Wheels Was By Far The Greatest And Most Memorable Member Of The Degrassi Cast...
This Page Is For Him...Wherever He Is.. We're Thinking Of You Neil
Neil Hope's Story (By Catherine Dunphy: from
the book: Degrassi Talks-
1992)
Degrassi Talks based
on interviews taped for the TV documentary subjects like: Alcohol, abuse,
sex,
drugs and so on.
This is an interview with the actor Neil Hope by Catherine Dunphy:
"A lot of teens drink.
In fact 74% of Canadian teenagers use alcohol. I'm Neil Hope. In
the Degrassi series
I played the character
Wheels. Both Wheels and I have had our life changed by alcohol. Wheels
lost his
parents due to a
drunk driving accident, I lost my real father to an alcoholic's disease.
You think my
decision to stay
away from alcohol would be a easy one. It's not. Pressures to drink
are everywhere".
"We have traveled
around the country to find out how Canadian teenagers are dealing with
the issue- to
drink or not to drink.
About working on Degrassi Talks, Neil says: " It taught me a lot more about
alcohol...
Being able to talk
to other kids who are going through the same things was like a therapy.
For others, I
think they will finally
learn that alcohol can kill". Neil's own story about growing up as a child
of alcoholics is
next.
He made it look so
easy. Walking towards the camera, looking it straight in the eye, saying
firmly, calmly:
"Me too, I'm a child
of alcoholic parents. I know".
But this wasn't Wheels
talking. It was Neil Hope, the real person behind the kid from Degrassi.
No more hiding
behind a made-up
character.
And it wasn't easy.
It never is. it wasn't when he was interviewing Nathan about his life with
alcoholic parents for
Degrassi Talks. Nathan
is a very quiet, very withdrawn person. Even with a microphone, it was
hard to hear what
he was saying.
So series producer
and Degrassi founder Linda Schuyler suggested that they turn the tables.
Literally.
They turned the camera
around and pointed it at Neil, and Nathan asked him questions about what
he went
through growing up
in an alcoholic home.
And Neil talked and
Nathan listened.
Neil did that a lot
as he traveled around western Canada interviewing other teens about alcoholism.
"I'd tell them before
the interview started I was a child of alcoholics and I could almost see
their bodies relax", he
recalls. "After the
interview was over, a lot of them wanted to keep talking and telling their
stories. It was almost
like a weight was
lifted from their shoulders because they had talked about it and felt better.
"And they had really
talked about it- not just "I'm a child of an alcoholic" and then little
stories here and there- but
they really got everything
out".
"So now a lot of
them feel they can talk about it and not feel ashamed about it".
Not feel ashamed about
it.
For many kids whose
parents are drunks, this is what it is all about.
Try telling them
it's not their fault, that they have nothing to do with why a mother or
a father, or grandparent, has
to drink and get
drunk, why they can't quit the habit, why the bottle is always more important
than the kids is.
Try telling kids
they can bring their friends home after school because even if their friends
see their parents passed
out on a floor, or
in a boozy rage, it's nothing for the kid to be ashamed or because it's
not his fault.
It doesn't wash.
Neil knows that.
He never brought friends home after school because, he says, he wanted
to deny it and
everything else that
was going on around him.
And if his friends
saw his mother, then he would have to see her. Really see her.
It was easier to
pretend.
Pretend to the outside
world, that is because there was no escape from drinking at home.
Neil is the baby of
the Hope family, the fifth kid, the fourth son. Both his parents were already
alcoholics when he
was born September
24, 1972, in Toronto.
He figures it probably
wasn't long after when his dad left home for the last time.
Anyway, Neil has
no memory of living with a mother and a father together in the same house.
For him it's always
been either/or. The kids would stay with their mom for as long as they
could take it, then they
would move in with
their dad. When things ot too tough there, they'd all shift back to wherever
their mother was
living.
As a result, he went
to six or seven different schools and grew up all over Toronto- in the
east end in the
Gerrad/Pape area,
across the street from the headquarters of a motorcycle club, and out in
the west end, down
by the lake shore
strip in Etobicoke, "where all the drunks are".
That's his description.
He laughs when he says it.
But it's not a real
laugh. not natural. It's hollow and it sounds bitter. In the television
episode of Degrassi Talks...
On Alcohol, you can
see a photo of a laughing young boy named Jimmy and ot the newspaper articles
which
reported how his
body was found among a bunch of trash in a dumpster in that rough part
of town.
He had died from
alcohol poisoning. He was only 15 but alcohol killed him.
Neil knew him. He
was the son of one of his mother's drinking buddies.
His mother had a
lot of them. They drank a lot. And they always seemed to be fighting.
"That's something
that I don't think will ever go away. Nathan talked about that too," Neil
says. "Fighting between
parents or watching
your mother fight with somebody always sticks in your head.
"I was so afraid someone
would get hurt.
It frightened me
when I was little. Just hearing it. The yelling and the smacking and cleaning
up the blood. It's just
frightening".
The worst time was
when he was only 5 or 6. The family was living in the east end then and
his mother would get
drunk with her friends
and turn up the country music and sing along.
Neil's face flushes
and he frowns. "I hate country music now because that's why my mom listened
to. I just get
shivers when I hear
country and western song".
Because it also makes
him remember when the police car and the ambulance pulled up in front of
their house
because his mother
had slit her wrists.
That's the memory
that sticks, that's always there, that's never going away, that won't fade
with time.
There's always one
memory with kids who your father passed out face down in your birthday
cake in front of all
your friends.
For others, it's
the time a mother "forgot" to pick them up from a skating lesson and left
them waiting in a
snowstorm who is
just a kid, who should be cared for, looked after, protected, always laughing,
feels totally
helpless. And afraid.
Really afraid. Not
the fear that comes from remembering a scary movie, but the fear from the
much worse
realization that
a kid is caught inside a terrifying story, that he can't get out, that
there is nothing, nothing he can do
to fix it, make it
better, or change anything.
Neil was 5 when he
knew that.
His sister Cheery,
used to make a lot of the lunches for everybody, his brothers Stacey, Brian,
Danny, looked out
for him too.
But even when they
tried, the boys never succeeded in breaking up any of the fights and they
never stopped their
mother from drinking
when she get her mind to do it.
When Neil was younger
and his mother was on one of her binges- when she would get up at about
10 in the
morning and drink
all day till she passed out, usually about midnight he used to try and
distract her, ask her to go
for a walk,
offer to take her to a movie.
He shakes his head.
"It didn't work. She wanted her alcohol. That was her escape".
When they went to
stay with their father on weekends, it wasn't much better. He would get
"all drunked up and
yell and curse and
swear at my mom and about two in the morning pick up the phone and crank
call her and we'd
be sitting there
having to listen to him call a fucking bitch and everything else".
But Neil adored his
dad.
"He was never physical
with us, " he says.
meaning he never
was violent. "He never said a bad word about us. He cherished us, he really
loved us".
From the time he
was 8, Neil wanted to be an actor. or director. or just a part of movies,
television. He was
always watching TV.
"We'd have dinner
sitting on the floor and watching TV. Our family wasn't the Brady Bunch.
We didn't have a big
dinner table, you
just grabbed whatever you found on the couch or floor.
"I was always interested
in how the shows were made. What was everybody's job? I always watched
the credits
wondering what a
grip was. What is a director? The more I thought and it the more I wanted
to get into it".
He admits it was an
escape. "I loved cartoons especially because they were animated. They weren't
real. They
were something I
could get into. I still watch Bugs Bunny, that was my greatest escape as
a kid.
"To my dying days,
I think I will watch cartoons".
He wanted to be a
part of television. He took an on-camera training course, which his father
paid for, and had
professional photographs
made up. He went on auditions, he was determined.
"My dad was always
there for me. He paid more than $400 for my course and it was more than
a year before
anything happened."
His brother Stacey's
girlfriend worked in a shelter for battered women not far from the Playing
With Time offices.
She saw a huge sign
they had in the window calling for kids to audition for parts in a television
show.
Neil was 10 when
he got a part in an early episode of the Kids of Degrassi called Marting
Meets The Pirates. It
was supposed to be
one-shot deal, but he stayed on as Griff, and later when the series shifted
to Junior High,
took the part of
Wheels.
His father was fiercely
proud of him. So was his mother, only she never said as much. When she's
not drinking she
is a private person
who doesn't talk about feelings or emotions much. Neil remembers finally
asking her, when he
was 12 or 13, whether
she was proud of him.
"She said, Of course
I am, and that was that" he recalls.
But it wasn't. Not
for Neil.
"That's another thing
about being a child of alcoholics", he says. "You want that little bit
of the attention that's all
going to the bottle.
I wanted to be in the spotlight for them".
So, out of all the
kids, Neil was the "good" one. In fact, thanks to the Degrassi pay check,
he was the family's
"saviour".
He makes in a face
when he says that. "I was the saviour because my mom was getting money
from me to buy the
booze. or else she
would spend all of her money on booze and I would have to buy the groceries.
"I was always the
praised one in the family because I was on television. I had a job and
the cops weren't coming
to the door because
of me.
They were there because
of Danny, who was two years older from Neil, and very, very angry.
"I kept my anger
inside and didn't let it go", says Neil, "but Danny let it go all the time.
He was stealing, just trying
to get her attention,
when all her attention was going to the bottle.
Neil 's dad died in
1987. He died of cirrhosis, a disease of the liver. The booze killed him.
Neil didn't admit
it, but, he does say now he was big on denial because some things were
obviously eating away at
him.
Playing With Time,
the company which made the Degrassi television series and which has made
the Degrassi Talks series, had begun a Foundation.
And the foundation
had money which it made available grants to the kids on the show to make
their own
productions. It was
Neil, the fledgling director, not the child of alcoholics, who applied
for and got a grant to
make a documentary
about having an alcoholic parent.
He was being practical
and paying attention to the old rule of all first time writers write about
what you know.
He turned the camera
onto the mother of his buddy and co-producer, Bill Parrott, who Played
Shane in the show.
And Rebecca Haines,
better known as Kathleen to viewers of Degrassi, talked candidly about
what she went
through before her
dad sought treatment for his alcoholism.
Then Neil sat down
in the hot seat and talked about how he felt having one parent who died
because of alcohol
and another who is
living for nothing but alcohol.
"It was some time
when I was making that film that I finally came to terms with it.
That I could really
talk about it because I finally knew it's nothing to be ashamed of because
it's not your fault".
But as it turned
out, The Darker Side was just the first step in his healing. His father's
death had shaken him more
than he had admitted.
For the first time
ever, he took the bottle. He drank enough to get drunk three of four nights
out ot the week.
These days he's sure
he's probably a "normal" drinker, somebody who can have a couple of beer
every so often
and not need any
more.
But many people believe
that if a person has one parent who is an alcoholic he or she has a 50
per cent chance of
becoming an alcoholic
himself. Two parents and the odds skyrocket up to 80 per cent.
Experts have also
noted that some families seem to have a "streak" of alcoholism running
through them that can go
back generations
and generations.
Neil's family is
like that. both his mother's parents were alcoholics.
So when things were
bad, it wasn't surprising for Neil to turn to drinking.
And they were. He
was so depressed he thought about suicide. often.
"I didn't give a
shit about living".
But he still cared
about making movies.
He sat down and wrote
a script. It was supposed to be fiction but it was his own life, more or
less.
The Playing With
Time Foundation approved his application for a second time and he got enough
money for a
week's shoot.
"In the script, I
changed the ending of my life and as I was writing it I really came to
terms with how stupid suicide
is and how stupid
I was to be thinking about it".
But his own healing
wasn't over yet.
Perhaps it never
will be.
The season opened
that year for the Degrassi series was a shocker. Both Wheels parents are
killed in a car crash,
a plot which was
not entirely a coincidence since so much of what happened in the television
show was regularly
reflected in the
real lives of the actors.
Neil knew it was
helping to have a lot of his personal life go into the television show.
But when it came
time to shoot the funeral scene and the entered the church and saw two
caskets, he lost it.
These were empty
coffins which were supposed to contain Wheels parents, but, Neil couldn't
act any more. What
he saw there were
the two caskets of his brother and his father.
"We went to stop
shooting because Wheels wasn't supposed to cry because he was angry. But
I couldn't keep it
back any more", he
says.
"Wheels was always
saying why me? but, I didn't because I knew what life and death was. I
understood that,
especially after
my brother.
"I cried my tears
and did my anger but there was no self pity trip".
Which is also the
last thing Neil says in his documentary.
As the credits roll,
he says "I don't want any pity".
That's not what you
go public about alcoholism for, he says. You go public, you make a movie
if you're Neil
Hope and that's what
you want to do for the rest of your life. Or if you're not Neil Hope but
you do have an
alcoholic at home,
you tell a teacher, or a friend or a support group because you finally
understand and believe it's
not your fault.
Neil Hope Pictures!!!!