I loved cinema while growing up and, for the longest time, wanted to be a director.

Vancouver's a very child friendly city, there's... no doubt about that.

A lot of the characters I play have problems, they are marginalised, they have serious psychological problems, problems with relationships, with childhood. These are big subjects, big subjects. You can't balk at work like that. As an actor, that's as good as it gets.

So many of my friends, old friends I haven't seen in years, made their way out there and got lost, then found their way back. That seems believable to me.

A lot of Scots have settled in Canada over the years and it's a very easy place for Scots - they understand us, we understand them.

In the late '70s, maybe just before I started, there was still an attitude that if you did film you didn't do TV and vice versa, but that's gone now.

I've never been good at accepting jobs six months down the line. I can't do it. If I'm thinking about this, I can't think about that. So I always seem to fly by the seat of my pants.