St. John’s own Anthony Tooton is getting back to work to tell personal story about survival | CBC News

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A man in a cowboy hat, cowboy shirt and dark sunglasses standing on a helicopter landing pad grins wide, close to the camera.
Anthony Tooton, pictured here as a young actor. Tooton is originally from St. John’s. (Submitted by Anthony Tooton)

After stepping away from the stage more than two decades ago, acclaimed filmmaker Anthony M. Tooton is ready to get back in front of the camera — this time to tell his own, deeply personal story about assault and survival.

In December 2001, on his father’s birthday, Tooton was drugged and sexually assaulted. Afterwards he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and his acting career derailed.

“I’ve never been on the stage since the incident. Prior to the incident, I was doing four to six plays every year, year and a half,” he said. 

“I was an actor. That’s what I wanted to do. I was trained through the Guildhall School of Music and Drama when I was a kid.”

Tooton went on to make a name for himself as a documentary filmmaker, including Restaurants are not Democracies! which won him a scholarship to the Toronto Film School’s film production program in 2006. Recently he made a documentary about his family’s photography business called Tooton’s Photography: In The Business Of Making Memories.

“Maybe it was easier to write and hide behind the camera,” he said, looking back on his career trajectory.

Now, more than 20 years after being sexually assaulted, Tooton is working on a script called Baptism by Fire and is hoping to get back into acting with a plot loosely based on his life.

The main character, James, is attacked in a small town in the United States. His cousin is his support pillar but dies. James eventually flees his hometown.

A man stands behind a small table, in front of a computer, talking into a microphone.
Anthony Tooton presenting Tooton’s Photography: In The Business Of Making Memories at the Niagara Artists Centre. (Submitted by Anthony Tooton)

Under an assumed name, James moves to another state and takes up a job as a pool shark in order to make money, but ends up making enemies of some of the regular players.

While James is trying to avoid confrontation, he soon finds he has an unknown guardian angel protecting who turns out to be the owner of the bar — though James never sees this man.

For Tooton, Baptism by Fire is a story about feeling secure again.

“He basically gets to a point where he needs to be safe again. And unbeknownst to him, the owner was connected to his cousin,” he said. “So the owner uses it as an opportunity, two-fold, to protect James and to also clean out that element within his own community because the owner is pretty powerful himself, but they never meet.”

The script delves with power and who uses it to help their community. Tooton added the police never factor into this story, which was deliberate. In his own case, every time he made an effort to reach the authorities after he was attacked, “It fell on deaf ears.”

“I’m paying homage to a specific type of individual who utilizes his power, for lack of a better term. And I’ve learned power can be a bad word, too, but he uses his power for the greater good,” he said.

Getting Back to Acting

For Tooton, the time is right to talk about how the attack changed his life, and he attributes that shift to the support he now has.

“Because of the people that are in my life, best friends. People who became staunch friends, no doubt,” he said. “I wouldn’t be here; everything is interconnected. And then you have to say, ‘everything happens for a reason.'”

He also wants to get back in front of the audience and start acting again, and would like to portray Baptism by Fire‘s protagonist James.

However, work on the script was delayed when in June of 2022 some of his belongings were stolen while in Ontario, including his laptop that contained a draft of his script.

“So I saw it as an omen to re-write. So that’s what I’ve been doing,” he said. “I’ve been kind of rewriting in accordance with the fact that I can write a better script now, based on what’s happened since the stuff was stolen.”

An old photo of a man in a cowboy hat and shirt, and dark sunglasses pointing off camera with a picturesque scene of ocean cliffs in the background.
Tooton is working on a script called Baptism by Fire and is hoping to get back into acting with a plot loosely based on his life. (Submitted by Anthony Tooton.)

Since the theft, he’s been writing the script on his phone.

Baptism by Fire isn’t just about the horrible thing that happened — for Tooton, it’s also a chance to look for the good things that can come from a bad situation.

“At the end of the day, I just want the perpetrator to get help. I just want it to not happen to anybody else. And I’m going to have to live with this for the rest of my life but maybe through art, I can redeem myself,” he said. “I can redeem the victimization of it all.”

But, he stressed, there are good people out there and he’s using his script to pay homage to them.

“That’s what I’m celebrating. There are good people whose sole job is to help, and protect and make sure nothing bad happens to those who are innocent or those who are good,” he said.

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