SUDBURY - If you’ve been hiding under a rock and have never seen Sudbury-shot Shoresy, actor Tasya Teles says “it moves quickly, like hockey. There's a lot of mouthy, silly fun, great music. There's a kind of electricity that runs through the show that really grabs you.”
Teles (you may also know her from The 100) plays Nat, girl boss and owner and general manager of the Sudbury Blueberry Bulldogs. After four seasons of the show, Nat has really found her stride in terms of her management style.
“In Season Four, I think she finally lands there, and we see this like super girl boss who's running the show with all of these hockey players with a lot of success behind her,” Teles said. “I just love playing that. So fun. She suffers no fools.”
The puck dropped on season four of Shoresy on Friday, Jan. 24. The six-episode fourth season premiered on Crave with two episodes, which will be followed by one new episode on subsequent Fridays.
Crave has also announced that “Shoresy has been renewed for a fifth season, and goes into production later this spring.
Created by Canadian actor Jared Keeso, who plays the titular character Shoresy, the show is a spinoff of Keeso’s earlier show “Letterkenny.”
Guest stars appearing this season include former NHLers Doug Gilmour, Marty McSorely and Sean Avery, and TSN reporters Kenzie Lalonde and Tessa Bonhomme (an Olympic gold medallist and Sudbury native).
Newcomers include Sudbury Wolves forward Chase Coughlan, along with Issac Kragten, Eric Fleising and Sudbury native and former junior hockey player Xander Roy.
The new season follows Shoresy as he explores life after hockey, and the Sudbury Blueberry Bulldogs contend with the distractions of summer in Sudbury.
In the fourth season, the Sudbury Blueberry Bulldogs have just won the nationals, and are celebrating in the off-season. But Nat still has to keep her eye on the guys.
“She's supposed to be off during the summer,” said Teles. “But you know, these guys never really give her a break. She's always having to kind of chase them around and make sure that everyone's behaving and they're upholding a certain reputation because now they're winners.”
Teles said she’s now spent so much time filming in Sudbury, she considers it a second home. She said she loves the fact that Shoresy showcases the Nickel City, throwing in Sudbury references and landmarks.
“I've done a lot of television in Canada, and often the cities that we film in mask as a different city, or U.S. city,” she said, adding that it feels great to authentically represent a Canadian city in Shoresy.
As stated above, fans of the Sudbury Wolves will see a familiar face in Season Four.
Wolves forward Chase Coughlan plays Mason, one of four newcomers who have joined the cast, representing the AAA Sudbury Lakers, who are being mentored by the Sudbury Blueberry Bulldogs before heading off to the OHL.
“One of my old trainers, he sent me the audition,” said Coughlan, a first-time actor, who said the show needed people who are good hockey players. “He’s like ‘You know, you should audition for this.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, cool.’
“I watch Shoresy, and I’ve got a big hockey family, so everyone has watched Shoresy. When they heard about it, they were like ‘Yeah, do it.’ I kind of went in, and was, ‘Well, there must be a lot of people auditioning for this, and if I get it, I get it, if I don’t, I don’t.’ But I’m very happy I got in.”
Coughlan said the experience of being on set this past summer was “surreal,” and everyone involved with Shoresy is “super supportive,” including show creator Keeso.
“He writes it all, and he's always there for me if I have any questions and stuff like that,” he said.
Ryan McDonell plays Mark Michaels, the goalkeeper of the Sudbury Blueberry Bulldogs.
The actor said he played hockey quite competitively up until the age of 18, and he still plays hockey now, but he’s never been a goalie.
Ironically, he’s now been in two hockey-related productions, Shoresy and Slap Shot 3, and in both he played a goalkeeper.
As a goalie, his Shoresy character is “the weirdo,” McDonell said. “It’s very classically defined that goalies are weird. So it's been a lot of fun to play. They’re more meticulous. If a goalie is playing well, you want to leave them alone, or they've got all their rituals that they have. You see them doing weird things, and they're in their own world before a game.”
McDonell said he thinks Shoresy appeals to anyone who’s played a team sport or even been part of a close-knit group.
“We’ve created something where it’s like a family, for lack of a better word,” he said. “If you've played, even if you had a favourite grade or a class that you were in, the group that you were in, like you remember that, you have those memories …
“You're on the team, someone's better, someone's funny, someone's whatever. You know, it just takes a large group to always make that work. And I think we're portraying it pretty well with just a big shoe box full of mixed up characters, and it's fun.”
Heidi Ulrichsen is Sudbury.com’s assistant editor. She also covers education and the arts scene.