What does Ontario–born movie star Kevin Zegers miss most about his home and native land now that he’s based in L.A.?

“Everything,” he says on the line from Toronto, the night after the premiere of his film The Colony. “Any chance that I get an opportunity to come up here and work, aside from just coming to see my family, it’s always nice to be able to use work to get back home.”

Sometimes, though, you have to be careful what you wish for. Although he now appreciates Canada’s varied climate in comparison to the monotony of L.A.’s eternal sunshine, shooting The Colony for six weeks in the winter in North Bay, Ontario, was far more extreme than the weather of his formative years.

“I didn’t grow up in North Bay, which is a very different kind of cold than Woodstock, Ontario,” he says. “It was pretty bitter and pretty awful up there when we were filming. It definitely worked for the film, but it was not what I was accustomed to.”

In the Canadian sci-fi action-thriller (which opens on Friday [April 26]), Zegers plays Sam, one member of a settlement of survivors who live underground during a neo–Ice Age that has wiped out almost all of humanity. When Sam’s community receives an emergency signal from another outpost, Sam joins an expedition to trek there. However, the horrors that they discover not only threaten their survival, but their entire home base.

Yet it was the action scenes, which make up most of the latter half of the movie, that he found far more physically demanding and draining than the weather. Those scenes were filmed 180 metres below ground at North Bay’s decommissioned NORAD base (it was the first film to be made there), which became the sets for the survivors’ underground colony.

“It was a great setting for what we were filming. It sort of sets the tone for being a little solitary and out of the way, and cellphones don’t work down there. So you felt sort of away from the world when we were down there, so I think it sort of helped with the actors and with everybody to sort of set the tone for the film.”

While going off grid helped the cast bond, Zegers found that he particularly clicked with Laurence Fishburne (who plays their group leader, Briggs), whom he has always been a fan of and has maintained a friendship with ever since.

“He started acting at a young age also so I think there’s a sort of commonality of people who have gotten into this line of work at an early age,” Zegers, now 28 years old, says. “We sort of share a lot of the same traits because of that.”

Zegers cut his teeth as a child actor on Canadian TV series like Street Legal and Road to Avonlea, and has gone on to star in the Air Bud series, Dawn of the Dead, and another wintry thriller, Frozen. He also received critical acclaim for portraying a bisexual hustler in Transamerica. After The Colony, he’ll next be seen in the upcoming Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, based on the fantasy-action series; the high-school thriller The Curse of Downers Grove; and the Halifax-shot ensemble dramedy All the Wrong Reasons, with Glee’s Cory Monteith, Emily Hampshire, and Karine Vanasse.

As for what helped him transition to adult roles and kept him going in the business, he says it’s probably his own tunnel vision.

“I just never really considered the notion that I wasn’t going to be able to do this,” he says. “So it’s probably just blind ignorance of the fact that it’s a tough racket to make a living at. But I’ve never really considered doing anything else. I guess that’s probably why I’ve continued to do it because I don’t have another plan. I don’t have another option."