Hammer thrower. Sportscaster. Actor. Director. Author of scientific articles. Poet. If the life of Nils Oliveto were a film, his scenario would undoubtedly be accused of implausibility. “I’m not a jack of all trades,” he swears. Jack-of-all-trades don’t know what they want. Me, it was always clear, what I wanted. I always wanted to be number one. » Portrait of the cantor of the bobsleigh tracks, who these days presents his new feature film, Confessionem.
Posted at 7:00 a.m.
Nils Oliveto was thinking at that time of not too time-consuming ways to finance his career as a hammer thrower. The advertisement ? There is easy money there, says to himself “in a very simplistic way”, he admits it today with a laugh, the one who was then finishing his master’s degree in exercise physiology and human performance at the University of Oklahoma.
Visiting his former high school in Greenfield Park, the athlete slips a word to his drama teacher. “Mr. Gold said to me, ‘Why would you do it part-time? You are a talented actor, do it now while there is still time.” »
A few weeks later, in the basement of his dormitory, the student watches a film. “And there, it took me by the throat. I had a physical experience. I could no longer accept being behind. I had to be there. There as: in the screen.
Son of Italian immigrants who both set sail for Quebec in the name of adventure, Nils Oliveto was until then the man of a single objective: to participate in the Olympic hammer throwing tournament, a discipline he chooses ado because it suits his size (hefty, but not gigantic) and because of all the throws, this one requires the greatest technical mastery, he explains.
PHOTO DAVID BOILY, THE PRESS
Nils Oliveto
But while he feels this Olympic dream slipping away, after having participated in several major competitions, including the Canada Games and those of La Francophonie, Nils Oliveto multiplies acting workshops in Oklahoma. If he doesn’t become the next Gaétan Boucher, his hero since the Sarajevo Games, if he doesn’t beat Yuriy Sedykh’s records, why not play his all-out in… Hollywood? “That, in screenwriting, is what we call a plot twist,” he jokes.
Like thousands of dreamers before him, he moved to Los Angeles in 2000 in the hope of being spotted, a period of two years during which he multiplied acting and screenwriting training, as well as odd jobs.
My weekly budget for groceries was $20. The hammer thrower has lost a lot of weight. But I also learned what that meant, competition. I thought I knew, but that was a whole different game. I had to learn to differentiate myself, to target my unique side.
Nils Oliveto
Smarter than it looks
After landing several small roles in films and television series, and after a stay in Calgary at the national bobsleigh camp, Nils Oliveto returns to Montreal driven by the ambition to charm a producer with one of his scripts. After having contacted “literally all the film producers on the planet”, he is relying on the risky but salutary path of total independence.
Like all his other productions, Confessionem, which he is presenting this Thursday at the Cinéma Moderne and which he hopes to soon have the opportunity to distribute more widely, is the fruit of a keen sense of resourcefulness. Dreamlike suspense in black and white, the feature film financed out of his own pockets delves into the twisted psyche of a teacher (played by Nils), wrongly accused (or not) of various crimes. It won the Best International Film award at the Golden State Film Festival in March.
“We’re starting to understand that I’m not just fat, tough and silly, that I’m smarter than I look,” says the filmmaker, half joking, about this condemnation of not being only one thing that is sometimes seen by the other.
Americans are less like that. One of their great qualities is not to put you in a box. They have a great admiration for someone who can bring several elements. They call it versatility. Here, we see it as someone who scatters.
Nils Oliveto
Competitive at all times
Versatility, you say? Nils Oliveto published last December Winter haiku-lympics, a collection of haikus singing the beauties of winter Olympic sports – you read that right. “I consider being boring to be blasphemy in my profession,” he writes in the preface, about his job as a board sports commentator, which he has been doing for Radio-Canada since 2017. “If you change channel while I’m on the air, I failed. Period. »
PHOTO PROVIDED BY NILS OLIVETO
Nils Oliveto with his colleague Kéven Breton
Noticed during the recent Beijing Games thanks to his flights worthy of Alain Goldberg delivered in a tone “loud enough to wake the dead”, Nils Oliveto will have made captivating events whose stakes would otherwise have remained impenetrable for the neophyte.
Nils “brings analysis and description to life in the same way he would on stage,” observes his friend and colleague, sports journalist Kéven Breton. “I even think he plays a bit of a character in the analysis, deliberately, to make it more alive. Performance is something inseparable from him, he wants to perform, regardless of the field. »
“I often work on TV with people with a sporting pedigree superior to mine, so this is my chance to show that I can be as good as them at what I do in 2022”, confirms the one who will be Worlds d athletics from July 15 on Radio-Canada alongside Bruny Surin and Michel Chabot. His most recent scientific article was published in July 2021 in the magazine Track & Field News. “I don’t fight against them, but I stay competitive. The first thing I said to Kéven was: “I want viewers to find us hot.” »
Participating in the Olympic Games in this way will have alleviated the disappointment of not having been invited as an athlete. “It took me so long to put aside this bitterness”, confides the one who will be in the distribution of the series Indefensible in the fall at TVA. “Today, it’s as if I had been extremely in love with a girl for years, without it being reciprocated, and that I have now become friends with this girl. ” Nice picture. “It’s my poetic side. »
Confessionem is presented this Thursday at 10 p.m. at the Cinéma Moderne.