Don McKellar

Personal context

Summary

Don McKellar is a Canadian writer, director, actor, and playwright known for Last Night, Twitch City, and screenplays including Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould and The Red Violin. His work ranges from offbeat comedy and portraits of artists to stories about social tensions and outsiders, including Dance Me Outside and Through Black Spruce. Discussing The Sympathizer, he said he wanted a writers’ room with diverse perspectives, primarily Vietnamese; he also described Through Black Spruce as an experience of stepping back to let Indigenous voices speak. He once said he had flirted with communism as a young man; no public record of party campaigning, advocacy-group affiliations, or sustained activism is on record.