Always working

Fame can be funny. One day, the internet mistakenly pairs you with a Brazilian supermodel you’ve never met. Another day, a waitress at the Calgary airport asks for a photo, then tells you — innocently enough — that you looked “much fatter on TV.”

Ryan Belleville laughs at both. After all, the comedian and actor, who appears at Rumor’s Comedy Club from today to Saturday, has been doing this long enough to know that fame is best handled with a sense of humour.

“I was like, ‘Thank you, thank you,’” he says, laughing. “And I told my wife — she’s like, ‘That’s terrible.’ I thought it was hilarious.”

That reaction tracks. Belleville says he has zero interest in being famous and plenty of perspective on how strange public recognition can be.

The Calgary-born comic — who starred as the emotionally-available-to-a-fault Lionel Carlson, husband to psychiatrist Anne, for seven seasons on CBC’s Workin’ Moms — is busier than ever. Criss-crossing across North America is part of the job, he says, before listing off an exhausting itinerary.

He’ll spend Valentine’s Day in Winnipeg, a city that holds a lot of blurry memories — including a late night in an Italian café with a couple of older men he’s still convinced were mobsters.

But gone are those late-night, booze-fuelled adventures. These days, life has a decidedly different pace for the self-professed “big family nerd.”

After years in Los Angeles, Belleville moved his family back to Canada last summer. The decision was based on industry shifts, remote work possibilities and a desire to be closer to family.

“We’d already lived through Trump, COVID and everything else. And then I noticed a real change in the industry. A lot of work shoots in Canada now, and as a dual citizen, it just made sense,” he says.

His wife, a film and television editor, can work remotely, while Belleville spends so much time on the road that the exact location of home matters less than it used to.

The move took some adjustment for his kids, who arrived with “cute little California accents” and big doubts about Canadian winters.

“They were a little shocked at first. The older one was like, ‘I’m going back to university in the States.’ But he’s old enough to see the news and go, ‘Wait, what is going on down there?’” Belleville says.

It’s that brand of resilience and adaptability that shaped Belleville’s comedy, honed over decades of trial and error.

Raised in a gypsy-esque, arts-focused household, he discovered his calling as a teenager at Calgary’s Loose Moose Theatre, a renowned improv centre that helped launch performers including Kids in the Hall alumni Mark McKinney and Bruce McCulloch.

“I wasn’t great at first, but I really wanted to get better,” he says.

That drive led him from improv to street performing, standup and eventually acting. While his career spans film, television and comedy clubs, Workin’ Moms — Catherine Reitman’s parenting comedy-drama that gained widespread viewership when it was picked up by Netflix in 2019 — brought a level of recognition he hadn’t anticipated.

“You do a Canadian TV show and don’t expect much to happen.then suddenly it’s tens of millions of people watching,” he says.

Still, Belleville is painfully aware of the downsides.

“I have friends who are wildly famous, and I don’t envy them. Every time you trip or stub your toe, there’s a chance someone knows who you are and remembers it,” he says.

“I took my family on a trip to Palm Springs. I slipped and fell on my ass in the pool. I stood up, and a woman goes, ‘Oh my God, are you from Workin’ Moms?’ I was like, damn it.”

Now, he’s touring extensively, putting the finishing touches on a new standup special being released this spring and using his platform to champion Canadian artists, musicians and comedians.

“I think Canadians, we all are having this sort of cultural PTSD moment together,” he says. “Everyone’s talking about boycotting America, but I think we should just support Canadian artists. Follow them, retweet them, repost their stuff on social media. Following us on social media helps us get a bigger audience, and gets more international eyeballs on Canadian culture.

“If Canadian culture doesn’t survive, who cares about our sovereignty? Because then we’re just American. That’s my call to arms.”

arts@freepress.mb.ca

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