TORONTO -- An interview with Scott Speedman is winding down and the actor is given his customary opportunity to promote upcoming projects.
Instead of launching into excited chatter about all the films he has on the horizon, however, the straight-shooting Toronto native grins with a hint of mischief.
"Man, I got nothing going on," Speedman replies, peppering the thought with an unprintable expletive. "I'm trying to get a job. I'd worked a bunch and truthfully I was waiting on some other things to happen in the TV world that I'm waiting to find out about.
"Just trying to get a job. I'm pretty freed up right now."
Even after a brief chat with the 39-year-old, one learns that such candour is characteristic.
He's being served up to promote Toronto director Ruba Nadda's mood-infused thriller "October Gale." Speedman plays a gunshot-punctured mystery man who wanders into the isolated summer home of a widowed doctor, played with typical vanity-free intensity by Oscar nominee Patricia Clarkson.
His pursuers, apparently, want to finish the job. A storm rages and a tentative romance flickers while Clarkson's mourning health-care professional tries to assess her houseguest's real motivation.
Speedman's Will is a wanderer with a skeletal backstory, one that's revealed at Nadda's typically deliberate pace. The former "Felicity" star dances between menace and virtue to leave audiences guessing, as he did with Jacob Tierney's twisted 2010 thriller "Good Neighbours."
Does such ambivalence suit Speedman?
"I had to do less work, frankly," he replied, laughing. "'Who's this guy? I don't know. Roll the camera. We'll see."'
Nadda attested to a patience-trying shoot, where terrible weather conditions in Ontario's cottage country threatened to derail the entire production.
She was stressed, and Speedman was not.
"Every movie goes off the rails in some way another," he pointed out during an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival. "I find a lot of the creativity and a lot of the angst, a lot of the bonding, comes from these wild experiences. Whatever could go wrong on this one kind of did in various ways, and it was totally fine.
"I kind of enjoy when things go to (crap). It relaxes me. It does. 'Oh, yeah, this is imperfect.' I feel more at home in that environment."
It helped that Speedman was familiar with the area. He went to a camp called Muskoka Woods as a kid, and in the evenings he said staff let the actor -- a self-described "basketball junkie" -- come by to shoot hoops.
That offered a welcome respite from a taxing shoot, though Speedman argues that filmmaking is rarely much fun.
"It's an awkward, tense environment, making movies -- really," he said. "There's a lot of money, there's a lot of pressure, it's not fun. It's 5 in the morning, you're up at Muskoka, it's freezing, the lake's not melting -- I'll 'dot dot dot' that.
"It's not a fun environment. When anyone, like my family, comes to visit, they're like so excited and then they get there and they're like: 'This is weird. I want to get out of here.'
"Do you know what I mean? It's boring and (everyone's) weird and insecure and everybody's nervous and people are smoking. Everyone looks unhealthy."
One almost gets the sense from Speedman that he's losing passion for the industry, but in actuality the opposite is true.
There was a time, he acknowledges, that his enthusiasm for show business waned, but since making Atom Egoyan's 2008 drama "Adoration" he has been challenging himself to unearth richer and more demanding roles.
"I kind of drifted away from the business a little bit," he conceded. "You have to approach it like a bit of an athlete. You have to be all in if you really want to do good things. And it's so competitive, obviously. You know, I really wasn't living like that towards acting. I wasn't being disciplined.
"Since (2008) I've been much more focused and trying to do good things and trying to do career things and build it back up, to be honest. That's what I'm doing now."
He's speaking during the first morning interview of a busy day of press, a task he's approaching with a clear-eyed professionalism he might not have always possessed.
Asked how he's enjoying the tiring press-carpet-party circuit, he replies: "For me? I'm pretty good."
"I haven't been going out that much at all," he explained. "Usually at these things I'm like Gollum -- just guzzling espresso trying to remember what movie I'm talking about.
"(It's a) new approach to the film festival."
Speedman's almost dismissive modesty, meanwhile, stands in stark contrast to the praise doled out by his collaborators.
Nadda calls him "dangerously smart." And Clarkson, too, gifted unreserved kudos.
"Scott Speedman is just such a beautiful man -- physically he's that, but why he's so beautiful physically is because he's so talented," she said.
"I don't want to objectify him, but let's!" she added, laughing. "No, what I'm saying is it's the talent that makes it nice."
The TV project Speedman referenced vaguely, by the way, might be Ryan Murphy's HBO pilot "Open," seemingly held in limbo. Asked about it, Speedman replies: "I don't know what I'm allowed to say and what I can't."
But it's tempting to wonder whether a guy who has perhaps struggled recently to find his place in the industry -- and who has earned such respect from his peers -- has ever considered a role behind the camera?
"I lack a certain amount of cojones when it comes to that, you know what I mean?" he said. "I'm always amazed when people say, 'Yeah, I'll do it.' That's what it really takes, is guts. To say yeah, and then figure it out from there.
"I'm not there yet. I'll never write. I'll always have to interpret somebody. But I'd like to get behind the camera at some point in my career, for sure.
"There's a movie that I would like to do that could be very good," he added. "And I'm amazed at how many movies get made and they're not good -- there's no director at the helm.
"So you know, why not me? Why not other people I know?"
The Toronto International Film Festival wraps up Sunday.
