"I have this terrible fear," says Jay Baruchel, "that Canada will cease to exist sometime in the next two centuries." He gulps. "I was reading about the Kingdom of Jerusalem after the Crusades – that French-rule part of Israel. Their whole thing lasted 200 years. And that was over 1,000 years ago. I'm sure at year 100 they thought they'd be around for ever. And now no one has any idea about them! So I can't help but think that way about my tiny little country of 30 million people next to a superpower of 300 million."
Baruchel, 32, thin as a whippet, squirmy as a puppy, is one of the least likely patriots I've ever met. He's no jingoist – this is a man to shrink from bells and whistles – but he is fierce, fuelled by fear and gratitude and guilt. By a life lived in the shadow of "cultural inundation" and a career choice that necessitates regular crossings of the border, usually to Hollywood, sometimes all the way to Cannes, where he is now, head-to-toe in black, from tufty mohawk to slip-on sneakers.
"One of the great shames of my life," he says, "is that I didn't go to the Royal Military College in Kingston." Most of the men on his mother's side fought for "the only country I call mine. But I didn't pull my weight yet. So I see working in Canada as a degree of civic service." He smiles, continues with the same mix of swallowed laugher and Bambi sincerity that characterises all his chat. "God's honest truth, since I was a kid my goal was to make movies to fulfil my responsibility to Canadian cinema. That's why it's such a point of pride for me that the movie I wrote was the number one English language film at the Canadian box office that year." (It was also the highest-grossing Canadian film in the UK ever.)
That film was Goon (2011), a sweet, immensely violent hockey comedy starring American Pie's Seann William Scott and featuring Baruchel as co-writer and as the motor-mouthed best buddy. But if you recognise him, it's probably from his role as the sidekick to Seth Rogen in Knocked Up. Though he's actually better looking than many of these schlubbier pals, he represents the audience's cipher in the Apatow rep company; the outsider, almost the bystander, not flashy or showy, a little repulsed by all the glitz. He's our buoy in the celebrity soup, even in This is the End, of which he was really the star – a leading man in the guise of a regular Joe.
The same is true of the film he's promoting today: DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon 2, in which he returns to voice reluctant hero Hiccup, who wrangles with dragons and tries to broach accords between his Celtic-ish tribe and the freedom-seeking beasties. Baruchel treats it seriously. Yes, he says, it is a cautionary tale about over-investment in diplomacy when faced with an intractable enemy. Yes, it is a meditation on the joys and frustrations of hereditary legacy; Hiccup has inherited animal empathy from his mother (a Dian Fossey-style figure voiced by Cate Blanchett) and "civic responsibility" from his father (Gerard Butler's ballad-belting chieftain).
From his own father, says Baruchel, he picked up "a lack of tolerance for bullshit. Dad raised me with the idea that, at the end of the day, all you have is your balls so don't let anybody step on them." From his mother, he inherited an indebtedness to his homeland and an appreciation of his good fortune, even when it didn't feel like it. "I grew up quite poor, yes, but in a country with socialised medicine and really affordable education." It was a good day when he could start paying tax. "I felt I was paying back into the society that let me become what I was. I wouldn't have had half those opportunities if I grew up in the States or Brazil or some fucking place."
That said, the US does have the edge should you harbour showbiz ambitions. In his neighbourhood in Montreal, he says: "There was a sort of poor pissing contest. The worst thing you could be was rich. And all the rich kids kept that shit quiet. You did not want that; it robbed you of your credibility. And it's wonderful to grow up with a feeling that we're all in it together. Problem is when you don't want to just watch movies, you wanna make them. 'Who the fuck are you?!' It's what my sister calls 'lobster pot'; they just put you back in."
Ever since he was nine, he says, he wanted to direct (his first project, a slasher about "murder as a form of creative expression", should shoot next spring). But you can't do that as a child, so he went front of camera instead: ads, TV shows, and supporting roles in big films such as The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Million Dollar Baby. He's been at it two decades "but I never had a particular hard-on for acting. It's afforded me and my mother and sister lives we would never have had, but I'd be lying if I said it was my thing."
It's this reluctance, this slight skulking, the queasiness at the very idea of putting yourself out there, that makes Baruchel such an appealing figure. In underrated romcom She's Out of My League (2010) he played a shy guy whom his friends rate as a six but who somehow manages to land a girlfriend who's a "stone-cold 10" (Alice Eve). He must then haul himself up the register through confidence alone. In fact, Baruchel, being a movie star, is a couple of digits above that, but it is indeed from his uncertainty that his charm comes.
He's a curious physical presence, a gentle gangler rather than, say, a clenched intellectual like Jesse Eisenberg, with whom he must vie for parts (Baruchel's lately been cast as the lead in an adaptation of Simon Rich's short stories). Even the DreamWorks animators can't resist mimicking that kvetching shrug and his rubbery arms. He comes off like a normalised Woody Allen, a less freaky Giovanni Ribisi. The closest comparison is perhaps French Stewart, the dim-witted nasal clown from TV show 3rd Rock from the Sun.
The difference is the lack of naiveté. Don't confuse those stutters for disengagement – or for lack of study. While Hiccup must embrace the political office foisted on him by that primogeniture, Baruchel is a sceptical protectionist disillusioned by mainstream politics. There are no heroes out there, he thinks. Not even Obama? "He has the most corporate White House in US history and he's made drone attacks a cottage industry."
Legislators in general are "all of the same class, they go to the same schools, they all go to the same restaurants – it's just a different face. I see very wealthy, powerful people in each country being ideological allies. I think a Texas oil baron has way more in common with an oil baron in Saudi Arabia than he does with any average Texan."
It is perhaps inequality that most eats at Baruchel. So what would he advocate? "A greater degree of localisation. There's no such thing as a one-world market and there never will be. I believe that in Canada we should build products for Canadians and sell them to Canadians. That was the template in almost every country until the last 30 years and now it's just the consolidation of wealth and power and we're being reduced to a planet of serfs."
His chariot awaits; he's late for a photocall with a man in a 12-foot dragon outfit. Then he'll go back to his hotel room and write more Goon 2, then fly back to Canada to "salt my approach and shovel my driveway and all that stupid shit". It's that which he wants to enjoy, while it lasts.
• Watch a video interview with Kit Harington for How to Train Your Dragon 2
