St. John's actor Cassidy Little thrilled to land role on 'monumental' Coronation Street
An actor originally from St. John's is joining popular long-running soap opera Coronation Street.
Cassidy Little said he was filming a movie in Bulgaria when his agent called to say he was up for the part.
"When you get calls like that, you don't think you're going to get the role, but that doesn't mean you're not going to give 100 per cent during the audition tape," he told CBC's Here & Now.
Cassidy did a tape for the audition, sent it away, and was speechless when he found out later he got the role.
"What do you say when you're going to be on something that monumental?" he said.
Little 36, left St. John's to pursue a comedy career in the United Kingdom and wound up joining the British Royal Marines.
He lost his right leg, below the knee, during a tour in Afghanistan in 2011. In 2013, he was the face of the Royal British Legion's poppy campaign.
He also went on to a career as an actor, and was the champion of The People's Strictly for Comic Relief, a charity spinoff of Strictly Come Dancing, a British version of Dancing with the Stars that aired one season in 2015, featuring inspirational contestants.
His character
On Coronation Street, Little plays an amputee who meets with Jack Webster and explains how he dealt with losing his leg and becoming a Paralympian.
"This is not secret, secret stuff — if you've been following the storyline, you know that Jack got sepsis. He's a young boy, and he had his leg amputated below the knee," said Little. Jack has problems with the way he looks now, and the way he interacts with other kids.
"I've come in as a military buddy of another character and kind of trains Paralympic athletes, and I've come in as the guy who grabs life by the horns and shakes really hard, and then shakes really hard, and then tries to rub that attitude off a little bit, by proxy, onto Jack."
Little will appear in six episodes beginning this fall. He said he wasn't aware of the show's popularity among Newfoundlanders until he was on set.
"Somebody said, 'Where are you from in the States?' And I kinda went, 'I'm Canadian,'" he said, and then they asked where in Canada he's from.
"I said, 'Oh, you probably haven't heard [of] it, but it's the best-kept secret in Canada. It's a place called St. John's, Newfoundland,' and before I could finish that — because normally I go into this big spiel about the fishing communities, the artistic communities, the nightlife — they cut me right off and said, 'Yeah, we love Newfoundland.'"
With files from Here and Now
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