He might take the bus to work, and end up sitting in cheese along the way, but Hope-Z’s psych resident Gavin is concerned solely with remaining open and honest.

“It’s the epitome of Gavin, that he doesn’t drive a fancy car like Dr. Goran,” says actor Kristopher Turner. “He’ll admit that he sat in cheese – he’s fine being a goof and letting people see him as a goof. It relaxes people when they know he’s a person who’s OK with his own flaws.”

And just as Gavin handles the emotional lives of the patients at Hope-Zion, he also deals with the emotional lives of the doctors.

“He’s the one person at the hospital who wants to connect to people in a world where disconnecting is a coping mechanism – especially with the Alex character, where she has to deal with her fiancé being in a coma and Gavin wants to make it known that he’s there for her,” Turner says.

And as much as Gavin wants to connect with Alex, he really wants to connect with Maggie. “He starts to develop a crush on her and wants to be able to explore that,” Turner says. “He wants her to know that he’s a friend, and even though he wants a bit more, he’s still there as an open and honest guy.”

“She really loves Gavin as a friend,” says Julia Taylor Ross about her character, Maggie. “You know that kind of thing where you know someone likes you but you’re just kind of, ‘I don’t want to go there,’ so you keep it light and friendly and pretend it’s not happening. I think she just sweeps it under the carpet, the sweet gestures.”

To get deeper into her character, Turner reads a lot about psychological issues.  “I’ve talked to a lot of psych residents in Toronto and hearing their stories and their experiences (has helped),” Turner says.

“Some doctors look at patients as their ailments, where Gavin looks at patients as human beings first and how to deal with the mental aspects that go along with that.”

In Episode 6, Gavin is finally able to bring all of his strengths to the table. “In terms of his arc as a doctor, this episode is where he really gets to delve into the psych world,” says Turner.

Gavin is brought in initially to deal with the fact that a patient is under hypnosis and can’t feel pain. “Personally I think Gavin has a little hobby in the hypnotism world,” says Turner.

“He’s not good at it in any way, but it deals with the brain and it brings up the question of why not let someone psychologically be free of pain,” explains Turner. “Alex, being in the science world wants to mask his pain through drugs and pharmaceuticals and Gavin raises that point that it’s the same thing – hypnotism to not feel pain or morphine to not feel pain. Why choose one over the other?”

Gavin even tries his hand at hypnotism, though it doesn’t quiet work out. “I imagine that Gavin has watched some YouTube videos and perhaps attempted to hypnotize friends at a bar, or an attempt to hypnotize his mom,” Gavin says, and admits he might have tried his hand at hypnotism off-screen.  

“I saw a hypnotist in university and I thought it was really cool so I thought, ‘I can do this, I can count backwards.’ But it’s a lot more complicated than that,” says Turner with a laugh.

And pain isn’t the only psychological issue Gavin tackles. “The Heather character comes into this episode initially with a neck ailment, but what we find out is it’s in fact closer to a mental illness and schizophrenic episodes, where she has auditory hallucinations and really uncontrollable thought patterns,” says Turner.

“Her speech becomes more rhythmic, more about the sounds of the speech over the meaning of the words, which are clues and symptoms Gavin picks up on.”

Turner believes it’s Gavin’s ability to connect with people that is his greatest strength as a psychiatrist. “Especially when you have a disease of the mind, you want to treat someone as a human being first, and their ailment second. Somebody is not schizophrenic, they have schizophrenia,” he says.

“Gavin is able to connect with Heather and say, ‘I see you as a person, and I’d like you to separate your mental illness from who you are.’”