Minnesota-born Seann William Scott was happy to drop the gloves in Manitoba

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Seann William Scott as Glatt the hockey goon.

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(ALLIANCE FILMS PHOTOS)

Seann William Scott is not a hockey player. And his starring role in Goon notwithstanding, he doesn't exactly play one in the movies.

Scott's character Doug "the Thug" Glatt is a bouncer who punches his way onto a hockey team during a skirmish in the stands involving his loud-mouthed friend Pat, played by Goon co-screenwriter Jay Baruchel.

If Glatt looks a little wobbly on ice, that might have something to do with Scott's real-life skating skills. Scott may have been born and raised in the wintry Minnesota burg of Cottage Grove, but the 35-year-old actor decided early on that his winter sport of choice would be basketball.

"My hockey experience goes back all the way to when I was eight years old, and for one winter I played at the local outside rink and I sucked," the actor says on the phone from New York City, adding that a little off-rink violence didn't help.

"I apparently had a little mouth on me when I was younger and I was in the warming house and mouthing off to the older kids and one of the guys hit me," he recalls. "And I was like: I hate hockey. So that was pretty much it for me."

Ah, but in 2010, Scott was obliged to give hockey another shot when he signed on to shoot Goon, which shot in Winnipeg and Portage la Prairie. And this time, the actor would mostly be on the right side of the thrown punches.

The Manitoba set felt comfortable for the actor, who is probably still best known for his American Pie movies in which he played the obnoxious horndog Steve Stifler. (He is set to reprise the role again in this year's instalment American Reunion hitting theatres in April.)

"I enjoyed being in Winnipeg. Growing up in Minnesota, it felt like I was home, such nice people and similar values and personalities," he says. "I thought the girls were much hotter in Manitoba than in Minnesota."

"But the hours were tough, I must say."

Indeed. Shooting a hockey movie in Manitoba in winter necessitated assembling at hockey rinks overnight because all the day times were booked.

"We would shoot anywhere from midnight to 10 in the morning after working 13 hours, so it was physically pretty taxing," he says. "But I think there's this manic energy that you get when you're acting like a vampire, when you're supposed to be sleeping, you're awake."

Scott was sold on the film's Canadian director Michael Dowse after seeing his underrated 2004 comedy It's All Gone Pete Tong, about a deaf DJ. "I just thought It's All Gone Pete Tong was brilliant," he says. "I think the people that know films know about it but it really should have seen a wider audience."

That film was about a drug-addled superstar DJ whose life of self-indulgence comes to a crashing halt when he loses his hearing. Scott appreciated Dowse's ability to make the character sympathetic, a skill that would come in handy for Glatt, whom Scott describes as a guy who is surrounded by violence but you still like him and want to root for him.

"It's a credit to the script Jay Baruchel and Evan Goldberg wrote that balanced a fun, vulgar, real comedy," he says.

Goon also afforded Scott the opportunity to work with his American Pie co-star Eugene Levy in a different capacity. Levy plays Doug Glatt's disapproving dad, a doctor dismayed by his son's bloody new career as a hockey enforcer. In a family dinner scene, the pair generate a touch of unexpected poignance in a movie otherwise characterized by pretty brutal comedy.

"In the American Pie movies, I never really had the chance to do many scenes with Eugene and I'm a huge fan of his," Scott says. "I didn't know if people would be distracted from seeing us in a different movie. But I knew he'd be great and I wanted to be sure I did my part.

Scott has one scene where Doug attempts to justify his career choice to his father: "I'm not as smart as you guys. This is what I'm good at. You guys should be proud of me."

Scott says, "It was just enough that it wasn't so overly dramatic. It was done with just the right amount of seriousness. And of course, Eugene is great. I think the guy could do anything but it's nice to see him playing serious even though he has some funny moments."

And has Scott kept up with his skating since the movie wrapped?

"I anticipated that I would keep it up, but I haven't," he says. "I'm about to take my girlfriend to the Rockefeller Center where they have an ice skating rink there and I'm hoping that my skills are still there. I want to impress her.

"I hope I can still stand and move around a little bit. I was never able to stop. Hopefully, I'll be able to skate into somebody."

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

We shoot ...we suck!

PRIOR to the Winnipeg premiere of the hockey comedy Goon at Polo Park Silver City Wednesday night, the film's director Michael Dowse acknowledged in an interview that while the movie was being shot in Manitoba in late 2010, he and actor/co-screenwriter Jay Baruchel were striving to create a movie that could stand alongside the Paul Newman hockey classic Slap Shot.

Dowse didn't pull any punches with regards to Canada's appalling track record of making hockey movies along the lines of the abysmal 2010 effort Score: A Hockey Musical.

"F-n' movies are about hockey in this country," Dowse said during an interview at the Winnipeg Free Press News Cafe Wednesday afternoon. "If it's not a musical, there's a chimpanzee as a goalie. Or a guy's a f-n' tooth fairy or something.

"Really? That's the deal? That's what we're doing?

"Jay recognized and the producers recognized and I recognized that we definitely wanted to fill that void that was there. God, we all love the sport and we all live and breathe it and I don't know why we can't make a film that does it justice."

Watch the entire interview with Dowse at the Free Press News Café below:

Archive video: On the set of "Goon"

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition February 17, 2012 D1