Fulvio Cecere

Fulvio Cecere
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Portrays:	Alastair Thorne
Date of Birth:	March 11, 1960
Date of Death:	Missing required parameter 1=month!
Age:	66
Nationality:	CAN
Related Media
		@ BW Media
Official Site (archived)
IMDb profile

Fulvio Cecere (born March 11, 1960) is a Canadian actor and filmmaker of Italian descent. Born in Montréal, Québec, he is best known within the Re-imagined Series for his portrayal of Lieutenant Alastair Thorne in "Pegasus" and the TV movie Razor. Over a career spanning more than three decades, he has accumulated over 190 screen credits in film and television productions across Vancouver, Toronto, Los Angeles, and New York, and has expanded into documentary filmmaking with two feature films.

Biography

Born to Italian immigrant parents, Cecere relocated to Hawthorne, New Jersey, as a teenager in 1973, where he graduated from Hawthorne High School in 1978. On December 2, 1977, while working a part-time shift at the Glen Rock A&P on Lincoln Avenue, Cecere intervened when a masked gunman began pistol-whipping the store's assistant manager, Al Jenski, during a robbery attempt. Cecere moved his car to block the store's entrance, then ran back inside and grabbed the gunman, who fired four shots, one of which struck Cecere in the stomach. He recovered in time for the track season and later that school year was presented with a Federal Criminal Investigation Association (FCIA) Valor Award at a ceremony held at Hawthorne High School. National FCIA vice president Frank Scodari noted it was the first time in the association's history that the valor award had been given to a civilian who was neither a federal agent nor a police officer.

As a child, Cecere played the captain in a school production of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta HMS Pinafore before falling ill and losing the role to his understudy. He has cited the experience as one that left him feeling he had never given acting his full effort.

He subsequently attended Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles, but left after one year. He found most of the coursework uninteresting, with the exception of criminal law and torts, and concluded that he would rather pursue acting. He enrolled in acting classes at UCLA, later joking that law school had driven him to acting.

His move to Vancouver came about by chance. While on an inexpensive vacation to the Pacific Northwest, a friend suggested he send his headshots to her clients in the local industry. He was surprised by the response; after five meetings with agents he decided to settle there permanently.

Career

Cecere built an extensive television résumé through the 1990s and 2000s, accumulating guest and recurring roles across a broad range of genre productions. Early credits include appearances on The X-Files (1994–1995), Highlander: The Series, The Outer Limits, Millennium, Da Vinci's Inquest, NYPD Blue, and JAG. Police and detective roles account for a large portion of his work, a pattern he has attributed to casting rather than personal preference; he has spoken of the challenge of finding something different in each character despite the similarity of the material.

Among his recurring television roles, Cecere portrayed freelance detective Fred Durkin in the A&E telefilm The Golden Spiders: A Nero Wolfe Mystery (2000) and across 12 episodes of the follow-up series A Nero Wolfe Mystery (2001–2002). The production used a repertory company of actors who rotated through different guest characters each week; Cecere compared the format to working in a repertory theatre and found it almost liberating, since the actors' mutual familiarity allowed them to take risks across different roles. He recurred as Manticore agent Richard Sandoval across 9 episodes of Dark Angel (Fox, 2000–2002), as Detective Gene Taylor across 6 episodes of The WB's Tarzan (2003), as Skip Dimitriapoulis across 6 episodes of ESPN's poker drama Tilt (2005), and as biker-gang leader Dante Ribiso across 19 episodes of CBC's Intelligence (2006–2007), created by Chris Haddock, who also produced Da Vinci's Inquest. He also appeared as Mack Sorenson in Spike's Blade: The Series (2006).

Post-Battlestar Galactica television credits include recurring appearances on Continuum (2014–2015), iZombie (2015), A&E's Damien (2016), Rogue (2017), and guest roles on Supernatural, The Flash, Grimm, Timeless, Blue Bloods, Transplant, Wild Cards (2024), and Hallmark's Providence Falls (2025).

In feature film, Cecere has appeared alongside major studio productions shooting in British Columbia and Ontario. Credits include Richard Donner's Assassins (1995), Christopher Guest's Best in Show (2000), Valentine (2001) as Detective Leon Vaughn, John Woo's Paycheck (2003) as Agent Fuman, Jean-François Richet's Assault on Precinct 13 (2005) as Ray Portnow, and Ron Howard's Cinderella Man (2005) as Referee McAvoy. Cinderella Man shot its boxing sequences at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, one of six arenas built to the same specifications as the original Madison Square Garden. Cecere recalled the set as giving the impression of a time machine, given the resources available to a production of that scale. He portrayed Agent Forbes in Zack Snyder's Watchmen (2009), with additional scenes included in the director's cut. Further film credits include Paul W. S. Anderson's Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010) and The Age of Adaline (2015).

Documentary filmmaking

In 2003, Cecere wrote, directed, produced, and acted in the short comedy film The Regular Guy, playing both brothers in the story through split-screen composite effects shot on 35mm film. Camera and grip equipment was obtained on loan from Vancouver-based suppliers Panavision and PS Services. The production cost approximately CAN$25,000, employed a crew of 25 to 30 working without pay, and was shot partly at the Dunes area near the Fraser River in Richmond, British Columbia. Cecere has stated the film screened at 20 film festivals and won several awards.

Cecere directed and co-produced the feature documentary 350 Days (2018), a five-year project examining the lives of professional wrestlers during the territory era of the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing from 72 interviews and approximately 120 hours of footage, the finished film features 38 wrestlers including Bret Hart, "Superstar" Billy Graham, Greg Valentine, Tito Santana, Paul Orndorff, Wendi Richter, Stan Hansen, and Lex Luger, along with some of the final recorded interviews of George "The Animal" Steele and Jimmy "Superfly" Snuka. The film premiered theatrically via Fathom Events on July 12, 2018, at the TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles and subsequently received VOD distribution through Gravitas Ventures. Cecere has said his interest in the subject grew out of his work on Cinderella Man, where the boxing production environment led him toward professional wrestling.

In 2024, Cecere released a second documentary, The Jersey Sound, a feature-length portrait of the New Jersey music scene featuring Al Di Meola, Southside Johnny Lyon, Felix Cavaliere, and Tommy James, among others.

Battlestar Galactica

Cecere portrays Lieutenant Alastair Thorne, the Pegasus's chief Cylon interrogator, in the Re-imagined Series episode "Pegasus" and the TV movie Razor. He auditioned without being given any background on Thorne's character, and was surprised once on set by the extent of what the episode would depict. The episode was directed by Michael Rymer. Cecere noted that the shoot's pace differed from standard television practice: the crew took time to get all the nuances right rather than rushing through pages of script per day, an approach more typical of feature production.

Cecere, co-star Grace Park (who played Sharon "Athena" Agathon), and director Rymer spent considerable time discussing the characters before filming the confrontation scene. Cecere recalled the tone on set as serious throughout, and that he repeatedly checked that Park was comfortable given the intensity of what was required of her. The scene as broadcast was substantially toned down from what was originally filmed; Cecere expressed surprise at the decision to cut the most explicit material while retaining the slow-motion depiction of Thorne's death, for which he returned to Vancouver to film reshoots. On Thorne's moral position he stated: "Thorne is not a bad man. Thorne is really a patriot. He's doing his job and you may question the methods, but ultimately it's about saving lives and protecting my crew and the ship." He has also suggested the possibility of Thorne returning as a Cylon, noting the dramatic potential of such a storyline.

External Links

• Fulvio Cecere - official site
• Fulvio Cecere interview at GALACTICA.TV

References