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As Flashpoint Begins Final Season, Star Enrico Colantoni already Misses Cast Camaraderie

Bell Media

Enrico Colantoni as Sgt. Gregory Parker on the final season of CTV's Flashpoint

With its basis in reality and reliance on life-and-death situations, Flashpoint has always been an intense show. For four seasons the award-winning Canadian cop drama has entertained viewers at home and in the US with exciting tales of the Strategic Response Unit (SRU), a fictionalized version of the Toronto Police Service Emergency Task Force Unit. Now Flashpoint is about to launch its fifth and final season, and producers have upped the drama even more, says star Enrico Colantoni.

"You'll notice season five is so much more different and so much more intense than any other season," Colantoni says from his house in Nobleton, ON. "And fans will say, 'What?!' And it's true because they know we were going out. There was no going back, and this is it, this is our swan song. So [producers] Bill [Mustos] and Anne Marie [La Traverse] and the writers, they were more audacious in their scripts, and the directors took more chances, and the actors had more fun. And it was great to be allowed to be able to say goodbye."

The Toronto-born Colantoni, who made his name on American TV hits like Just Shoot Me and Veronica Mars, plays SRU leader Greg Parker, who invariably spends much of his screen time each episode negotiating with that week's bad guy. Except Flashpoint's "bad guys" invariably are just regular people pushed into extreme situations. It's that ambiguity that partly attracted Colantoni, whose brother is a retired Toronto police officer, to the role.

"It made it real. It wasn't so black and white. Here you are ready to storm the castle, and you would love to deal with a conscious criminal who is just a card-carrying criminal. Then it's just like 'let's go!'

"But when you are dealing with people who just don't know better or are in a position where they are just doing silly things, it's going to affect you differently. It's going to remind you about your humanness, and that's what was so beautiful about this show. No one was ever a bad guy."

Flashpoint shot all over Toronto during its five seasons and marked Colantoni's first lengthy return to the city since he first left in 1984 to attend Yale drama school. I ask how working on Flashpoint has changed his opinion of his hometown.

"How it's changed has been eye-opening," he says. "But just reinvesting myself into the smells and the streets and my history and the people that I went to school with, bumping into them... Toronto is fantastic, and I'm so glad that this show came along and really didn't apologize for making it Toronto. It was a love letter to this city. It reintroduced me to the city that I was born in in a way that I would have never experienced just coming back to visit."

Not surprisingly given the amount of time the cast spent together on and off set over the course of the 75 episodes they filmed, Colantoni already misses the camaraderie of the Flashpoint cast, although he still keeps in touch with many of them.

"You start out like make believe and then it becomes real," he says. "So Hugh [Dillon] and I, for example, have become dear, dear friends. He's like a brother to me, a lot like Ed [Lane] and Parker were. Sergio [Di Zio] is a lot like Scarlatti was to Parker; a young man who I have so much respect for and so much admiration in his skill and his talent. And the same with Amy Jo [Johnson] and David [Paetkau]. When you have five seasons to kind of go there every, every time, you automatically love the human beings that you're working with. So I miss them, and I really felt that, by the end, we really felt like a team."

Unlike on his previous TV shows, Colantoni knew Flashpoint was coming to an end months before filming ended in late-June - a situation that cushioned the blow of losing that job.

"On Just Shoot Me, we didn't know we weren't coming back," he says. "On Veronica Mars, we didn't even see that train coming; it was just over.

"So when producers come to actors and say 'it was a good run,' it allowed us to really just enjoy every moment. It was such a beautiful gift for us to relish in the minutia of the workplace. So we had more fun, we took more risks, had better conversations."

Colantoni says that he will be watching the last season along with the fans, not only out of curiosity but to aid in his own closure.

"The actors really won't feel the weight of that until we start watching. Because it never felt real to me until I saw that on TV, until I'm enjoying it as a fan, saying 'holy crap! Oh my God,' when I too lose myself on that little journey. And when they end, I will be devastated."

Flashpoint's fifth season premieres Sept. 20 at 10 p.m. ET on CTV.

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