He is from Quebec, the province where they do things differently, and so fittingly, Dupuis has a certain je ne sais quoi. I mean, if he were from Alberta, we'd expect him to be rugged and wholesome. Would we want him to be complex? Naw. And to smoke? Forget it. And if he were from the Maritimes, we'd expect him to be friendly and outgoing, in sneakers, probably, and a wide grin. That Dupuis is Québécois makes the woollen cap he wears backward over his longish, tangled blond hair, the rough beard he sports, and the sunglasses he seldom removes, all seem, well, a perfect fit. He is that province's spirit: unknowable, mysterious, a little bit frustrating, like the one child in the family who doesn't want to go along for the ride in the comfy Coke-stained station wagon.

He is one of us, but not. Even he seems to struggle with his identity.

"There, that's better," Dupuis says, readjusting himself on a chair with his feet propped up on a bench, in the courtyard of a Toronto hotel. "At least this way I don't feel I am with my therapist."
Candy to a baby, that entry point. He goes to a therapist?

"Me?" he asks coyly. "Oh yeah. I like to learn where I came from, what I'm made of."

His confusion about who he is, what he represents, is puzzling in itself. From the very beginning of his acting career, everybody has been telling Roy Dupuis exactly what he's made of.

Joel Surnow, an executive consultant who cast him as a mysterious secret agent in USA Network's action-espionage series, La Femme Nikita, described him as "the best-kept secret -- an unusual blend of male action machismo and a vulnerable romantic, a combo of Mel Gibson and Brad Pitt." That was back in 1997. TV and film insiders have been saying Dupuis is on the cusp of Hollywood fame for years.

Problem is, Dupuis doesn't seem to want it. "I don't like the game [of Hollywood]" is his explanation. Agents have been after him to move to Los Angeles. "I said, 'No!' I can't do that," he says. "Quebec is my home. I'm very sure about that. It's different from anywhere else in the world. We're the only people who speak the way we speak, who think the way we think." He turned down the opportunity to audition for the part of the rock star, played by Billy Crudup, in Almost Famous. Another Nikita colleague, supervising producer Peter Lenkor, once said of Dupuis that, "If he put 10 per cent of his time into promoting himself, he'd be big."
When Nikita, which developed a cult following, was cancelled last year after five seasons (reruns still air in more than 50 countries), 39-year-old Dupuis dropped out of sight. "I had been too exposed. I needed a rest. I couldn't show myself in front of a camera," he says. His current role as biker Ross Desbiens in CBC's motorcycle gang drama, The Last Chapter,is the first thing he agreed to do since his self-imposed sabbatical of six months.

He hunches forward, elbows on his knees, as if wanting to be helpful, to be accessible, understood, then just as suddenly flops back in his chair, shaking his head slightly as he looks off into the middle distance. I ask an innocent question about where he lives. "Uh, I don't say," he says, the expression on his face cold as stone, that of his hazel eyes shielded behind his glasses. "There's a lot of people who would want to know where I live," he explains with a hint of apology.

With his longtime girlfriend, Canadian actress Céline Bonnier, he lives in the country outside of Montreal. That's the only signpost he will give. "[The property] took six years to find," he continues. "A house for me is not an investment. It's a home. It's for generations." He lives in a farmhouse, built in 1840, which he is restoring. To rebuild the interior walls, he found an old recipe for plaster. There is a porch he built with cedar and a copper roof. In the middle of a field, somewhere on the 50-acre farm, he has installed a hot tub.
The need to escape happened early on, he says. "Just one night," he says. "It all happened in one night." That was in 1989 when the TV series Les Filles de Caleb (entitled Emily in English Canada) aired in Quebec. More than 80 per cent of the population tuned in. Dupuis played the male lead. "I was living in downtown Montreal. The next morning, I went out to get my bread at the corner store, and suddenly" -- he points his arm -- "people were [shouting]: 'That's him. That's him.' I lost a certain liberty. Everybody knew me. And I actually like the city, the anonymity it gives you, but I lost that." He shrugs. "And the worst part is, Montreal is a city you walk." Unwittingly, he had stepped into a street in which U-turns are next to impossible. "You never think you're going to become the biggest star of your province," he says.

He had a golden touch -- each project he took on earned him more critical acclaim, more recognition. For his work in Les Filles de Caleb, Dupuis won a best-actor award at the Cannes Audio/Video Festival, and a Gemini. In 1991, Jean Beaudin cast him for the role of Yves, a gay prostitute and killer, in the film, Being at Home with Claude. The critics applauded, and again, Dupuis came to international attention at the Cannes Film Festival in the section called "Un Certain Regard." Between 1991 and 1994, he portrayed reporter Michel Gagné in the series Scoop, and then in 1994 had his English-language-television break playing the father of the Dionne quintuplets in the CBS miniseries, Million Dollar Babies. He has also starred in several plays, including Jean-Marc Dalpé's Le Chien and Sam Sheppard's Fool for Love and True West.
But celebrity, he says, "has been a big struggle." His overnight fame in Les Filles de Caleb caused him to drink more heavily and do cocaine. "You try to freeze yourself so you can go out," he explains. "[Fame] is not human in a certain way. You become a product." A year before he took on Nikita, he gave up drinking and drugs. "I had had enough. Drinking had become a lifestyle, the night life. It was almost a philosophy. [But] it was getting dangerous. It wasn't fun any more. That's pretty much when the therapy started." By the time he began the Nikita series, he had bought his farm.

Of course, this stance at the edge of the spotlight is part of Dupuis's appeal. Celebrity chases him. He has never pursued it. It's as if fame is a form of Canadian nationalism, of mainstream popular culture, that he instinctively resists. Even his choice to become an actor was made by other people.

He tells me the twists and turns of his story as though someone else wrote it, and he's just a character whose motives he, too, is trying to figure out. Narrative is important to him. He wants to be connected to his past, to his province, to the mystery of why he is popular.

Born in New Liskeard, Ont., the middle child of three, he moved between English and French Canada for much of his childhood. His late father, Roy Sr., was Franco-Ontarian, a travelling salesman with Canada Packers. His mother, Ryna, is Québécoise. The family moved to Abitibi in northern Quebec when he was a young boy, then to Kapuskasing, Ont., when he was 11. His parents separated when he was 14, at which point he moved to Montreal with his mother.

The idea of acting arrived as suddenly as a storm. No one in his family had been involved in theatre, although his mother taught piano and Dupuis, as a child, had played the cello. While in high school, he saw a movie about Molière. "That decided me to do a play," he explains. He chose a theatre class in place of physics. He met a girl who wanted to become an actor. She was preparing for auditions to the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal and wanted him to read lines with her. He did. Later, as a present for his birthday -- she was a little bit in love with him -- she gave him an envelope. Inside was an application for the theatre school that a friend of hers, who no longer wanted to go, had filled out. "Pretend you're him," she told Dupuis. He did. At the audition, he read with his friend, impressing the panel of judges who chose which of the 2,000 applicants would win the 16 available spots. But then they noticed he looked different than the picture on the application. "I told them the truth, but they let me in anyway," Dupuis recalls.

That this mixture of truth and make-believe would lead him to his career path seems characteristic of Dupuis. He is a series of contradictions; two solitudes in one person. He is shy in a world that demands self-promotion. He withdraws in a province that wants to embrace him. There is a world-weariness about him -- all that drinking as philosophy, his tinted view of the world, literally (through those ever-present sunglasses) and figuratively -- but he is innocent and hopeful, too. He doesn't believe in marriage, but wants family, he says. Why? The question unleashes an impassioned exhortation. "Family makes the world," he says, leaning toward me again. "It builds the world we live in, it builds the humans we are."

He, like Quebec, is not easily understood. For someone who has worked so hard to examine where he comes from, Dupuis is not entirely aware of what makes him different. I want to know if he feels it is his French-Canadian sensibility that creates his edgy, romantic screen presence.

"I guess so," he says with a shrug. Falling back into the embrace of the chair, he sighs, and with a long exhalation of smoke, adds that whatever others may see in him is unconscious on his part. "That's the instrument I play with," is his best explanation.