You’re watching your favorite Canadian TV comedy, Letterkenny, the other dayee when you find yourself wondering, Wait… which one is Ron and which one is Dax?
The Hulu exclusive series satirizing rural life in the Great White North boasts one of the most unique ensembles of any sitcom running today. In fact, each character boasts enough fascinating quirks and memorably hilarious qualities to make them all easily distinguishable from one another… well, except, for the two members of the Letterkenny cast we're about to discuss in this piece.
Even the most die-hards fans of the sitcom — which recently debuted its first live-action spin-off, Shoresy, on Hulu — often find themselves struggling to tell the two married workout partners apart. I will admit that — despite their disparate physical characteristics — each and every time I have referenced them in an article about Letterkenny, I had to rely on internet research to confirm that James Daly is Ron (a.ka. "Ronzy") and Gregory Waters plays Dax (a.k.a. "Daxy").
Apparently, this is an issue not lost on even Jacob Tierney, who co-created Letterkenny with Wayne actor Jared Keeso and who also stars as local pastor-tuned-MoD3an’s employee, Glen. The actor and filmmaker was recently interviewed by EW about the show’s slow, pressure cooker success story and, when asked about any past characters he would like to bring back, had this to say:
There's enough of them. I can barely fit them all in a fucking frame. [Laughs] I don't want more actors; I have plenty. I barely know which one's Reilly and which one's Jonesy. I don't know which one's Dax and which one's Ron.
So, not only does Tierney struggle with differentiating Dax from Ron, but he also faces the same problem when identifying fellow gym dwellers, Reilly (Dylan Playfair) and Jonesy (Andrew Herr). Intriguingly, this reflects a running gag on the show that Wayne often fails (of, perhaps, refuses) to remember either of the hockey-playing best buddies' names.
EW writer Tyler Aquilina then reveals that he isn't sure which is which when Dax and Ron are on screen either. This prompts the following reply from Tierney, jokingly claiming that Daly and Waters might be just as clueless:
I don't think they know! I think they learn both lines, and then they're just like, flip a coin to see who says what.
Thinking more about this topic and reminiscing about the best Letterkenny episodes, I often can’t tell the difference between another pair of workout buddies named Tyson and Joint Boy, who are played by Jay Bertin and Joel Gagne, respectively. I also tend to forget if Sash Striga is the one who plays Aly and Nadine Bhabha plays her friend, Bianca, or vice versa (the former turned out to be correct). Finally, I do recall a time I genuinely wondered if I was looking at Wayne’s French-Canadian ex-girlfriend, Marie-Frédérique (Magalie Lépine Blondeau), when it was actually Kim Cloutier as Anik, the French-Canadian ex-girlfriend of Daryl (Nathan Dales).
Luckily, I suppose it does not always really matter if we find ourselves seeing double with any of these characters because, in most cases, they come as a packaged deal, especially Ronzy and Daxy. Maybe one day, if the creators do want to make it easier for fans to solve this conundrum, it would help to make the couple the stars of their own spin-off. I'd give that a Texas-sized 10-4.
