The Englishman's Boy rides onto small screen

Canadian actor Nicholas Campbell says he approached the iconic role of Shorty McAdoo in The Englishman's Boy with some trepidation.

It wasn't the fear of portraying a grizzled cowboy-turned-movie-actor in 1920s Hollywood that had him worried — it was the prospect of trying to do justice to Guy Vanderhaeghe's beloved story.

"You don't want at the end of the day to say I was in that book that everyone liked so much and I disappointed them a little bit and I didn't really hit what was in that book," he told CBC cultural affairs show Q.

"Really, it's more your fear that you can measure up to these big ideas that this man was dealing with in his life," said Campbell, who is best known as the irascible coroner on  Da Vinci's Inquest.

The miniseries, based on Vanderhaeghe's The Englishman's Boy, begins airing this Sunday starring Campbell, Bob Hoskins, Michael Therriault, R.H. Thomson and Michael Eisner.

McAdoo is an enigmatic character, quite unlike the outspoken Da Vinci, and Therriault plays the young writer who draws out the past that so haunts him.

Much of the back story takes place in the late 1870s in what is now southern Saskatchewan. Filming was done in Saskatchewan last summer with real cowboys brought in to help the "Toronto tenderfoots" adapt to their role, Campbell said.

"It's sort of that post-Civil War period where borders were very fragile, except that border coming into Saskatchewan. It was lawless up there," Campbell said.

"It's about an ill-fated posse who are riding up there to recover what they think are stolen horses and it leads to the Cypress Hills massacre."

The miniseries slowly reveals the connection between the lonely, footloose Englishman's boy (played by Eisner) and Shorty McAdoo, the movie cowboy.

The screenplay was written and rewritten by Vanderhaeghe from his Governor General's Award-winning book — initially as a feature film and then as a miniseries.

"I think because the screenplay actually was in gestation or being worked on for such a long time, I managed to get out of the novelist's head," he said from Saskatoon, where he lives and teaches at the University of Saskatchewan.

"Many novelists, when they go to adapt, they don't really think about adaptation, they think about somehow literally representing the novel on film, and I don't really think that's possible to do. I learned that."

Both Campbell and Vanderhaeghe believe the miniseries, directed by John N. Smith, lives up to the rich promise of the book.

"It's one of those dream opportunities that you can really show your skill as an actor," Campbell said. "Everyone wants the chance to be in a western."

The Englishman's Boy begins airing on CBC Television on Sunday at 8 p.m. (8.30 NT).