It’s always been Kenton Dyck’s dream to be in a sitcom, and now that filming is wrapping up for Maria and the Mennos, he wants to share what it was like.

It's been almost three months since the start of filming for the show, and Dyck says his experience has lived up to his expectations. 

“I'm relieved how much fun I'm having. Because it is such a dream, you brace yourself to be disappointed, right? Because you've worked it up in your mind, but it has been what I was hoping."

He says the best part about filming is receiving the script and just getting to have as much fun with it as possible.  

“You just play for most of the day and then go home.” 

Dyck says although it is mostly fun and games, there are some moments where it feels like work. 

“There are times like any job when things maybe aren't going so well, or people are tired and you get to a point where you just have to do it, but for the most part it's really been a fantastic experience.” 

One thing Kenton doesn’t love about filming, is how little of the day actually consists of filming. 

"Everything has to be set up for the scene, and there are so many moving pieces, and actors are really only one fairly small part of the actual production.” 

He says a large part of his day is sitting and waiting. 

“’Now go sit and wait and come back when we're ready to shoot’, and then you come back and you do your little bit, and you do it again, and you do it again, and then you go sit and wait for a while,” he says. “So there's a lot of waiting.”  

He says memorizing his lines isn’t too bad, as unlike theatre, you don’t have to memorize a whole script like you would for a play.” 

“You really only memorize the scenes that you are going to be in tomorrow and the day after,” he says. “Usually I'm going into set knowing pretty well every all the lines that I have to do for the day, and I'm just going over things between scenes so that the next time we do a setup for a scene, I'm good to go.” 

Dyck says he doesn’t feel like he is ‘performing’ on the show like he does in theatre. 

"You never ever feel like you performed. Usually in theater, you prepare a piece, put it on stage, and then you get all the recognition and people are watching and you get a feedback,” he says. “But this does feel very weird, and it's so silent. In theater, you're performing in front of people so you know when something is going well, but in this, if you do something really well everybody on set should be perfectly silent.” 

He says it’s a weird feeling not getting an immediate reaction to your acting. 

“(If) they're making noise and reacting to what you did, they're ruining the take.” 

The crew is done filming at the house in Winnipeg and is now on location in Winkler. 

They are shooting some scenes at the Winkler Art Centre, and on a couple of farms in the area.

He notes his character on the show isn’t similar to the real Kenton Dyck in a few ways. 

"There are some things that are very much not me in that he's got a very weak stomach, and that's not something that I really struggle with. But I think the more I play it, the more it becomes me."

Maria and the Mennos starts airing this coming August. 

 

With files from Corny Rempel