Allan Hawco would be the last person to call himself a star.
“It’s just a part of our identity to not be so self-aggrandizing,” said the Canadian actor, writer and producer during a pre-Christmas chat in Toronto.
“Imagine if the headline of this article is, ‘Hawco thinks he’s a star,’ you know? Like, what a fool I’d look like.”
If not a star, then, how about a success story, an overachiever even?
After all, the 48-year-old Newfoundlander has created not one, but two Canadian TV hits in the last decade and a half — no mean feat when Canadian content has to fight to be seen among the deluge of programming from the United States.
That and his appearances in other shows and movies on both sides of the border have made him one of the more recognizable faces in Canada’s screen industry.
His most recent hit, crime drama “Saint-Pierre,” debuts its second season on CBC on Monday. Hawco co-created it alongside Perry Chafe and Robina Lord-Stafford; writes and executive produces; is the showrunner with Lord-Stafford; and stars in it as police Inspector Donny “Fitz” Fitzpatrick.
The day before we spoke, Hawco had spent hours at CBC headquarters giving interviews about “Saint-Pierre.” He spent another hour and a half talking to me in the service of something he considers essential: Canadian content made by and for Canadians.
“Yesterday there were a lot of questions like ‘Oh, is this tiring?’ or ‘You must hate this,’ and I’m like, are you out of your mind? There’s nothing worse than complaining about having to promote the thing you love,” he said.
“Whenever I’m busy working, which luckily for me has been a lot of my career, the concept of complaining about it blows my mind …
“If you can imagine my workload on ‘Republic of Doyle,’ the first time I started producing and writing and showrunning and acting, like, it’s a lot. But come on, it’s the lottery. (People) watched it. And they cared. And wanted to keep watching it,” he said.
“Now to do this again with ‘Saint-Pierre,’ it’s like, wow, OK, you got another shot.”
‘What a hustler!’
The small working-class farming town of the Goulds, now a suburb of St. John’s, N.L., wouldn’t seem the most obvious incubator of acting talent.
But that’s where Hawco learned to love drama and Shakespeare from a teacher named Tony Duffenais at St. Kevin’s High School.
“He taught all of us, myself, Perry Chafe, Alan Doyle (the musician turned playwright and author), my brother (composer Greg Hawco), Jill Keiley (the theatre director and former National Arts Centre executive). That ad hoc drama program triggered a lot of artistic careers that have been leaders in the country.”
Besides drama, Hawco was involved with band and choir, was captain of the hockey team, co-school president and worked full-time hours at a grocery store. Like I said: overachiever, although all of that didn’t leave much time for academics.
He did eventually get to university — “I visited Memorial University for a semester” is how he put it — but volunteering for the Shakespeare by the Sea Festival was more appealing. He found another mentor there, Danielle Irvine, who pointed him toward the National Theatre School in Montreal.
The story of how he got part of the money to attend is illustrative of Hawco’s drive and chutzpah. He applied for a federal retraining package made available after a moratorium was imposed on the Newfoundland cod fishery in 1992.
“You weren’t allowed to apply for a university. It had to be a trade school. So I convinced the woman who worked at the unemployment office that the National Theatre School was a trade school.
“Did anyone ask me if I worked in the fishery? No one asked me. They just thought I did,” Hawco said.
“What a hustler! I was 19 years old and I convinced the federal government to give me $300 a month.”
Montreal in 1997 was an inspiring place for a young actor.
“After the (sovereignty) referendum, it was like the artists ruled the city,” Hawco said.
He shared an apartment with his brother, who was doing a master’s degree at McGill University, and percussionist Romano Di Nillo, who’s played in “Come From Away” on Broadway and the North American tour of “Wicked.”
“We used to have these big parties (with) all the percussionists and all the actors and all the designers. It was pretty cool, what a baptism into a community of people who were devoted to their craft and didn’t even know what it was yet — you know, little babies,” said Hawco.
Like many eventual screen actors, Hawco began in the theatre. He did projects with Soulpepper and the Stratford Festival, appeared in Montreal venues and played Romeo in an ill-fated “Romeo and Juliet” in an outdoor tent at Ashbridges Bay Park.
“The show got panned so badly,” Hawco said. “I was kind of getting bitter at 24 and that’s a bad time to get bitter.”
But, in what seems to be a theme in Hawco’s career, he took control of his own narrative by starting Toronto’s Company Theatre in 2004 with actor Philip Riccio.
“We did a production of ‘A Whistle in the Dark’ by Tom Murphy with Joe Ziegler, who just passed, and Johnny Goad, Sarah Dodd, myself, Phil, Aaron Poole, David Jensen was in it. It was like a huge, explosive hit in Toronto,” Hawco said.
“Jason Byrne was our director from Ireland and it just changed everything in my life because I was finally being seen in a role that I wanted people to see me in. I was so impatient when I look back on it — the concept of wanting to be seen as an actor who could play any role when you’re 25. I was so impatient that we started an entire theatre company to do it.”
‘It was a pretend world’
Hawco dipped his toe into screen projects with parts in Canadian shows like “The Eleventh Hour” and “H2O,” even a Heritage Minute.
When he co-created “Republic of Doyle” with Perry Chafe and Malcolm MacRury, he was 32 and still making what he called “theatre money.”
“I had a credit card that had a $500 limit when we started doing ‘Doyle.’ And we used to have to put $50,000 cheques on my credit card to rent cars, buy furniture. The bank called and they were like ‘What is happening?’” Hawco recalled.
“Republic of Doyle,” in which Hawco starred as roguish private detective Jake Doyle, lasted six seasons on CBC between 2010 and 2014.
Hawco followed it with appearances in series like “The Book of Negroes,” “Caught” (which he also co-wrote and executive-produced) and “Jack Ryan,” and movies such as “Hyena Road” and “Midnight at the Paradise.”
He stumbled into the idea for “Saint-Pierre” while scouting locations for the CBC comedy hit “Son of a Critch” — on which Hawco is an executive producer — in the tiny French archipelago of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon.
“I was sitting next to Mark Critch and Janine (Squires of Hawco Productions) and Dan Murphy, our (assistant director) … and I started to shake. I got scared it wasn’t going to happen, I got scared someone else was going to do it,” Hawco said.
Part fish-out-of-water drama, part cosy mystery and part police procedural, “Saint-Pierre” was CBC’s most watched new series in 2025.
Hawco’s Fitz is the fish, a Newfoundland police detective who’s banished to Saint-Pierre after he arrests the province’s premiere.
There, the non-French-speaking Fitz is paired with Deputy Chief Geneviève “Arch” Archambault, a Parisian transplant played by Joséphine Jobert (“Death in Paradise”). The earnest Fitz and the sarcastic Arch turn out to be a good team as they investigate murders and other crimes in the small community.
It’s been a welcome return to writing a crime procedural for Hawco, but one that has an element of fantasy to it.
“It was a pretend world,” he said. “We didn’t have to carry the baggage of reality around it. We could really enjoy whatever equality and diversity we want in this place that we’re creating organically.”
‘It’s so important that we have storytellers’
That diversity extends to both sides of the camera.
Hawco, for instance, ensured that his co-star and co-writer were both Black women, and has hired women of colour as directors and writers.
“One of my favourite things that’s ever happened in my career is that first week of rehearsal for ‘A Whistle of the Dark,’ is paying everybody,” Hawco said.
“Still to this day, being a part of an employment trajectory for people … you’re watching all this growth of these artists and these technicians who are so good at their craft …”
“Maybe that’s a part of being a working class kid from Newfoundland: I can’t help but see the contribution that everyone puts into a collaborative project like making a TV show.”
Hawco said he’s happy to work anywhere — he has a team in Los Angeles actively chasing roles for him and he’s developing other shows with various networks — but he takes particular pride in being part of the burgeoning screen industry in his native Newfoundland, which celebrated hitting more than $1 billion in film and TV production last month.
He’s generally optimistic about the Canadian industry as a whole.
“There’s so many different talents and storytellers that are emerging,” he said.
“So from a creative perspective, I think we’ve never been better. It’s not the same people trying to do the same thing over and over again.”
And Canadians are still watching TV shows like his.
He recalled doing a red carpet interview for the premiere of Paul Gross’s war movie “Hyena Road” in 2015, and “I said, if we’re not a part of telling our stories, who’s going to do it for us? It’s so important to us being a nation that we have storytellers.”
Afterward, the reporter asked Hawco if he really believed that or if he was just saying it.
“I was like, I’ve dedicated my entire life to that. That’s not just something I’m making up.
“I am actually putting my money where my mouth is. I’ve never left.”
