He’s thrown a grenade right at us. I glare at him, willing him to take it back.
‘I know that this is bringing up… other stuff for you. I am trying to be extremely mindful of that. But you’re not the only fucking person who lost someone here,’ he says,turning to leave for the bedroom. Noel Edmonds and hisDeal or No Dealboxes, a sort of televisual Ambien, take me on into the night-time. I find succour in the contestants who leave with a £5 box.You and me, Barbara, I think,living right on the shitty end of the stick.To show some manner of willing, I shower first thing the following morning until the water turns icy, watching as dirty water circles the drain. The sense of achievement is enough to get me to leave the house. To the first tree I see and back, I tell myself over and over.
I’ve only been inside the flat for a few weeks, give or take, but the whole world feels different, as unsettling as a lunar landscape.
As I walk into Victoria Park, I feel a small bounce of recognition as a man in an aviator jacket walks towards me. Is he a friend of a friend? Someone’s boyfriend or brother? One of the finance guys? I finally land on it. He’s that actor from that thing, Mr Snuffleupagus. He looks back at me with his beautiful sad brown eyes and for all their softness, it feels like a laser has gone through me. Was that a Look look? My head involuntarily swivels to see who is behind me, but no, there’s no one else there.
It’s not quite a thunderbolt or anything. But it’s a definite… weather event. It’s only as I keep walking that I realize I’ve been left a little short of breath.
I look at the clock in the sitting room and it’s 3.45 a.m. I’m savouring the quietness of the world– just me, the urban foxes and the general pallor of misery– when I type the words ‘Ted Levy’ into YouTube. We definitely shared something on the street earlier. Anything over three seconds long is definitely, definitely… something. I’m glowy,just thinking of those beautiful eyes looking at me. Not just looking, but seeing.
The first thing that shows up is a god-awful TV movie from 1999:Kelly, Please Eat Something. Absolute twenty-four-carat shite, which will do me just nicely. In it, a beautiful teenage girl with Björk-style twists in her hair is hiding an eating disorder from her family. Ted Levy, with his wallet chain and bleached tips, is her gay best friend, begging her to seek help. The hair game is always surprisingly strong in these movies. As they lean against their high-school lockers, he looks into her eyes, holding her shoulders. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do without you, but I don’t ever want it to come to that,’ he is telling her. I laugh at the dialogue, but my stomach warms at the kind, concerned way he looks at her. This guy is delivering his dreadful lines with his absolute all; I’ll give the dude that.
A quick google brings up a newspaper article and there he is, slightly older and more filled out.
Montreal Sentinel, 20 July 2008, by Dylan Bloom
With his days as a glorified speaking extra behind him, Ted Levy is fast gaining a reputation for portraying show-stealing characters with complex emotional depths. In the indie sleeper hitShock & Awe, his star turn as a young father getting over the death of his daughter has won him many admirers, yet the Toronto resident doesn’t like to overthink his work.
‘I don’t really go into it thinking about pushing the boundaries of acting, or what it means for acting overall.’ Levy shrugs. ‘The characters are just there, flying around in my head, waiting to be given a voice.’
Though not best described as a typical leading man, Levy, 40, has an undeniable charm. Slightly jowly, with a jawline that seems to suit the nature of his everyman work, he wears a baseball cap pulled down over a mass of wiry dark brown hair that obscures his preternaturally animated brown eyes.
Some who know Levy from his time at the Harepepper Theatre Company speak of a painfully shy and reticent player. Others mention a Jekyll and Hyde performer who suddenly springs to life once the limelight finds him. The emerging picture is that of a blazing, but slightly reluctant, talent.
‘He’s not a scenester at all,’ says fellow actor Miriam Waters, who has performed with Levy several times. ‘He comes, he inhabits whatever character he is asked to, he goes home. It’s ironic, because he’s actually pretty good at what he does, but I suspect he is terrified at the idea of being widely recognized for it.’
He’s in under my skin, so I decide to google Ted Levy a bit more. Another article; this time in theToronto Daily.
Toronto Daily, 25 August 2008
A spot as a leading figurehead in Canada’s acting pantheon could well be Ted Levy’s for the taking, but the prospect doesn’t interest him. Perhaps his sense of being an outsider suggests why.
Growing up in the affluent Bathurst Street of Toronto, Levy enjoyed a typically middle-class Jewish upbringing. His mother was an elementary school teacher, while his father, now remarried, works as an accountant in Alberta.His parents divorced when Levy was a teenager and his father went on to remarry. He has a step-sister who is a kindergarten teacher– although in interviews he won’t be drawn on any further details on his family.
‘Things got dark,’ is all Levy will say on the matter, over lunch at La Salsa. ‘My dad was not a good guy when we were kids. To any of us. We talk occasionally now, but it took us a long time to even get back into a room together.’
Causing mayhem in middle school with impressions of his teachers during math class, Levy also recalls being something of an attention-seeker in his earlier years.
‘It all mellowed out for me in high school, though,’ he recalls. ‘I just wanted to blend in, desperately.’
Blending in definitely doesn’t appear to be part of Levy’s master plan these days.
‘I mean, some of the roles I take on can seem a little left of centre, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m an extrovert, or as colourful, or as outspoken as any of them,’ he says, shrinking even further into our booth. ‘Honestly, I’m so normal, it’s kind of funny.’
A few days later, as I’m waiting for reruns ofBullseyeto start and with Johnny long retired to the scratcher, I faff about on Facebook, on Twitter. Essie Marie has now opened Twitter and MySpace accounts in addition to her Facebook profile– why not be someone else entirely new on there as well? I check my emails. I am actively trying to ignore Ted Levy, and it’s taking quite an amount of effort to not think about the very idea of him. In the end, it all becomes too much and I type ‘Ted Levy’ into Google. The words on autocomplete make my heart jump. ‘Ted Levygirlfriend’. ‘Ted Levy wife’. ‘Ted Levy net worth’. ‘Ted Levy Canadian’. The ‘wife’ search brings up nothing, but I fall instantly on an old Getty image. ‘Ted Levy and girlfriend Linda Morello’.
It takes mere seconds for the image to fully pop up on my screen, but it feels like hours. I drink every pixel in. Their bodies are cleaved together intimately in the closeness of a long-time couple. They are both smiling for the camera but somehow holding something back from it, something just for themselves. Ted’s face is turned towards her, as though the intrusion of the camera has momentarily broken something lovely and secret between them.
I zoom in on Linda. Her eyes are warm brown, twinkling with happiness. She looks like a regular woman, the sort I’d be friends with. I start to imagine what it might be like to be friends with both of them. Opening the door to them at a dinner party, thanking them for the lovely expensive wine they’ve just brought, telling them that I’ve just spent an absolute bloody fortune on burrata and tapenades, sit anywhere you like. Linda’s top in the image is unfashionable, but impressively low-cut. I look at the softness of the skin below her clavicles and imagine him touching her there. Her teeth are crooked in a way that seems to make me like Ted Levy even more.
Heavy with curiosity, I search for some more information on her and them. No sign of her on LinkedIn or Facebook. ‘Bit rude,’ I tut at the room. I google ‘Linda Morello Toronto’ and there’s a Linda Morello working in a Tim Hortons coffee shop on the harbourfront and she’s in management and that can’t be her, surely? I then search for ‘Linda Morello Ted Levy’ and I can already feel the sweat on my upper lip when Google autocorrect fills out the rest. ‘Breakup’.
Canadatheatrenews.ca, 1 July 2008
Rising theatre star Ted Levy splits with high school sweetheart Linda Morello
Ted Levy took to the stage at the Tarragon last night despite nursing heartbreak after calling it quits with his partner and sometime collaborator Linda Morello. Insiders say that things have been entirely amicable and, moving forward, Linda will always be Levy’s greatest professional champion. ‘They were just moving at different speeds, in different circles,’ says a friend, who also hinted that despite the friendly nature of the breakup, the actor is still ‘hurting’.
