Rise to Fame
Cameron Crowe cast him in Almost Famous because he needed someone who looked genuinely overwhelmed by rock music. Judd Apatow saw the same quality and built Undeclared around it. The Fox comedy ran one season, but it was enough to get him into Apatow's Knocked Up and Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder. The bigger break was voicing Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon (a franchise that grossed over $1.6 billion) and co-writing This Is the End, where he played himself as the buzzkill who turns out to be right.
In the Spotlight
BlackBerry (2023) reframed the conversation. Playing BlackBerry co-founder Mike Lazaridis in a film about corporate hubris earned him a Canadian Screen Award for Best Lead Performance. It's the kind of serious adult work that separates character actors from leading men. He's also been building on the filmmaker side, directing and exec producing The Sticky on Prime Video. The next thing is The Stunt Driver, a comedy about a Canadian daredevil who tried to rocket a car across the St. Lawrence River, reuniting him with his Goon director. The Canadian angle is no longer a limitation. It's the whole brand.
Side Notes
'My mom is Catholic and my dad is Jewish, but the only thing I was, was a Habs fan.' He grew up in Notre-Dame-de-Grace, a working-class Montreal neighbourhood, and wrote a whole book about it: Born Into It (2018), partly about fandom and partly about processing his father's death when he was 21. In 2015 he moved to Toronto, citing what he called Quebec's 'poisonous ethnic dialogue.' He reportedly kept the Montreal house.