Seann William Scott grew up in the one American state where hockey is king, and he managed to play every sport but hockey. The Minnesota-raised actor played basketball, baseball, and football in high school, but he only went to the local ice rink to see his friends play.

A couple of decades later, Scott, perhaps best known for playing Stifler in the American Pie movies, is the unlikely star of the latest film about Canada’s favourite sport: Goon. He plays the title role, that of Doug Glatt, a fan who gets pulled into the game after knocking out a hockey enforcer who enters the stands looking for a fight. He learns enough about skating to catch on with the Halifax Highlanders, a franchise in the top levels of the minor leagues.

Doug still can’t skate well, but he knows how to stay on his feet long enough to win his fights, which seems to be enough. He is also aware that eventually he will have to fight Ross Rhea (Liev Schreiber), the reigning goon, who wants to leave the game a winner.

The real hockey world has changed. The deaths last year of three players best known for their fighting skills have made most fans of the game aware that a terrible price can be paid for the physical punishment meted out in those scraps. It has also led to a call for an end to the kind of prearranged fights that are at the centre of Goon. Over the phone from Toronto, Scott says that the film was made prior to the renewed debate over hockey fights. He adds that he is hopeful that fans can appreciate the efforts of the men in the trenches.

“When we were making the film, these things [the deaths of Derek Boogard, Rick Rypien, and Wade Belak] hadn’t happened. Hopefully, the film celebrates the role of the enforcer and what they sacrifice, and audiences can enjoy the film and the sport. On a personal level, I felt awful [about the deaths], because even though I didn’t play the sport as a kid, growing up in Minnesota I had a lot of friends who did play and I really appreciated their skill. I was very concerned that the movie might disrespect them [enforcers] or the game, and when I saw the film, I felt it didn’t do that.”

Goon, which opens Friday (February 24), was written by Montreal Canadiens’ uberfan Jay Baruchel and ex-Vancouverite Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen’s writing partner on Superbad and The Green Hornet. It is directed by Michael Dowse, who helmed two Fubar films and It’s All Gone Pete Tong.

Dowse says that he and Baruchel and Goldberg were looking for a way to create a movie that would pay homage to the classic hockey film Slap Shot. He says that although other hockey films have merit, there is a tendency to minimize the game and focus on something else in the story line.

“I loved Slap Shot and I also liked [the hockey movies] Miracle and Mystery, Alaska. They were good, but there is a thing with hockey movies where people feel that they might not work without a gimmick. There is a history of bad hockey movies. They’re either musicals or feature chimpanzees or they are kids’ movies. Look at Tooth Fairy [which stars The Rock as a hockey player condemned to play the tooth fairy], for instance. Maybe they don’t feel they can work without that.

“When we made this film, we wanted to show there is an athletic virtuosity and sportsmanship, and it should be part of the general discussion. We love these guys and hope that we have made them more human. I think that there is a ‘last gunslinger’ element, as well. Doug’s story is that of a guy who is starting off his career while Liev’s character is ending his career, and he represents jadedness and less innocence and damage. So we end up talking a lot about exit strategies for these guys and what happens to them.”

Although Goldberg grew up in Vancouver, he admits to feeling like a hockey outsider. He says that when he was working on the screenplay, he let Baruchel—who still lives in Montreal despite success in Hollywood—take the lead in all things hockey. He says he felt that the goal was to write a script that gave the game’s fans what they wanted.

“I know as much about hockey as most Canadians, but Jay is a rabid fan and knows so much more about the game than me,” Goldberg says. “I know more than most Americans, but that’s it. I did feel that we wanted to make a real hockey movie because I felt that Slap Shot is that movie, and that most of the other films about hockey try to find ways to bring in a general audience. This is made for hockey fans, and we did not try to cater to anyone else.”

His sense of being removed from the sport, both physically and emotionally, prevents him from talking much about the fighting controversies. Goldberg adds that he doesn’t consider his opinion to be relevant. “I don’t know as much about these controversies as most Canadians because I have been living in L.A., far from this [discussion]. I don’t see that my opinion is valuable, but I do think that if someone is an enforcer on a team and they are pushing pain and giving dirty blows, they shouldn’t be there. I have heard a lot about people in hockey taking pills, and when your body is saying ‘no’, you have to listen.”

According to Dowse, there is very little comedy in the book that inspired Goon. The film is an adaptation of Goon: The True Story of an Unlikely Journey Into Minor League Hockey, written by Doug Smith and Adam Frattasio. Smith, who played for several teams in minor leagues during a 10-year career, was a journeyman enforcer.

“I read the novel when we were prepping the movie,” he says, “and the novel showed the details of his life, and there were crazy stories. But it is very different from this film. He [Smith] was a gun for hire. He would play two games to fight one specific guy. It was a tough experience what he went through. There was one story where he had surgery, and the byproduct was that he had tubes installed. He got a call to go play, and he ripped out tubes and bandaged himself. He desperately wanted to make it in the game.”

In the film, Doug Glatt never seems particularly desperate. He is more Forrest Gump than Doug Smith. The child of a family of doctors, he is embarrassed that he has made it to his 30s without a career. When he discovers hockey, he finds himself actually enjoying life for the first time. Although the movie allows Schreiber’s character to serve as a cautionary tale, there is little about this Doug that suggests he will end up tearing out tubes.

Scott says that when he read the script and saw that the character was considered to be kindly but rather dumb, he wanted to add a few layers. He notes that having become famous for a character like American Pie’s Stifler, who had few redeeming values, he wanted to flesh out Doug so that he wasn’t one-dimensional.

“I talked to Jay and Mike, and we all had an idea of what he would be like, but when we were shooting, we all played hockey and saw that the camaraderie is different from basketball or baseball. I think that there is an interesting dichotomy here in that he is a good guy but he exhibits a bad temper when someone breaks one of his codes. I think that’s a good thing, because it would have been annoying had he been too sweet. I actually was able to relate to him much more than my American Pie character because there was a kindness to him. At the same time, there was a balance because he does lose it in some of the fights. That made him interesting.

“Since American Pie, I have played variations of the same character in every movie. I would walk in and read the script once and know everything about the guy. They were usually very unlikeable. I wanted to work, but I didn’t want to play the same guy anymore, so when I heard about this script I auditioned for the role. I decided to make him the guy you love to hate, and I still feel that way about him.”

Watch the trailer for Goon.