BF23: Baseball's loss is Blyth's gain with actor Justin Otto
BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN
In what has been dubbed a meeting of two of the best Canadian third basemen of the last 40 years, Justin Otto, a northern Manitoba native and one of the stars of Liars at a Funeral, took the time to chat with long-time Citizen Editor and former Pickering Pirate Shawn Loughlin about what will be his first time acting at the Blyth Festival.
The young Otto will act alongside Nora McLellan in Liars at a Funeral. Otto is relatively new to the industry with just a handful of credits to his name, while McLellan is one of the established women of the Canadian stage, with over 20 Shaw Festival seasons and many television and film credits to her name.
Otto comes to the project through director Krista Jackson. He had worked with her prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and joined the project late in the process, he said. This will be Otto’s first time in Blyth, so he’s excited to learn more about the Festival and the community through Liars at a Funeral.
Otto says he’s looking forward to being part of a comedy with the hilarious Liars at a Funeral. He says that, in his short performing career thus far, he’s either been tapped as a comedic actor or for “dark and gloomy” roles, so he is happy to be able to flex his comical muscles in this upcoming production.
As a young man, Otto says he had always been drawn to performing, specifically comedy, thanks to a pair of strong influences. One was his mother, who was always a “goof” throughout his childhood and the second was Canadian Jim Carrey. Otto was a child during Carrey’s meteoric rise in the world and his comedies of the 1990s were a big influence on Otto.
Then, after a career in professional baseball didn’t pan out (despite the audacious claim at the beginning of this story), Otto turned his attention to the world of drama.
He attended drama classes at his high school and was lucky to find a steady stream of work in theatre right out of school, which has kept him busy in recent years. He has worked in both film and television, as well as theatre, in addition to working on his own short film, which is still in production, called Drunk All The Time. The film tells the stories of working-class artists, battles with alcoholism and more.
As for his work with Liars at a Funeral, Otto says he’s excited to bring the two characters he plays to life. They both come from an interesting perspective in a play that is largely about family, in that both of his characters are not members of the family, so there is a bit of an outsider theme to them both.
Otto is a graduate of the University of Winnipeg who has spent some time with Second City Toronto. He has performed in SpaceGirl at Winnipeg’s Prairie Theatre Exchange and I, Malvolio at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre’s Shakespeare Fest. He will soon be part of the CBC’s Alter Boys project and his own play, HORSES, will begin workshops this fall.
Liars at a Funeral opens this year’s Blyth Festival season on Saturday, June 17 at 8 p.m. and closes on Saturday, July 8.