Heart of a Dragon wears its you-know-what on its colourful sleeve, and if the Canada-China coproduction is ultimately more instructional than artful, it does bring some key B.C. history—and outsized personalities—to life on the big screen.

The movie, opening here Friday (October 29), is also something of a breakthrough for Calgary-born Victor Webster, who plays Rick Hansen at the height of his fame, when the paraplegic wheelchair activist took his around-the-world Man in Motion mission to China and captured the world’s imagination. Up until now, the hunky Albertan, who segued easily from modelling into the acting game (after a short stint as a stockbroker), has been a soap-opera regular and had small parts in action shows and comedies, often as a bad guy or handsome rival to the lead. Here, he literally drives the story, and he had to do it—much like Hansen—without the use of his legs.

“It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” says the dark-haired 37-year-old, talking to the Georgia Straight at a gallery near Granville Island. “The amount of training was incredibly intense. I come from a sports background, where I always think I could have done better. But I’m really proud of this movie.”

He got the part in an audition for writer-director Michael French, who took a small crew to record Hansen’s exploits back in 1985 and who got to use pieces of that footage here, in his fictionalized recollection, shot roughly two years ago.

“It just clicked. We really saw eye to eye. I believed in him and the story he was telling and wanted to be a part of it. He saw a lot of potential in me, and we put a tremendous amount of work into making this project happen. With people like Michael and [executive producer and composer] David Foster pushing it along, it had to be perfect.”

Of course, neither wheelchair exercises, period research, nor location shooting could make it easier to play a figure so well known to West Coast Canadians.

“I met Rick Hansen, of course, and studied his story, but I was very conscious of not doing a biography. The movie is certainly not a documentary; it was inspired by him, and this Rick Hansen is a character who travels around the world to prove what people are capable of.

“I went fishing with Rick once, and he’s incredibly strong, physically; more than that, he has this commanding presence, and you can just feel his determination. He really does have the heart of a dragon. You know, we see a dragon as a fierce creature, but the Chinese see it as a powerful ally, even as a kind of friend. And I think that really conveys Rick’s never-give-up attitude.”

Webster, who reportedly has the lead in the next Scorpion King movie, definitely stepped up his own presence in Dragon. And it gave Vancouver veteran Jim Byrnes, who has done countless TV shows, one of his meatiest movie roles yet. In an intriguing bit of casting (Byrnes lost both legs above the knees in a 1972 road accident), the famously cane-carrying actor and musician (his last album was called My Walking Stick) plays a journalist who follows Hansen to China and questions whether or not the athlete is using his disability as an attention-getting device. Oddly, it never comes up that his character has reasons to relate to the dragon-hearted hero’s ambulatory challenges.

“We certainly talked about it,” Byrnes later tells the Straight, fingering his stick at the same gallery. “But the filmmakers thought that would open a whole can of worms.”

Still, his on-screen persona—an amalgamation of B.C. reporters who tracked Hansen’s exploits in the 1980s—is a pesky gadfly.

“Yeah, my job there isn’t to make a feel-good story. I mean, you’re a seasoned writer and you get this assignment to go to the middle of nowhere, where there’s this ragtag bunch of flakes. I don’t know whether it’s just an ego trip or the guy’s trying to form a cult or something. There’s a physiotherapist who’s given up her marriage and a great life to follow him around, the guilt-ridden best friend, and the cousin who’s like, ”˜Any way the wind blows”¦’ So not too impressive, right off the top.”

In real life, Hansen started his 1985 world tour from the Oakridge Centre mall, without a lot of media coverage. (Some press was even antagonistic, echoing what Olympian Harry Jerome went through years earlier when he tried to illuminate social ills.) And now, Byrnes feels, younger people aren’t as aware of Hansen’s legacy as they are, say, of Terry Fox and his still-growing legend.

“It’s always been a battle, man. You have to remember that at the time, Hansen had kind of fallen off the map as far as the Canadian public was concerned. This was before the Internet and digital cameras, of course, so it couldn’t happen like this today. He disappeared in his travels, and it wasn’t until Hansen had this huge success in China that people remembered who he was. You know, most people don’t realize this, but the main reason it was so well received over there is that the son of Deng Xiaoping, China’s president at the time, was in a wheelchair. So there was a personal angle there.”

It was personal, too, for top Canadian guitarist Don Alder, the athlete’s real-life pal, who shows up as a central character (played by Englishman Andrew Lee Potts) in Dragon, which was primarily shot in remote western China, on or near the Great Wall.

“It’s kind of neat the way everything worked out,” Byrnes recalls the same week that his newest album, Everywhere West, is released. The blues-minded singer, who also shows up on the film’s soundtrack, mostly stayed at the rural compound seen in the movie, where he had an unexpected bond with Chinese beauty Yu Na, who plays the tale’s chief translator.

“She’s a very popular singer over there, and also a good guitarist. Anyway, she kept hyping me to everyone there and handing me a guitar to play some of what they call ”˜Blue Sound’. I’ll tell ya, playing Robert Johnson’s ”˜Steady Rollin’ Man’ on the Great Wall is not something you’ll forget anytime soon.”