Best-laid plans of Baruchel
Actor never planned to do this his whole adult life, but here he is again
Jay Baruchel — born in Ottawa, raised in Montreal and now a Toronto resident — continues to live his Hollywood dream.
Take his new American series, “The Moodys” (which returns for a second season with backto-back episodes Thursday on Fox). Shot in Montreal, it stars Denis Leary and Elizabeth Perkins. Baruchel plays one of three adult children; still at home, still hoping to strike it rich.
The character, therefore, is a lot like the actor, except Baruchel’s dreams came spectacularly true.
“When Mom and Dad realized that I wasn’t interested in softball or hockey, they did see that I took like a duck to water with movies,” he told the Star last week from a cottage getaway in Ontario. “Once they saw that, they just leaned into it like crazy.”
Long before streaming services, his antique dealer dad Serge used to scour video stores on business trips for the latest Scorsese or Tarantino flick. Mom Robyne, a freelance writer, sat with him every weekend watching “Saturday Night at the Movies,” hosted by TVO’s Elwy Yost.
And every weeknight, long before YouTube or Instagram, Baruchel parked himself in front of the TV after supper to see Leonard Maltin premiere an exclusive movie trailer on “Entertainment Tonight.”
“All of that stuff — Roger Ebert, Elwy Yost, Leonard Maltin — those were really important people to me because they were important people to my folks,” says Baruchel, who turns 39 in April.
He devoured Maltin’s movie guides and film history books, drawn to what he saw as the author’s “ceaseless affection for movies of every shape or size.”
“It’s easier for me as a kid to fall in love with movies if everything I’m reading is a function of someone’s love, as opposed to a function of everything they disliked about it.”
Baruchel thought about film schools and sent away for applications. Barely a teen, he kept landing work, however, as an actor on TV shows such as “Popular Mechanics for Kids” and “Are You Afraid of the Dark?”
Stick with that, said his mom: “This is the best film school you can go to.”
He says he saw acting simply as a way of being on a set. “I always knew I wanted to be a director,” he says. “I have no chasing of the brass ring as an actor in me.”
Besides, he insists, “I was not a cute kid.” Casting agents tended to disagree. He was hired to be in Cameron Crowe’s 2000 feature “Almost Famous.” Crowe encouraged Baruchel to ad lib, to “just riff until he called out ‘Cut!’ ” Baruchel was by no means the star, but he was in two or three scenes in a big Hollywood production — and he nailed them.
His friends were impressed, but Baruchel thought he might be done. He was back home goofing on PlayStation in his sister’s room when the phone rang.
It was a casting agent in Los Angeles who had seen “Almost Famous” and wanted to make him more famous in a little Judd Apatow comedy series: “Undeclared” (2001-02).
“I really didn’t think I’d be an actor in my adult life and it all starts there,” Baruchel declares.
Then at 19 he found himself cancelled — except the phone rang again. Baruchel wound up directed by Clint Eastwood in the Oscar-winning Best Picture “Million Dollar Baby” (2004).
And on it goes. He was reunited with Seth Rogen of “Undeclared” in Apatow’s “Knocked Up.” He was directed by one of his idols, David Cronenberg, in “Cosmopolis” (2012). He was working with everybody from Ben Stiller (“Tropic Thunder”) to the Trailer Park Boys.
And he got to direct. After the success of a very Canadian hockey movie he co-wrote with Evan Goldberg, “Goon” (2011), Baruchel directed the sequel, “Goon: Last of the Enforcers” (2017). In 2019, he directed and wrote “Random Acts of Violence.”
Those projects and others (including the FX series “Man Seeking Woman”) were all shot in Canada, something Baruchel is extremely passionate about.
Then it hit him — those books he used to read by Maltin and Ebert, he’s now in them.
“Crazy,” says Baruchel. “Crazy.”
Ebert even gave him a rave review for the 2010 feature “She’s Out of My League.”
“Jay Baruchel,” Ebert wrote, “has that quality of seeming like someone we might actually have known outside of a movie.”
The reviews from his new castmates are also keepers.
“He’s f---kin’ brilliant in ‘The Moodys,’ ” says Leary.
Baruchel plays Sean Moody, Jr. Montreal native François Arnaud (“The Borgias”) plays brother Dan; Chelsea Frei plays newly separated sis Bridget Moody. Another Canadian, Gerry Dee (“Mr. D”), is hilarious in a recurring role.
Because Boston-raised Leary, a big Bruins fan, is part of the mix, there are hockey scenes.
“It’s in my contract,” says the actor/comedian and former “Rescue Me” star. “Anything I do has to have a hockey scene, minimum of two hockey scenes.”
Baruchel, a devoted fan of the Montreal Canadiens, says the hockey talk is no put-on from Leary.
“That’s all Denis really cares to talk about,” says Baruchel. “He’s by far the biggest hockey nerd I’ve ever met.”
Says Leary, Baruchel “comes in a close second.”
“Mom and Dad … did see that I took like a duck to water with movies.”
JAY BARUCHEL