ST. ALBERT – With one of the newest shows to come out, there’s one familiar face to St. Albert viewers you won’t see on screen. Brendan James Boyd is there, just out of view, and his hands are working some small-screen magic at the controls of some of the colourful main characters.
AppleTV+ offered up the first of 14 episodes of the Jim Henson Company’s revival Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock on Jan. 21. Boyd, a puppeteer who was previously a puppet builder on the set of Caution: May Contain Nuts and also worked in the props department on Ghostbusters: Afterlife, said this gig has also revived his lifelong love of puppets.
"The funny thing about all this is ... I actually quit puppetry and now because of this my puppetry career is taking off again, which is so beautiful," the 34-year-old laughed.
The series filmed for five months last year in Calgary. Boyd was in Edmonton at the time and had reached a point where he had to make some tough choices about how much you have to sacrifice to work in "the biz." The vast majority of the puppetry gigs were in New York or Los Angeles, just in case you wanted to know how to get to Sesame Street, or Jim Henson's Creature Shop, for that matter.
At the time, the struggling artist just didn't have the money.
"I'd given up on it happening and moved on to more design work, and then I heard this was happening in Calgary," he continued, calling out his own denial of the possibility.
He figured the show would have brought its own crew from the United States. There's no chance he would get hired, he thought at the time, and so he let the opportunity go.
"As it got closer to production and people I work with in the design field were getting hired on the show, I started to get the itch. So, I reached out to them."
He scored an interview to be a puppet builder, but his excited nerves didn't help his case, he admitted.
"I had that interview and, of course, I was so nervous. I was shaking because ‘Oh my god, I got an interview with the Jim Henson Company. I never thought this would happen.’ Totally bombed the interview, but in the interview, the person who was interviewing me — one of the heads of the Creature Shop in New York — she just interrupted me mid-sentence and said, ‘You want to be a performer, don't you?’"
He was at a group audition in Calgary two days later, and a month later, he was signed on.
Fraggle Rock for the uninitiated is a family-friendly comedy-musical series based in a cave where various anthropomorphic creatures sing, dance, and make their strange merriments. There are Fraggles, Doozers, Gorgs, and Silly Creatures in a cave. They depend on each other in the symbiotic environment but, being different species, they don't always know how best to communicate. It's all in good fun, though, and there are lots of lessons about co-existence to be learned for adult viewers, too.
What Boyd has already learned is it's a serious business and it has made him serious about puppets once again.
"It's incredible. We were the newbie puppeteers on set, but it was such an ensemble. We never felt like we were lesser puppeteers," he offered. "We were always all working together and that's because puppetry is such a collaborative art form: everyone's there, everyone's involved, and everyone's hand is in something just to make the shot work. It was wild. It was a dream come true. It was absolutely a dream come true."
While he waits to hear if a season two of the show might be in his future, he has a fallback plan. The 12 Alberta-based puppeteers (including Edmonton's DerRic Starlight) on the show are all collaborating and opening up their own new studio with a science fiction puppet pilot in the works.
"It's sparked this flame that the puppet community in Alberta really needed to get going again. It's going to have a really nice effect on the community here and I think you're going to see a lot of really cool puppet work coming out of it because of Fraggle."
Another side gig he has going on involves working with the Calgary Arts Collective. His interview for this article came right after he participated in a Zoom meeting with a Grade 5 class. He loves to help kids discover the joys of puppets, he exclaimed.