When I started acting, my mom said, "If you want to go to film school and eventually direct, being on set is probably the best film school in the world." I'm incredibly grateful for the career I've had, but I was an actor to be a part of movies and TV, not the other way around.

Before World War II in Canada, you were nobody until you went to England. Then, after that it was you're nobody until you went to the States.

Regardless of how insane it might be, when you dig somebody you just met and you send that first text, goddamn, it's an eternity before you get the reply back.

In the best-case scenario, the audience sees themselves in your shoes. The only way you can do that is if you try to play it as if it was happening to you.

I know it's going to sound like a cliché, but the key of successful playing a role is to sort of keep it real and earnest and react the way that one would react in those situations. Where the disconnect between the movie and the audience would happen is if you go too big or too crazy with that stuff.

It's something I want to do going forward - make a movie that is commercial and universal and will play in any movie theater or living room in the States or the UK, but is definitively Canadian. I don't think there's such a thing as prohibitively Canadian.

Movies are the greatest art form the world has come up with yet. If you don't use them to the full extent and you don't give people as much as you possibly can, you're doing a disservice to it.