You don’t need to tell Jay Baruchel that he is not a conventional movie star. He definitely knows.

“Trust me,” he says. “Nobody is more aware of that than I am.”

And yet, over the span of three decades, the Canadian actor has built a thriving career that has seen him work with some of the biggest names in Hollywood. He now stars as Canadian daredevil Ken Carter in the biographical comedy-drama The Stunt Driver, which hit theaters on September 25. 

Key Insights

• Baruchel’s love of movies and stubborn determination have sustained a three-decade career spanning acting, writing, directing and producing.
• His Montreal roots and longtime collaboration with director Michael Dowse made him a natural fit to portray Canadian daredevil Ken Carter.
• In The Stunt Driver, Baruchel balances Carter’s larger-than-life bravado with the fear and vulnerability behind his potentially deadly ambition.

The first time most American audiences saw him was in the short-lived 2001 Judd Apatow series Undeclared, but that was far from his first gig. “That was 26 years ago,” he laughs. “I had already been acting for five or six years in Canadian children’s programming at that point. My first day on set was in ’95, and I was always on set. I was always in acting because I love movies. I was never in movies because I love acting.”

He’s never lost that love, and he credits his innate stubbornness for at least some of his success, though it’s another innate quality that has served him just as well: his charm. Any successful actor has that in spades, but Baruchel adds an everyman quality that is uniquely appealing. It’s why he is so believable as the voice of Hiccup in the How to Train Your Dragon franchise, and as a leading man in TV shows like Man Seeking Woman and movies like She’s Out of My League and BlackBerry.

The Stunt Driver, written and directed by Michael Dowse, chronicles the five years in the 1970s when Carter planned a massive car jump over the St. Lawrence River, as it became clear that attempting the jump might actually kill him. The film brilliantly mixes humor, action and pathos, as Carter constantly puts himself in danger, but always within reason.

Well, almost always, but still. It actually makes sense that Baruchel would play Carter, as they both possess a doggedness that drove them to the top of their profession. For Carter, that meant jumping over things in a car and risking his life. For Baruchel, it meant building a career, one role at a time, while also diversifying into writing, directing and producing.

“I was always pretty adamant and stubborn about where I wanted to be and the kind of stuff I wanted to do,” he says, “long before I had any reason or ability to be that way. Also, there’s a great deal of luck in there, because less than 20 percent of actors can feed themselves from acting alone, and I’ve been doing this for 30 some odd years, so that’s pretty crazy.”

The fit of actor to role was no secret to Dowse, with whom Baruchel had worked several times before. Dowse had fallen in love with the 1981 documentary about Carter, The Devil at Your Heels, and knew there was a narrative feature to be made. He also knew, right away, who would be the right guy to play Carter.

“I thought visually it would be an incredible story, driven by an incredible character, and it had all the pieces that you look for in terms of telling the story, and it’s a true story as well, which is even more amazing to me,” Dowse recalls. “I’d watched BlackBerry. I turned around and I was like, my God, Jay’s the same age, he’s from the same neighborhood, he understands that world where Ken was from. His parents ran in the same circles. He knows where that guy came from, and that’s a very specific thing.”

Of course, there was more to it than that. Like, y’know, Baruchel’s actual talent. 

“Yeah, I also knew how great of a dramatic actor Jay is,” he adds with a laugh. “Obviously, he’s funny, and we’ve had a wonderful time working together on other things. But I just knew he could embody this character and would embrace it. So it was a very easy decision, and I think it’s important as a filmmaker to stake a claim and say, ‘This is my guy, and I’m going to build around him, and come hell or high water, we’re making this movie with him as Ken Carter.’ It was a very, very easy decision to make.”

It did take some time. Several years, in fact, before the whole package came together, but even as he was working on other things, the actor knew his director friend was pushing the boulder up the hill, and eventually, would make it to the top.

“Mike had told me about this movie a long time ago,” he recalls. “When you know each other as long as we have, and you hang out and you work and you both love movies and work in movies, you talk about, ‘If I could do anything, this is what I would do.’ I remember him telling me about The Devil at Your Heels years ago.

The first time I watched it, it was just for pure joy, because I’m a fan of Canadian cinema, and this was a local Montreal Anglo character who was larger than life. He was from a bygone era, and I remember what men like that looked and sounded like, because those guys were still around when I was a kid, and they’re all gone now. So I immediately was hooked on the romance of that character. Then Mike wrote this awesome script, and he’s like, ‘I think you could do it.’”

Despite knowing about the project for so long, when it was becoming a reality, Baruchel admits to having doubts. Playing a folk hero like Carter carries a lot of pressure with it, after all.

“Once that happened, I had to rewatch the movie through that lens, to try to honor Ken,” he says. “The Ken that’s documented in The Devil at Your Heels. The Ken that Dowse expresses in his script, and then build a character with my friend. There are few directors I trust as much as Mike, but yeah, I had the weight of a lot of responsibility with this.”

He comes through just fine, as Baruchel’s Carter is a real character, in the best sense of the word. He portrays Carter’s bravado with the layers of a man who’s not afraid to tempt death, but only to a point. When that point is reached, the bravado slips, like in the prep for the big jump. Carter knows the stunt could kill him, and while part of him wants to do it, it’s eminently clear that he’s looking for a way out, and Baruchel plays that dichotomy with empathy and depth. In a sense, it’s the kind of role he’s spent his whole career training for.

“Somewhere between the two-mile markers of needing to keep the lights on and doing stuff that I would cut my arm off for is my resume, I think,” he says. “At the risk of sounding super hokey and self-important, I just lead with my heart wherever I can. You can’t always. You answer different masters depending on where you’re at in your life.

I’ve got to pay the bills and look after my family and do all the stuff I’m supposed to do as a man, but it’s got to be shit that I would want to see myself, you know? I’m lucky enough that I’ve been able to always find a place to do something.”

Baruchel will show up in next year’s fifth season of Reacher on Amazon Prime, but he’s also already planning to get back into business with his director. He and Dowse are writing a new sitcom together for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which Dowse will direct and in which Baruchel will star.

“It goes real hard and it makes us laugh, and it’s pretty crazy that the CBC is letting us do it,” Baruchel says, laughing. “So that’s really cool.”

For Baruchel, a lasting career has meant balancing practical responsibilities with the love of movies that first drew him to a set. His advice emerges less as a formula than as an example: stay persistent, find collaborators you trust and keep pursuing work you would want to watch yourself. In The Stunt Driver, those instincts come together in a role that draws on his roots while giving him room to grow. With more acting and writing ahead, he’s still following the curiosity that got him started.