LOS ANGELES—Sometimes you have to leave Canada to discover your own “true patriot love” of the country. Jay Baruchel, the Ottawa-born, Montreal-raised costar of Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, who sported a maple-leaf tattoo in Knocked Up, says that all he really wants to do is make Canadian films.

“I love Canada, but it is amazing that I always have to leave home to make movies. Almost for the duration of my career in the U.S., I haven’t been able to get arrested back home. When I did Fetching Cody in Vancouver in 2005, I started blipping on Canada’s radar, but it broke my heart not to be cast in more Canadian films since my heart literally has a maple leaf tattooed over it. If I had my druthers and I got to any level in my career where I could dictate where movies got shot, they would all be there.”

Baruchel’s next American movie comes out on Wednesday (August 13). In Tropic Thunder, he plays a modern-day actor cast in the role of a Vietnam War soldier. The actors end up having to survive against an army of drug lords when they get lost in the jungle.

The film features Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey Jr. Baruchel says that he wasn’t intimidated being cast alongside actors with such high profiles and uses a hockey metaphor to describe his reaction to working with them and Eastwood.

“You can either be in awe and choke or bring your ”˜A’ game,” he explains. “When Mario Lemieux brought Sidney Crosby to Pittsburgh, he went so far as to move him into his house, which is pretty intimidating. Sidney could have blown it because of his awe of Mario, but he thrived instead. I felt that way here, and even more so with Clint. I felt that my job in Tropic Thunder was to set these great actors up for the punchlines and not step on their lines. Then, when I had the opportunity to be funny, I could do that.”

Baruchel has gotten his wish to star in Canadian films. He starred in the recently released Nova Scotia–shot film Just Buried and has the lead in The Trotsky, which was shot in Montreal.

He started out when he was 12 in lead roles in two series, My Hometown and Popular Mechanics For Kids, and says it was good preparation for the work he is doing now. He hopes to do more of it, and wants it to be in his home and native land.

“I started with leads, so I cut teeth being in every scene. So that helped when I was cast in Just Buried. I loved that film because I had the opportunity to play someone new to me, and Halifax is the only place outside of Montreal I could live. I had the greatest time working there. If it takes working on one of those Tom Selleck TV movies, which is what it seems they shoot there, I would go back.”