spotlight - Nathaniel Arcand can dance

Nathaniel Arcand plays a native warrior in this month's historical action pic Pathfinder, but his own personal path into acting included a few rocky detours.

The 36-year-old Plains Cree native was born and raised in Edmonton, and was barely out of diapers when he knew he wanted to act.

"I was five when I watched Bruce Lee on the big screen at a drive-in theatre," he says on the line from his home in Edmonton. "I started mocking him and I told my mom I wanted to be an actor, but she just dismissed it.

"Then you get caught up in the teenage world and it feels like you lose your dream for 10 or 15 years before you reach your adulthood and go, 'Hey, I thought I had a dream there once.'"

So how did he grab hold of that dream once more?

"Well, I had to do it the hard way. I went to jail," he says frankly. "I started hanging around with the wrong crowd at a young age and I found myself in youth detentions, and when I turned 18 I went to real jail and I realized at that point it was not for me. I really felt like I hit rock bottom at that point and I felt there was no place to go but up. I thought, 'Let's get my education back,' so I got my GED — that took a while — and in the meantime I was building myself back up, I was working, looking for whatever jobs I could."

It was while he was waiting for his friend, actor Dakota House, to have his headshots taken at a photography studio that a talent agent saw him and asked if he was interested in acting.

"I said, 'Yeah, sure!' So right there and then I signed up with my agent, Darryl Mork. The first three years of my career I did a few things here and there, a movie with Graham Greene, but it was so slow and I was on the verge of quitting. But Darryl said, 'Don't do it man, hang in there, we'll find you something.'"

That "something" was the TV series North of 60, on which Arcand played the show's troublemaker, William MacNeil. He's been working steadily ever since, landing gigs on such TV shows as Smallville and

Da Vinci's City Hall, and in films like American Outlaws, Elektra and Pathfinder.

Pathfinder, set sometime around 900 A.D. in the wilds of North America, casts Arcand as Wind in Tree, a warrior facing a Viking invasion that's being repelled by Ghost (Karl Urban), a Viking child who was raised by natives. The role didn't allow Arcand the chance to showcase his extensive martial arts skills (remember he's a Bruce Lee fanatic), but he did demonstrate another type of athletic ability. 

"Mostly, you'll see me dancing. I got to show off my traditional dancing skills," he says proudly. "You had four different types of natives in our tribe in the movie — Salish, Lakota, Plains Cree and some natives from the U.S. — so it was, 'Okay, what dance are we going to use?' We decided we'd each use our own dance from our own culture and I'll tell you, we all look pretty good."