Peter Keleghan is an ad guy stuck in the woods in Eating Buccaneers.

If you watch Canadian TV, you’ve seen Peter Keleghan. On programs like The Red Green Show and the Halifax-shot Made in Canada, he has generally played insecure, overingratiating guys who are a bit behind the beat. Lately, though, the multiple award winner has been branching out, playing tougher and meaner—but still funny—characters in independent films.

“I’m getting back to where I started,” Keleghan says on the phone from his office in Toronto, “which is working for jelly beans—pretty much what they paid on these things. I’ve done five in the last year-and-a-half.”

Born in Montreal a half-century ago, Keleghan did the low-budget-flick route before getting in with Toronto’s burgeoning TV scene, with guest spots on Street Legal and other then-popular shows. In the ’90s, quick visits to Cheers and Seinfeld (as the mythical Lloyd Braun) netted international interest. And his mid-decade turn as dim-bulb anchorman Jim Walcott on The Newsroom cemented his reputation as a worthy foil.

“If I ever write my autobiography,” the actor avers, “it will be called Idiots and Assholes. They are all A types or Type As, and pretty intense guys, usually under somebody else’s boot—or at least they think they are.”

The boot is now on the other foot, with Keleghan currently going out on his own with smarter, harder-edged leads in films currently playing here or coming soon.

In Coopers’ Camera, which opened November 24, he plays a smooth-talking travel agent (okay, he thinks that’s a hot job) and estranged brother to Jason Jones’s dumb suburbanite while carrying on a long-running thing with the dope’s wife, played by Samantha Bee. Eating Buccaneers, an ensemble comedy starting Friday (December 4), finds him on a road to nowhere, as a sharklike ad exec stranded with a bunch of agency types in Ontario’s Algonquin woods.

The best of the bunch might be Leslie, My Name is Evil, Vancouverite Reginald Harkema’s take on the Manson murders and the American culture of violence that dominated the Vietnam era. In that film, opening early next year, Keleghan plays the chain-smoking, Nixon-loving dad of the main character, a Manson juror who fixates on one of the murderer’s “girls”.

“The father is an out-and-out bully,” he explains. “That whole movie is about brainwashing, and how it works from top to bottom. Obviously, things are no better now. The fact that Bush was elected twice is just incomprehensible. But the advantage of running a fear-based economy, for the people doing it, anyway, is that the more you attack it, the stronger it grows.”

The flip side of that dynamic will be seen in next year’s Love Letters, written by Keleghan with his wife, Leah Pinsent, also appearing in Buccaneers.

“It’s based on the play by A. R. Gurney. Leah and I did it several times in the theatre, and we thought it would be a nice vehicle for celebrity couples, each reading a different scene, to show off their craft—and also be themselves for a change.”

The film, which also boasts such duos as Camera’s Jones and Bee, will air January 31 on CBC, where Keleghan has spent so much of his adult life.