When Shannon Kook first moved to Canada from South Africa, where he was born and raised, he won tickets to the premiere of Monster, the film which earned Charlize Theron her Academy Award. A teenager at the time, he had never won anything before, and suddenly he found himself within speaking distance of the glamorous South African star.
“I wanted to chat with her in Afrikaans, but I chickened out!” he says. He kicked himself for missing out on an opportunity to connect with such a global icon from his native country.
Kook says that most of his regrets in life involve things he didn’t dive into right away out of fear. Though he had acted in school plays since primary school, often in leading roles, it took him a long time to admit he wanted to be an actor. Knowing his parents preferred he embark on a stable career path, he initially studied accounting before attending Montreal’s National Theatre School of Canada, where Sandra Oh also got her start. In fact, Kook, born to a Mauritian father of Chinese descent and a South African mother, was mentored by Oh years later at the TIFF Rising Stars program in 2014, and it meant a lot to him to see an Emmy-winning Asian Canadian actress making it in Hollywood.
Nowadays, Kook is most known for his role as Zane Park on the Canadian teen drama Degrassi: The Next Generation, but this summer, he’ll be co-starring in Dark Places, the much-anticipated film based on the book of the same name by Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl), due out August 7. Set in Kansas, Dark Places is about a woman who is the sole survivor of a horrific massacre that took her mother and sisters when she was a kid. Kook plays one of the suspects when the film flashes back to the 1980s, when the crime took place. “My character is into death metal and messes with dark magic,” he explains.
The film brings his life full circle. Not only has he dived full force into his acting career, his latest role allows him to share the screen with the one and only Charlize Theron. “Even back then, I thought, ‘I’m going to meet her again one day,'” he remembers. “I just had a feeling.”
Feature image courtesy of Gilles Toucas Photography
This story was originally published in our Summer 2015 issue. Get your copy here.
