PASADENA, Calif. _ When he was in elementary school actor Jay Baruchel's mom enlightened him about the difference between boys and girls. "A boy will hit you," she told him. "But a girl will be mean to you,"
Today at 34 he thinks he's learned that lesson. Baruchel lends some of that wizened wisdom to his role in FXX's "Man Seeking Woman," where this season the man and the woman actually move in together.
"When I was 21 I was engaged to be married for two years, and that mercifully ended," he says in a screened-off cubbyhole in a meeting room here.
"There was a fundamental paradigm shift after that. I'm fairly old-fashioned, so when I get to the point where I'm going to put a ring on someone's finger, I pretend it's 1930 and splitting would never be an option. So I put up with no end of nonsense," says Baruchel, who's wearing a T-shirt inscribed "Celtic Football Club."
"And since it kind of went pear-shaped and ended, it was like, 'Oh, s _, where was I going? I coulda gone down a path that wasn't my own, and I've got stuff to do that I wouldn't have been able to.' . . It's funny, through my teen years and 20s there was no ticking clock. When stuff happened I thought it was going to last forever. I hit 30, and everything was finite, and I had X amount of time on this Earth to do things. And it's not a coincidence, I think, that the engagement ended around then."
Baruchel isn't soured on the idea of romance and has a new girlfriend. But he says, "My mom didn't understand my step dad, and he didn't understand her to a certain extent, same with my sister and her fiance. There's a disconnect because our makeup is completely different. Typical thing is when a girl has a problem and she just wants you to listen. She doesn't want your advice. She doesn't want you to figure this out. She just wants a place to vent to and the next step to that is, 'How come you're not participating? I'm just talking at you and you're not doing anything.' So you're damned if you do and damned if you don't."
It's different with men, he thinks. "The way men are wired if there's an issue, you're supposed to solve this. And every girl I've ever been around, they just want you to listen."
A weathered veteran who's been acting since he was 12, Baruchel also welcomed advice from his dad when it came to work. "You get different things from each parent, and my father's legacy was 'spine' and stand up for myself. So there are moments for us to suffer fools, that's where I draw upon my dad to know how to negotiate them," he chuckles.
"My dad's whole thing � for better or worse � he never let anybody get the best of him ... My dad was an immigrant kid, moved to Montreal, then moved to a Jewish neighborhood, then to an all-French neighborhood, fought from the age of 10, played on an all-Jewish hockey team where parents of the other kids would throw pennies at them as they skated onto the ice.
"So it was actually fine. 'This is how the world treats me, OK fine, I'm going to defend myself and protect my own.' So he had a very distinct sense of who he was and what he was going to tolerate and what he wasn't going to tolerate, and I think I've inherited that."
He has. For instance, having sat for hours in countless drafty halls waiting for auditions to begin, Baruchel now waits 30 minutes. "I've never been late to an audition. I was always early. Most actors I know are the same way. And I got sick of getting there and having directors or casting directors not care about punctuality as much, so 10 years ago I made myself a rule: I don't wait more than half an hour, and if I lose that gig, I lose that gig, but at least I can look at myself in the mirror."
While he's worked in show business most of his life, he's still uneasy with fame. "I've been very fortunate it's a gig where less that than 20 percent of us can feed ourselves from acting alone. And the fact that I've been able to live off of acting for over two decades is awesome. It's provided my mom and my sister and I lives we never would've otherwise had. That being said, I'm not really comfortable having everyone stare at me and have my picture taken," he shrugs.
"And I don't like people poking at me and all that, so there's a version of things that whenever this show is finished and my cartoon gig finishes _ because I voice the main character in 'How to Train your Dragon' in movies and the TV show, when those two things are done, I might be hanging up my spurs."
Well, not hanging them up exactly, but maybe changing saddles. Baruchel directed his second film, "Goon: Last of the Enforcers," in his native Canada, due out next month.
BEST BUDS COSTAR IN HBO DRAMA
BFFs off-screen Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon not only costar but co-produce HBO's new seven part series, "Big Little Lies." "We're very, very close friends and we're able to talk about anything," reports Kidman.
"I love that (the show is) about women coming together and making something happen very quickly with friendship being the core of it. I mean, I'm speaking for myself, but ... we laugh. We have fun. And we're both at a stage in our lives _ I am where I want to be with people I really like. I don't want to be working on things with people that I'm not happy to be there. I want to be contributing and working with people that I like and love, and this was the perfect combination."
Witherspoon adds: "For 25 years, I have been the only woman on set, so I had no other women to talk to. They call it like the 'Smurfette Syndrome' where she's got 100 Smurfs around, but she's the only girl. And who gave birth to all these Smurfs anyway? ... It's so refreshing to get to spend time with women."
'PLANET EARTH' CHOOSES THE HARD WAY
If you remember how great BBC's "Planet Earth" was 10 years ago, you're going to be inspired by "Planet Earth II" premiering Saturday on BBC America, AMC, and Sundance simultaneously. One of the producers, Mike Gunton, says their challenge this time was to outdo themselves.
"The point for us is the easy stuff has all been done. It's only the hard stuff that's left to do. And having the ambition to go for these difficult things and to go for the really extreme stories is, I think, what drives us. And that's why I hope, when you watch the series, you'll be seeing new things because we have the resources and we have the ambition to go for those tricky things. And sometimes it fails. You have to have the ability to know that you can fail. Otherwise, you won't try to do these things. But it is nerve wracking."
One of the most nerve wracking parts was trekking to a remote island about 1,200 miles off the Falklands. It is so remote that it's only accessible by boat. Elizabeth White, one of the show's producers, says, "You sail through the roughest ocean on Earth for seven or eight days to actually get to this little spot of land that's actually an active volcano. So this was by far the worst kind of effort we were going to put into a trip, in many ways the most dangerous, the most committed trip. And so the logistics that go into preparing a trip like that can literally take more than a year in terms of choosing the right people, getting the right permission, making sure you've got all of the food, the water, the fuel, the camera equipment you need. And you have to make a kind of educated choice. We really hoped we were going to get two weeks filming on the island, but we may have gotten there and not been able to land."
Due to the narrow weather window, they were only able to shoot for five days. "So you have to take a gamble, and you have to talk to everybody who has ever been to a place and say, 'Are we being really crazy? Are we about to just waste a huge amount of time and money?'"
BRYAN CRANSTON CHOOSES ANIMATION
Ever since he did "Breaking Bad," Bryan Cranston has pretty much been able to write his own ticket. So why would he agree to be one of the voices in Crackle's stop-motion cartoon, "SuperMansion," which returns on Thursday? "It's the huge paycheck," he says.
"Next to radio, animation is right up there with it. It's really about storytelling. We look at these characters, and I really don't approach it any differently than I would live action. And when I first read the first script, I thought, 'This is really something that would be funny but also relatable.' You have a guy who is past his prime. Well, I don't know about that, but who is struggling to hold onto relevancy in his life and wanting to still be important to the world and proud of his job as, you know, a superhero, fighting crime. He wants to continue that. And that's, I think, an underlying relatable theme in all aspects of it with all of the characters and the very specific different characteristics that they were able to draw up. It's just a lot of fun, and you don't have to wear makeup or anything like that."
