It takes nearly the entire first episode of “Bon Cop, Bad Cop,” the new Crave series, for the characters from the 2006 film comedy, and its 2017 sequel, to reunite. When they do finally meet up, though, there’s a strange moment of hesitation. For some reason, neurotic Montreal detective David (Patrick Bouchard) fails to recognize his former partner and does a double take. “Did you change your hair?” he asks the man across from him. “C’est la moustache,” replies Anglophone Martin (Henry Czerny) in broken French before leaning in for a hug.
The joke, of course, is that it’s not just the moustache that’s new. Czerny, like his character, a Toronto native, and one of the most instantly recognizable Canadian performers of the last several decades, is stepping into the role originated 20 years ago by Colm Feore. The substitution was a matter of scheduling, and yet couldn’t go unspoken: not on a project predicated on a built-in fandom.
“The (moustache) is something we came up with that night,” Czerny told the Star. “There was that question of, ‘How are we going to deal with this?’ And that was it.”
Such gentle rapping against the fourth wall feels right for a series that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Like its cinematic predecessors, “Bon Cop, Bad Cop” is a congenitally playful procedural — fast and wisecracking — albeit suffused with even more complex seriocomic anxieties about Canadian identity. The original movie was famously promoted as the country’s first bilingual blockbuster, slyly satirizing the two solitudes through the conventions of mismatched, odd-couple investigators.
This time out, David and Martin have been simultaneously deployed to an Indigenous reserve in Gesgapegiag, where a local sheriff has disappeared under mysterious circumstances. The resulting tensions take on an allegorical dimension, with the English-Canadian and the Francophone united in their sense of mutual awkwardness.
“The first movie is more of a binary thing,” Czerny said. “Twenty years later, we have this venerable old dog and this inveterate puppy, and there’s a brotherly quality about them now. They’ve learned to like each other despite their differences and they want to incorporate that into helping out this First Nations community, but the people there are hesitant to accept their help. Maybe they feel like (the cops’ presence) is more of a hindrance than a help.”
The pilot episode plays its cards close to the chest plot-wise, but it works nicely as a showcase for Czerny’s comic chops. “I haven’t trained to be funny,” he said. “But I do have a sense of humour. I would love to do the sort of thing Leslie Nielsen did — you know, like here’s a tough guy and we’ll turn it on its ear.”
One thing Czerny was wary of, though, was trying to replicate Feore’s performance. “I said, ‘I’m not going to do Colm,” he recalled. “He’s a wonderful actor, and he has a tone … the part is written for him, but it’s not my sense of humour. We worked as quickly as we could, and while we couldn’t rewrite all of it, we could adjust it. I offered my best Martin based on the material.
“There are folks who will be like: ‘Well, that’s not the Hamlet I saw, I saw Olivier and now it’s Kenneth Branagh,’” Czerny added, smiling self-deprecatingly at the Shakespearean allusion. “I do think if people watch the series — if they get over their contempt prior to investigation — it’s not because of what I came up with, but because of what Patrick allowed me to do.”
Though Martin may be irascible, he’s a good guy, and Czerny recognizes that his perceived sweet spot is villainy. “I judge a script by what they’ve done with their bad guy,” he said, and his two signature roles resemble that remark: the conflicted Catholic priest Peter Lavin in the award-winning 1992 miniseries “The Boys of St. Vincent,” a tour-de-force performance that earned Czerny a slew of critical and industry prizes; and the cynical IMF honcho Eugene Kittridge in the “Mission: Impossible” movie series.
“He was still in there somewhere,” said Czerny of the character he originated in 1996 and unexpectedly resurrected in 2023’s “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One.” “I got to come back 20 years later and take all my experiences since then into the role.” As for reuniting with Tom Cruise, Czerny’s as effusive of the star as Kittridge is skeptical of Ethan Hunt: “He’s the reason that franchise exists. Thousands of people work on it, and millions of people enjoy it.”
“Bon Cop, Bad Cop” is smaller than “Mission: Impossible,” of course, but Czerny hopes the specificity of its subject matter and storytelling will connect with Canadian audiences.
“(The story) isn’t new,” he said. “What’s new each time is the prism through which that story is told. If there’s a basic underlying truth to the story, and the prism you’re sharing it through is closer to the community, people will be more interested. When people look in the mirror, they see themselves, and they’re interested in that reflection.”
