Shaun Johnston Keeps the Heartland Kids’ Photos in His Trailer

Shaun Johnston has a trailer on the Heartland set in the foothills southwest of Calgary, and its walls tell a story.

One photo shows him with Alisha Newton, who joined the show as 12-year-old Georgie in 2013. Another has him beside one of the Spencer twins who play little Lyndy. He admits he isn’t sure which twin it is. One with Amber Marshall might be 15 years old by now. And one shows his own son, Shea, who has played Jack as a young man in flashback scenes.

Johnston was on a break from filming Heartland‘s 20th season this fall when the Calgary Herald came to visit. “I’ve watched these people grow up, fall in love and go through these thresholds in their lives,” he said.

Spoken like Grandpa Jack. Only this time, it was all Shaun.

To see how he got there, you have to start on a farm.

Cattle, horses and crops near Ponoka

Johnston grew up in the Ponoka area, the farm country between Red Deer and Edmonton. Acting wasn’t even on the list.

“We ran cattle, we rode horses and farmed crops,” he told the Red Deer Advocate in 2012. The ranch skills he brings to Heartland weren’t learned for the part. He grew up with them.

He was a high school jock who played basketball and other sports. Nobody in his crowd talked about art careers, so he took the practical road: a business degree at Red Deer College and a job at the Alberta Treasury Branch. He later said he was an assistant accountant there.

It’s hard to picture Jack Bartlett balancing ledgers. For a while, though, that was the plan.

The long way around to the ranch

The plan didn’t hold. Johnston had a quiet dream of working in fashion, as a photographer or in marketing, and in the early 1980s he headed to Toronto to try it. He ended up on the runway as a model instead. We told that part of his life, from the long drive east to the fashion shows, in our look at Shaun Johnston before Heartland.

The runway gave him a taste for performing. A few years later he was home in Alberta, studying theatre at Red Deer College. An instructor named Richard O’Brien convinced him that everybody has the talent to create something, and Johnston has called that the start of his acting career.

He went on to earn a fine arts degree from the University of Alberta’s drama program, then co-founded Edmonton’s Shadow Theatre with his classmate John Hudson. The company’s official history starts in 1992 with a play Johnston wrote himself, Catching the Train.

Then came the screen work. There was The X-Files, Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years and North of 60, plus the title role of Jake in Jake and the Kid. He played a wagon train captain in September Dawn, and the Canadian Encyclopedia counts it as his second Alberta best actor award.

By the time Heartland called in 2006, he’d been playing cowboys for years. He’d grown up as one first.

Honour is the one thing no one can take

Fans often say Jack feels real. There’s a reason.

Johnston has said Jack holds many of the same values he does. In 2012, he called Jack a man with “a sense of fairness and honour,” and he shared the lesson he always gave his own two sons: honour is the one thing nobody can take from you.

“If you walk the high road, it’s because you choose to,” he said. “And if you walk the low road, it’s also because you choose to.”

It sounds like something Jack would say at the kitchen table. Now you know where it comes from.

The episode he played without notes

Johnston is a planner. Before an episode, he follows a very specific routine and makes pages of notes.

There was one episode where he didn’t write a single note.

It was Season 9’s “Ties of the Earth,” the episode where Jack says goodbye to his horse, Paint. Johnston told Horse Canada in 2016 that he knew he’d be so connected to the story that he simply shot it. “It was hard on everybody,” he said. When they asked for his favourite episode of recent seasons, his answer was two words: “That one.”

A few years later, he looked back on it in CBC’s oral history of Heartland. What stayed with him wasn’t the script. It was how every member of the cast and crew felt the loss the same way.

“I recall a thousand tears during the making of that episode,” he said. “And they didn’t come from me. Not all of them, anyway.”

Only a man raised around horses could tell that story so dry and still mean every word.

A guitar on set and a hockey stick at home

Off camera, he’s busy. In that 2016 interview he said he plays “a ton of hockey” and as much guitar as he can. He called himself “no hot guitar player,” just good enough to keep himself happy.

Don’t let him fool you. He told CBC he doesn’t think he’s gone to work a single day without his guitar. Amber Marshall remembers the cast gathering around Shaun’s guitar back in Season 1, which grew into the on-set jam sessions the cast calls Trailer Sessions.

Asked what he’d do when Heartland ends, he kept it simple. Watch a lot of TV and play more hockey.

Growing old gracefully, 20 seasons in

In 2016, Heartland was filming its 10th season. Horse Canada asked Johnston what he would tell himself ten years earlier. Stop worrying between seasons, he said, because the show keeps getting renewed. He loved it so much that he spent every break hoping for one more.

He had good reason to worry, at least at the start. While they filmed the pilot in 2006, he told the young cast not to get their hopes up. “Shame on me, maybe, but I thought it didn’t have a hope,” he admits now.

Ten years after that Horse Canada interview, Heartland is in Season 20, and Jack is facing one of his hardest stories. The premiere revealed that he’d quietly had a stroke. He thought about stepping back, and then he chose the ranch anyway. You can read how Jack decided not to retire in our recap.

Back then, Horse Canada asked what playing Jack had taught him. His answer was short: “I’ve learned that I’m going to grow old gracefully.”

He’s doing it in a trailer lined with pictures: Alisha, a Spencer twin, his son Shea, and a much younger Amber Marshall. She was one of the kids he once warned not to expect much from a little pilot about a horse ranch in Alberta.