs with other people, and stuff like that. He just doesn’t have any of that. And it’s really amazing, it goes to show how much of a caring human being he is.
FF – Oh, that’s great. So, do you want to narrow this down to four words?
TM – Oh god, they don’t get narrowed down for me! Okay.
FF – You can do it.
TM – Okay. I’m gonna go… four words, okay.
Extremely talented. Amazing. Incredible father. Charismatic as hell. (And funny!)
FF – Okay. That sounds great. Those are fantastic words, Troy! You passed!
TM – All right!
FF – Wonderful! Well thank you so much for being with us today. And we’ll certainly follow your newest endeavors, and thanks again so much for your time. And, we’ll talk to you again soon.
TM – Well, that’s fantastic. It was a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you so much, I appreciate the opportunity.
FF – Okay, you have a great evening.
TM – You as well.
Thanks to Troy for allowing us to use his personal photos, and thanks to Casey for the transcripts!
Keep Up With Troy Mundle
Check out Troy Mundle’s web page.
Follow Troy Mundle on Twitter!
Check out Troy Mundle’s Instagram posts!
Here’s Troy Mundle’s IMDb file.
You can also find Troy Mundle on Storyhive.
Troy also has a Facebook page for career related updates.
Troy Mundle is at Eagle Point Studios.
Stargate Universe: Alliances link to his character Sergeant Hyatt.
All about SADinVAN
All about Ghost Unit
Watch Troy Mundle’s Videos
Season 1 of Single and Dating in Vancouver
Season 2 of Single and Dating in Vancouver (Louis appears in the first episode)
