At a table in an intimate café two men are engaged in a tense conversation. One rises and makes a dash for the nearest exit, but the door puts up a fight. Struggling, he eventually gets it open, but by then it's too late. Grinning, actor Chris Bolton comes back through the door and the
Rent-A-Goalie cast and crew share a laugh before preparing for the next take.
Bolton created, co-writes, and stars in the Gemini-nominated Showcase comedy series about a guy who runs a goalie rental service out of a café in Toronto's Little Italy. The show just wrapped filming on its third season and producers invited
CityNews.ca to the set during a recent taping - an episode featuring guest stars Fab Filippo of the program Billable Hours and retired NHL star Darryl Sittler.
"I was working on a couple of different ideas," Bolton responds when asked what inspired the show's unusual concept. "My starting point was I wanted to do a show based on the shows I grew up on, like Taxi and Cheers. I was working on (one) about goalies and (another) about an Italian café - I put them together and (came up with) Rent-A-Goalie."
Bolton, who plays main character Cake, has years of experience acting on the small screen and admitted he was growing tired of what he calls "cynicism in television shows."
"I wanted to make a guy who was optimistic and positive, trying to do right in this little world of his," he explains on a break from shooting, enthusiastically showing
CityNews.ca around the different sets, including Café Primo, where much of the action takes place, a hockey dressing room, and his character's apartment.
Though most of the action is shot at
Dufferin Gate Productions studio in the city's west end, the cast and crew film all the hockey scenes at Lakeshore Lions arena over three or four days at the start of the schedule.
Bolton's featured a number of legends of the sport on his show, from Sittler to Paul Coffee, Phil Esposito and Bob Probert. He notes TV hockey is a far cry from the NHL.
"Hockey's supposed to be a fluid, moving game but when you're shooting it's anything but," Bolton says. "You get the guys on the ice and they're a bunch of caged racehorses. They want to go and shoot and play.
"The best part of that situation is hearing these old school guys talking about the way the game used to be. They're all funny, all eager to share. It reminds us, A) why we're doing the show, for the love of that culture and B) who else we'd want to hang out with and what we could have them do."
Bolton cites Mario Lemieux as another player he'd like to lace up with, but only if it makes sense for the story.
"The collective sense of humour among the (players) is fantastic but I think what they appreciate is that we're not asking them to play themselves (for the sake of playing) themselves," he says. "These guys had to come in and pay service to the story, it had to work."
Rent-A-Goalie airs Sundays at 9:30pm on Showcase.