Actor Randy Quaid: Canada could deport me in days
Troubled Randy Quaid says he could be deported from Canada next week, bringing years of issues with the country’s border authorities to an end.
In a phone interview from a detention centre in Laval, Quebec, the American actor said he was arrested by Canada Border Services while making a regular check-in on Tuesday.
“They won’t allow me to remain,” Quaid said.
Quaid is the older brother of actor Dennis Quaid and is best known for his roles in films such as National Lampoon’s Vacation and Independence Day.
Immigration and Refugee Board spokesman Robert Gervais said Quaid would have a detention review hearing on Thursday. Officials said they were unable to give further details.
Quaid’s bid for permanent residency in Canada was denied in 2012 and it can take years for deportation to follow.
He was arrested in Montreal in May after becoming the subject of a nationwide arrest warrant when he stopped checking in with border authorities. He later apologised and was released, with the requirement to check in every two weeks.
Quaid said he has a deportation order for next Tuesday and Thursday’s hearing is about whether he can remain in the country. He said there was a chance authorities could delay the deportation for a few weeks.
The actor and his Canadian wife Evi fled the US in 2010, saying they were victims of persecution. Quaid has sought to stay in Canada, saying he was being hunted by “Hollywood star-whackers” who had killed his friends David Carradine and Heath Ledger.
The couple face legal problems in the US which began in 2010, when the Quaids were charged with trespassing and causing damage worth more than $5,000 to the guest house of a California home they once owned, but were allegedly squatting in it when they were arrested.
Two days before they were charged, they travelled to Vancouver, British Columbia.
Santa Barbara senior deputy district attorney Lee Carter said there was an active extradition order for Quaid on a felony vandalism case and prosecutors would be seeking his extradition if he was returned to the United States.
Carter said Quaid and his wife also faced charges for failing to appear at a November 2010 court hearing while on bail.
“I probably will get arrested for all that. I’m perfectly willing to face all that stuff,” Quaid said in the phone interview. “I would like to have the issues in Santa Barbara resolved so I can move on with my life.”
He said the couple’s behaviour, statements and videos they posted to social media, including a sex tape, were an act and a way of expressing themselves.
“I don’t know how you go about correcting perceptions. It’s like trying to put the genie out back in the bottle. For 40 years I was well respected,” he said.
He said he did not regret calling powerful people in the movie business “Hollywood star-whackers”.
“I don’t mean it in a literal sense. I think the people I’m going after would like to see me dead, absolutely, but whether they would act on that, I don’t know,” he said.
Quaid also said he would like to return to making films and called his wife “the best director I ever worked with”. But he said major movie studios made boring movies and called the people who run them “a bunch of crooks”.
