Mark Meer may be the best-known Edmontonian in the galaxy. Meer is the voice behind the male Commander Shepard, one of the heroes in the smash sci-fi game series, Mass Effect – and while Shepard is saving the Milky Way, Meer is meeting fans around the world.
When Avenue reached Meer by Skype, he was in England as a guest of the MCM London Comic Con, that country’s “biggest modern pop culture event,” drawing more than 100,000 people each year. “Being a nerd myself, I’m the kind of guy who has paid to go to comic book conventions in the past, and now I get to go as a guest, so it’s worked out well for me.”
Growing up in the central Alberta burg of Sedgewick – a town so small the doctor, his dad, still does house calls – Meer was a big fan of sketch comedy, but the closest he’d come to performing was playing the Dungeon Master in local Dungeons & Dragons games. “I had to take art by correspondence,” he says. “I’d never even done a drama class.”
After moving to Edmonton in 1989 to study science at the University of Alberta, Meer’s secret origin story began when he auditioned for the Citadel’s Teen Festival of the Arts in 1991. The following year, legendary Edmonton sketch troupe Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie – Cathleen Rootsaert, Neil Grahn, Wes Borg and the late Joe Bird – organized a comedy show. Meer was featured in the show as part of a makeshift troupe, Three Fried Teens in a Baggie, and he joined Rapid Fire Theatre a few weeks later. He’s been with them ever since. He also formed his own sketch troupe, Gordon’s Big Bald Head.
Meer also became a regular in Edmonton’s legendary live comic soap opera, Die-Nasty, where he became the first actor to ever go without sleep for the duration of its annual 53-hour Soap-A-Thon. “I owe most everything I know about improv and comedy to my many years spent at the Varscona with Rapid Fire Theatre and Die-Nasty,” says Meer, who received guidance from the likes of Trolls veterans Rootsaert and Grahn, Teatro la Quindicina producer Jeff Haslam, Second City alumnus Dana Andersen and Patti Stiles, an improv artist now based in Australia.