Rob Stewart is virtually anonymous in Canada. The 48-year-old actor is unemployed and lives with his parents in Brampton, Ont. “My life here is so banal,” he says, “very blue collar.” Most days, he rises at 7 a.m. to get his son off to school or hockey practice. There are auditions, but jobs are scarce, he says, and only sometimes lead to guest roles on television shows, including two episodes of ReGenesis and a forthcoming gig on Little Mosque on the Prairie.
Across the Atlantic, in Serbia, however, Stewart is a cult icon turned national superhero. Fans swamp him in the streets; bars erupt when he enters; quiet meals in a restaurant are impossible. “I can't even explain it without sounding like I lack modesty,” he says.
The reason? An early-nineties Canadian TV series called Tropical Heat (a.k.a. Sweating Bullets), in which Stewart starred as Nick Slaughter, a pony-tailed, hairy-chested private investigator who worked on an island, amid beautiful women in bikinis. He was embarrassed by his acting on the “cheesy show” – which he describes as “a B-version of Magnum, P.I.” and which lasted for only three seasons – until he logged onto Facebook last December and found a fan group called “Tropical Heat/Nick Slaughter” with some 17,000 (mostly Serbian) followers.
Stewart with a poster for his documentary about the cult status of his hairy-chested, high-flying alter ego: During the ugliest years of the Milosevic regime, says one prominent Serbian political activist, ‘We all wanted to be Nick Slaughters. … He is the Serbian Batman, an ideal Serbian superhero.’
I used to think [Tropical Heat] was terrible; I was embarrassed about it. But if it gave those people that comfort and emotion, it was a wonderful thing.
“It blew my thoughts off that [the show] had any relevance to anybody,” he recalls. The discovery inspired him to revisit Slaughter in the country that had stood by him all these years. With his neighbour, artist and neophyte filmmaker Marc Vespi, and Vespi's sister, Liza, Stewart went to Serbia last month to film a documentary called Slaughter Nick for President that explores his superstar alter ego.
In Belgrade, they were met with public hysteria. A series of media scrums awaited their arrival, along with groups of fans in tropical shirts (Slaughter's wardrobe staple). Photographers snapped away and then jumped in front of the cameras themselves to get a picture with their national hero.
The anticipation in Serbia had been building since March, when it was leaked to the press that Stewart would perform with a Serbian punk band at its 20th-anniversary concert. “It broke out all over the papers that Nick Slaughter was coming to Serbia,” says Stewart. “It was overwhelming.”
Stewart's Serbian host, prominent political activist Srdja Popovic – whom Stewart had contacted through Facebook – says that after a national newspaper published a photo of him with Stewart, “within 15 minutes, I got 300 calls – everybody asking, ‘Will you introduce me to Nick Slaughter?' and ‘I want a photo with Nick Slaughter.' I couldn't live my normal life.”
Popovic says “everybody in Serbia” watched the show in the 1990s: It was broadcast on four of five TV stations, competing only with nationalistic propaganda and telenovelas from South America. “No wonder Nick Slaughter appeared on the graffiti of Zarkovo [a Belgrade suburb] and later in the student protests,” he says.
In November, 1996, when young people took to the streets of Serbia's cities for three months after the Milosevic regime announced dubious local-election results, Slaughter became a symbol of their oppositional politics. First, there was the graffiti in Zarkovo, which read: “Nick Slaughter, Zarkovo hails to you,” a rhyme in Serbian. Then there was Nick Slaughter, Serbia Hails to You, the title of a popular (and ironic) song by the Serbian punk band Atheist Rap. From there, the slogans spread and mutated: “Every mother should be proud to have a son like Nick Slaughter,” and even “Nick Slaughter for President.”
