Ash Lee is quick with wit, talks tough and slides on black gloves before beating up his enemies.
A coffee shop that makes cute trees out of latte foam and prides itself on organic brioche doesn’t seem like the right place to meet.
He orders a coffee: no cream, no sugar. Tough as nails.
“What do you want to know? Where do you want to start?”
Uh, Mr. Lee, why don’t you start from the beginning?
“When we were kids we’d take Lucerne buckets with duct tape and broom handles and we’d go catch tadpoles. That was a rite of passage in Richmond.”
It turns out Lee, a born and raised Richmond actor, is just plain good at playing the steely-eyed bad guy — just look at his demo reel. But he’s actually nice. Friendly, even.
Lee has played lots of other characters — cops, doctors, a gay wedding planner — and now he’s getting the chance to show the world his less serious side in a short film that just may be the start of something bigger.
Lee grew up in Shellmont, near the neighbourhood’s old bowling alley. His family’s home had a ditch out front. He went to Kingswood elementary, then St. Paul School.
For high school, he took the bus to Vancouver College. There, he was drawn to engineering. He studied it at University of B.C. and got a job working with fuel cells.
“I was getting really bored so I just decided to do something completely out of the norm, something I had never really done before. I signed up for an acting class,” said Lee from a table facing a busy street in East Vancouver, where he now lives.
It was as simple, he said, as picking up a flyer one day and responding to an ad for acting lessons. The experience was at first terrifying, but Lee feels fortunate to have found his passion while still in his late 20s.
A few more classes later and Lee auditioned for Langara College’s renowned theatre training program Studio 58. He was accepted and quit his job. Three years of studying awarded him a graduation certificate in 2007 and his first professional gig at the summer Shakespeare festival Bard on the Beach.
“That was amazing,” he said. “It was the best first experience you could possibly ask for.”
More work came with companies such as Green Thumb Theatre, which brought theatre to high schools. His first role was in Blind Spot, a play about three teens who find themselves dealing with sensitive issues of alcohol abuse and date rape.
“I played the jock, which is so opposite, because I was such a nerd in high school: glasses, 4.0, physics, never got into a fight. That was me, and then here I am playing this jock.”
Then came film and TV. A writers’ strike and recession made finding gigs a challenge, but work eventually came. His first break came with a small role in the 2010 film Marmaduke. He remembers his first time on set — it was also his birthday — and William H. Macy called him over to chat. Lee was all nerves. But Macy, he said, was really cool.
Recent TV roles have been with series The Romeo Section, Motive andArrow — work he balances with another career as a mortgage broker.
Lee’s current acting project is Singer Sisters Inc. Along with two collaborators, Lee won a $10,000 grant to produce a 10-minute digital short for Telus’s Storyhive program, which will further award two top prizes in 2016.
