can i ask you something if you had one shot one opportunity to seize everything
that you ever wanted in one moment would you capture it or let it slip
i was supposed to be at uh quantland university in british columbia canada
and i did go there for 45 minutes and i said no and i left i moved to los angeles to get into
improv comedy i just thought i'm gonna go do this thing and i'm gonna give it a year and if it works
great if it doesn't i'll go back to school get a degree and go so join the workforce it was about
six weeks into my trip in los angeles and i called them and said hey i'm you know i'm in los angeles
my father hung up on me and then my mom called me back and i sort of she was always kind of the
voice of reason and then you know my father sort of came around i eventually ran out of money so i
just asked an agency to meet with me and and i called about 10 of them and then i finally got
my foot in the door with one really small agency and i i bullshitted them i just said if you send
me out on five auditions i don't care what they are what they're for i promise you've got one
somehow i got the fourth one i got i got a sitcom which was probably still the best job
i've ever had because it was nothing to do with money because it was a live audience it was like
kind of what i wanted to be doing anyway which was improv comedy and that kind of stuff was a
live audience that would pour in and then you know the sitcom world is about a six or seven
or eight month at most job a year i mean you know you you finish your season and then you're free
so i loved it because i would just go travel i would go backpacking all over the world and i
would do all these sort of things i think i really spent that money that i made wisely at the time
i got to see the world and have experiences so everything happened to me sort of in aggregate
kind of way it's very slow and steady so i'm grateful for that kind of momentum being very
very sort of snail's pace as opposed to like a rocket ship because i've watched so many
people in this industry come and go in various tragic ways and that's the thing fame is a weird
animal to deal with i think for anybody so so you know for me it happens so slowly that it's sort of
like getting into a bath over the course of a year you know you're not going to get shocked by the
water being cold or hot you're going to you know you're going to just immerse yourself in a way
that's really really slow so most people aren't really offered that everything's all or nothing
in hollywood it's either you're the biggest star they've ever seen or you're done yeah you know
i somehow found that i got lucky and found that weird sort of middle ground where i was able to
just build my career hollywood was i you know my experience would obviously different from
a lot of other people's but i found it to be a struggle it's difficult but it's difficult
moving to any city i didn't have a lot of friends or anything like that so i immediately tried to
immerse myself into that improv community in los angeles i mean i think it's the best acting school
on earth you know everyone what's good about it well it just it allows it really focuses
on listening like you really have to listen you know and so much of acting is putting yourself in
other people's position i mean it's it's weirdly empathetic you you're forced to constantly think
what would someone like that what would someone like that say or do or feel in that moment and
then you're always listening to your partner you're not supposed to ever say no in a scene
and improv you're supposed to say yes and okay so it was great it's the best training i've ever had
i mean back then i really didn't have a support system that i do now i had no outlet for that
so to sort of deal with this inner kind of hurricane that was happening i would just get them
jump up into the audience and just do the warm-up it was just a great way to kind of
expel some of that that super anxious energy and into something productive i always thought
i'd end up as in law enforcement like my family so i uh you know i didn't i didn't imagine that
acting was a was a way to get out of the house it wasn't really like a passion when i was a kid it
was something that i was i was already doing you know to survive so you kind of you know i noticed
when i was a kid making people laugh was a great self-defense mechanism it really helped me kind of
navigate my way through my own home it was a means to an end it was just a way to get out of the
house i could act i didn't necessarily want to be like i hid it largely in high school than then i
never celebrated it was something i kind of really tried to keep as quiet as possible for me
high school was a situation where i fight the more invisible i was the more kind of happy i was so i
just wanted to get through that [ __ ] show and go live my life and a lot of the stuff i did was uh
was shown in the united states but not necessarily in canada so i could kind of get away with that
you know you get by in your wits that's how you do it you don't get by on your fists so uh yeah it's
kind of a rough household um was less like the youngest brother but more like a moving target
we're all super close now you kind of become hyper perceptive you know you start to really
think about how you're going to survive so especially my three-year-old brothers were so
sort of physical guys and you know there was just rough housing like for them was always funny for
me it was like a life-threatening situation so you sort of uh you sort of learned to kind of get by
on on using your mind not your fists so i became kind of hyper perceptive as a kid and i know that
that contributed in in enormous ways to um the different paths i chose in life you know
particularly show business and that sort of thing i was able to kind of constantly mimic people
or watch people and look for tiny signs and big signs of you know danger it was tough i was
yeah i was a kid i had a lot of anxiety a lot of different kind of phobias and issues that i had to
had to sort of work through and and it took me a long time to kind of recognize those things as
assets as opposed to liability i still struggle with those those same things as challenging
as they are and and you know they they're also gifts that come with those things you know
it's that same sort of situation where you become kind of incredibly perceptive in ways in which you
you otherwise wouldn't you know you're constantly kind of sensing both real danger and non-existent
danger so you're you know that's those are things that really help me in my work one thing
that's worked for me is is practicing some form of compassion uh every day whether it's for yourself
or someone else especially for someone else empathy has got me so much more so
much farther that this has made me money friends uh priceless memories it's allowed me to fully
accept and provide love it's helped me recognize mistakes that i've made and learn from them
and above all it made me happy and it's something i'll probably be working on my whole life
my father had parkinson's he died a few years ago but uh you know my father was
very very proud man i mean i think he said the word parkinson's to me maybe twice in his
uh 25 years that he had the disease so i think more people talk about it the more i see guys
like my father who is a sort of the archetypal strong man the guy who you know don't talk about
your feelings cram them down and sort of robbed of his physicality and he was strong he's an
ex-boxer or cop you know i think part of his identity was that he was a very strong
man so it forced him to kind of reassess all those things which was in a way a good thing
but uh in the end you know that loss of of of self not quite knowing um uh where you stand
in any given moment um is pretty tough so i wonder if some of those underlying ideas or reasons we do
get sick or sick or is because we're not sort of expressing ourselves or letting things out
in thinking about your future what's important to you uh family 100 as anyone will know it's almost
frustratingly so for some of the people i work with is that i gotta make sure that my time with
my family is prioritized over anything else always just embrace this idea that you know nothing
because you don't i mean you know as soon as you think you know exactly what how it's all going to
go down or what audiences are really yearning for you know they it it you can be surprised you know
so um i love that edict i like that idea that i i believe in film and any endeavor to be a process
of collaboration i think you always have to listen and always ask for help and the best leaders are
are the people that hire the best people um so that's for me that's that's the thing that i think
that's the biggest lesson i've learned is like you know just hire the best people you can
uh people that you connect with people that you love people that you know you can learn from i
get excited about stuff that's kind of um you know inventive i love ingenuity i love anything that
sort of i think is interesting i'm not like a guy that sits around sort of rolling the dice looking
at the stock market and that kind of thing i don't know anything about that i wouldn't characterize
myself as an entrepreneur i would characterize myself as someone who has found a couple of
different things in life that i believed in with every cell in my body and this is one of them
you