Love has made a changed man of Bruce Greenwood.
The Quebec-born, Vancouver-trained actor is in a feisty mood when he calls from Vancouver to chat about his current romantic drama Republic of Love.
"I'm not a baddie, morose, scheming, power-hungry or despondent this time, so let's keep things light," he says.
Greenwood, 48, established his reputation playing heavies, villains and troubled characters in such films as Double Jeopardy, Exotica and Rules of Engagement.
In Deepa Mehta's Republic of Love, he plays Tom, a late-night radio talk show host whose many failed relationships have convinced him he'll never find true love.
The he bumps into Fay (Emilia Fox), another love skeptic, and the two find themselves blissfully infatuated.
This is a romantic drama so something inevitably happens to drive a wedge into their happiness, at least temporarily.
"It is so different for me to be playing a character who doesn't have some hidden agenda and isn't scowling or scheming. I got to be so cheery."
He also got to be shirtless, displaying abs of steel. "It was a very difficult shoot," he says of the film that was shot in Toronto last year.
"We had a lot of worries and had to shoot very quickly. I lost 10 pounds without even trying, and those abs just appeared. It wasn't like I obsessed over the fact I'd be running around without a shirt and spent every waking hour working out in a gym."
Even though it was always a low-budget film, Republic of Love lost its fundiing twice and when it finally got the green light, Mehta had only enough money to shoot for 25 days instead of the planned 35.
"You make do. You work harder. You band together. It's what you do when you love a project as much as we all did."
Greenwood says, like Tom in Republic, he is a confirmed romantic.
"We both wear our hearts on our sleeves and, when you really get down to it, we're pretty sappy guys."
Greenwood has been married for almost 19 years to Susan Devlin, a girl he met in Vancouver when he was just 11.
They now live in Los Angeles because "that's where the business is, but that's not where I work."
I, Robot - the upcoming Will Smith sci-fi thriller in which he plays a corporate heavyweight - was shot in Vancouver. He then flew off to Budapest to film Being Julia with Annette Bening, Jeremy Irons and Juliette Stevenson.
His family comedy Racing Stripes took him to Africa, where his co-stars included Frankie Munoz, Whoopi Goldberg, Dustin Hoffman, Mandy Moore, David Spade, Patrick Stewart and Jeff Foxworthy.
Well, sort of... "This baby zebra falls off the back of a circus truck. My daughter raises it with horses so it thinks it's a horse, and she's determined to race it," explains Greenwood.
It's a Babe kind of movie in which the animals talk to one another. I tell people I have a picture with Dustin Hoffman and show them one with me and a donkey because he supplies the voice of the animal."
Greenwood is in Vancouver working on a staged reading of Griffin and Sabine, a play-in-progress based on the novels of Nick Bantock.
"I'm producing this project. Who knows, it could become a play and I could go back to the stage, but that's a lot of 'coulds' right now."
