CAREFREE, ARIZ.-Several Canadian actors have had some pretty good years. Michael J. Fox had a hit TV sitcom and the megamovie Back to the Future in 1985. Keanu Reeves made three Matrix movies in just four years, and Jim Carrey and Mike Myers both had some phenomenal years when their careers were at a peak. That said, Taylor Kitsch, the former Friday Night Lights star from Coquitlam’s Gleneagle Secondary, is poised to set some records in 2012.

Kitsch, whose first acting job came with an episode of the locally shot series Godiva’s in 2006, has the title role in Disney’s $250-million science-fiction film John Carter, which opens Friday (March 9), and he will be back again in the $200-million movie Battleship in May. In July, he will costar with John Travolta, Salma Hayek, Uma Thurman, and Benicio Del Toro in the latest Oliver Stone film, Savages.

His busy schedule has taken him away from Vancouver for a while, and he admits at a Carefree resort, that success doesn’t make it easier to be away from family. “I miss home. I couldn’t go for Christmas because I had green-card [work permit] issues, but I will see the family for the first time in a while at the John Carter premiere in L.A. So I am excited about that.”

In John Carter, Kitsch plays a character created by Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs 100 years ago. He is a prospector and Civil War veteran living in the West and trying to stake out a claim when he is transported to another world after an encounter with a man dressed in robes. He discovers he has landed on Mars in the middle of a battle between rival cities. The battles appear to be manipulated by a third party, one whose members look a lot like the man he encountered on his last day on Earth.

Andrew Stanton, who directed John Carter, had seen Kitsch in the role of high-school football player Tim Riggins on Friday Night Lights when the TV show first aired in 2006 and thought about him when he was working to get Walt Disney Studios to support him in his bid to get the Burroughs character to the screen. When Stanton got the go-ahead to make the movie, he went out and auditioned many actors for the role, but eventually came back to his original choice. Kitsch says that when he heard Stanton wanted to talk to him, he looked him up and discovered he would be dealing with a two-time Oscar winner who was making a big move himself.

“He was a fan of the [Friday Night Lights] series, and the story he gave me was he was watching it on the plane and he thought, ‘He might be too young, but maybe we can bring him in later on.’ He was meeting everyone and anyone for it all over the world, and I got a call asking, ‘Do you want to go to Disney and meet Andrew Stanton?’ I didn’t know much about him, but I loved [Stanton’s Oscar-winning animated films] WALL-E and Finding Nemo. We met in the middle of a floor-to-ceiling prep of John Carter with all these visuals and we talked about the character arc. At the end of he meeting, I felt great. I think you know when these things come around that they are jobs you have to fight for and I threw my hat in the ring as soon as I could.”

As written by Burroughs, John Carter is no superhero. He makes good choices and he has talents that set him apart (he can leap long distances on Mars), but he is the classic ordinary guy in extraordinary circumstances. Kitsch says he saw Carter as an extension of himself. He says that although he liked the character and the sizes of both this movie and Battleship, he will be looking for roles with less exposure in the future.

“I didn’t play him as a hero, and I think it is my personality. I don’t live in L.A.; I live in Austin [where Friday Night was shot], and I am not a limelight guy. I don’t play the Hollywood game or anything like that, so it was a big step in the exposure sense of it. But I wouldn’t have signed on to this gig if that emotional ride wasn’t there. In the first meeting with him [Stanton], he said, ‘Everything else will take care of itself if we get this [the character] right,’ and that was music to my ears. I think that the beauty of this gig is that you do make the character your own. I love that. And I don’t worry about outside pressure because no one is going to put more pressure on me than I am.”

Kitsch came to the role of footballer Riggins from another athletic activity. He aspired to be a pro hockey player and made it to the BCHL’s now-defunct Langley Hornets at 19. He scored 23 points in 36 games before suffering a career-ending knee injury. Eventually, he tried modelling and moved to New York for more work, but he says that any comparisons to former athlete-model Channing Tatum, who also has several movies out this year, don’t work.

“I studied acting when I was in New York, so I cannot relate [to Tatum]. That was one of the reasons why I went there. I needed to study because I know this is an incredibly grounding job. You can never walk on a set and say, ‘I own it.’ Those first two weeks on a production are very much a feeling-out process for me. It’s about finding and grounding yourself in that character. I prep so much because it eliminates that doubt.

“But I got to work off Benicio Del Toro and John Travolta [in Savages]. I don’t think I was intimidated, but I was ‘up for it’ is the way to describe it. If you are doing the character justice, you lose it [the intimidation factor] because you think, ‘I will play the character in this scene and not Kitsch, who might be intimidated, because I know the character would never be intimidated in any way, shape, or form. If I am true to the character, I will be all right.’ ”

Kitsch may have liked the more simple life of being in a TV show that had a loyal group of fans but very little national exposure. However, exposure comes with big movies, and he accepts that it might not be as easy to avoid the spotlight as the year goes on. He says he will make an effort because he doesn’t want anyone to confuse the actor with the characters and he doesn’t want to get pigeonholed.

“I had the best of both worlds with Friday Night Lights,” he says. “We were garnering critical acclaim and we weren’t so overexposed that I had to battle to prove that I wasn’t that guy [Riggins]. It was a great thing to have done the show for five years and build as an actor and as a person and still be able to do completely different roles. But you do get those scripts [and producers] saying, ‘Do you want to do this again?’ You are conscious of it, but hopefully I can throw these curve balls to you guys so you can’t go: ‘That’s John Carter in the military.’

“There are guys you do tip the hat to who have won an Oscar and you don’t know anything about them. I love the fact that Christian Bale has an Oscar and when he made his acceptance speech [for The Fighter] suddenly everyone learned that he is British. I think going through this [exposure] makes it even more important to be disciplined and to stay out of the limelight.”

Watch the trailer for John Carter.