Richard Crouse

Check out episode twenty-six of Richard’s web series, “In Isolation With…” It’s the talk show where we make a connection without actually making contact! Today, broadcasting directly from Isolation Studios (a.k.a. my home office) we meet Jay Baruchel. He’s been acting since the age of twelve and has appeared in everything from “Knocked Up” and “Tropic Thunder” to “The Trotsky” and “She’s Out of My League” to the action-fantasy “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and “This Is the End.” He’s probably best known as the voice of Hiccup in the wildly successful “How to Train Your Dragon” franchise but he says, despite all the success in front of the camera, what he really wants to do is direct.

“I was really lucky in that my parents would give me a kind of film or music 101,” he says in the interview. “Whenever they would tell me something they would explain why it matters. Why they care about it. What the landscape that it came out in was like and then, of course ,then they would get into sort of inside jokes. They also showed me “Monty Python the Holy Grail” and pause after every punch line and be like, ‘Do you understand why that’s funny?’ This is called dry humor. Literally. Verbatim. This is called dry humour. Then dad bought me “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” on VHS for my ninth birthday. And that started my collection that I’m still crippled by because I still buy physical media. But I’ve never stopped. Somewhere in there I realized that as much as I adore writing stories, I realized that movies were the thing.”

Two years ago he wrote and directed the sports comedy “Goon: Last of the Enforcers.” Now he appears both in front of and behind the camera in “Random Acts of Violence,” a genre film that asks serious questions about how we relate to violence in art.

Based on a 2008 Image Comic, “Random Acts of Violence” begins with comic book writer Todd (Jesse Williams) suffering a case of writer’s block. His series, a grisly and successful adaptation of a real-life serial killer dubbed Slasherman, is coming to an end and he doesn’t know how to wind it down.

On a press tour from Toronto to New York to promote the final issue, Jesse and friends, visit the scene of the Slasherman’s crimes. As the group fall victim to a series of heinous copycat crimes the film asks, “What are the real consequences when life (and death) begin to imitate art?”

I talk about that with Jay in this interview but we started by reminiscing about the “beforetime” when we could go to the movies. I asked him what movie memories stand out for him when he thinks back to the theatre experience…

NOTE: The language in this interview is NOT suitable for all age. NSFW!

Watch the whole thing HERE on YouTube or HERE on ctvnews.ca!