A spiral of green motorcars driving across yellow pyjama pants provides a pleasing contrast to the bleak, fetid ski jacket. The wearer smiles, but a smile and an upright posture prove too much to maintain, and he sinks slowly, contentedly, to the concrete. I return his greeting and step carefully across rubber boots, one black, one green, glance at the rows of pageboys and perms in the window of the four-dollar-a-cut hair salon and ring the bell to a third-floor Kensington Market apartment.

On-screen, the camera widens Don McKellar's brown eyes, enlarges his forehead, makes him slightly odd, a man about to be a victim. Away from the celluloid, he is softer, physically more boy than adult, this hair a blue-black cottering, his voice cultured, impossibly tranquil. The large overcoat is frayed at the cuffs, his heavy cardigan presenting an avuncular air in disagreement with the ancient Roadkill T-shirt and its motto, EID RO EVOM. He jumps lightly down the final two stairs at this doorway, sidestepping the horizontal pyjama legs, and ambles out into the organized chaos of the market.

This October visit is my fifth, perhaps sixth, meeting with Don McKellar. I first met him some years ago -- before the Genie for his role in Atom Egoyan's Exotica; before his cowriting of Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould and its awards from around the world; before he wrote the new TV series Twitch City and two more movies, The Red Violin and Last Night -- projects that make the first months of this new year fat with promise. "It's not quite the right time for a profile," opined various editors, and at the next enounter, desperately trying to keep pace, I would talk to McKellar of further writings, further roles.

We used to meet in a tiny Portuguese café, a few doors from his apartment, where the owner would entertain us with details of neighbourhood robberies or suspected drug deals or the dead baby kept in a freezer for seven years. In those days McKellar made his home above a small, downcast dress store that sold velvet frocks and Sunday best. One early April day as he crowded over the dim threshold, I asked to see inside. There was only the slightest chagrin at the ankle-deep clothing on the bedroom floor or the days of dishes in the sullen kitchen. Instead, he offered an exasperated wave at the tax receipts paving the living room floor and soft delight at the Chinese bootleg CD that confuses REM with CCR.

Now he has moved a block south to a space that, like its predecessor, has the ambiance of a frat house. At thirty-four, McKellar possesses a twenty-dollar bicycle and a minimal amount of extremely ratty furniture. Luxuries include a catholic library (The Brothers Karamazov; The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sexual Practices; Textual Poachers; Television Fans & Participatory Culture); a vast, bewitching blowup of Al Waxman as the surly hobo and murder victim of Twitch City, an axe next to a woodstove on a floor that bears the marks of a much chopping; and appallingly glorious black and midnight-blue satin sheets, a residue of the Last Night film set, where they belonged to a character intent on spending the final hours of the earth's existence in sexual discover. "Did you actually buy anything?" I ask, surveying the Early Rec Rooom decor. He looks around for long moments. "Yes, the vacuum cleaner! No, wait, my parents bought that."

Today, we pass the window of a market café on Nassau Street, a woman in simulated leopard skin devours fluffy pastries, a brightly coloured cockatiel perched on her lacquered head. It is difficult to imagine McKellar apart from this place. The personal informs everything he writes, and much of the personal is in some way associated with these narrow streets, where goods harvested, baked or plucked slop across the sidewalks, and where square, grey bodies smelling of boiled greens and bingo jostle with fleshless moderns to gain wine-coloured plums or golden fowl.

"All my writing is in some way drawing on my experiences. But I try not to think specifically. The scene would become anecdotal, and even though I am exploring myself, I want to keep some mystery even to me." To McKellar, writing, acting and directing all intertwine: "There is something unnatural about trying to distinguish between them. When I am writing, I am acting out all the parts; when acting, I am directing and writing in my head; when directing, I am forcing people to act out little facets of myself."

While at Lawrence Park Collegiate, McKellar ran his own theatre company, and at the University of Toronto he did plays at nearly every college until he dropped out one credit shy of a degree ("I am waiting for them to give me an honorary doctorate"). As a cofounder of the Augusta Company theatre collective, he produced eight original pieces. In 1986, gonzo film director Bruce McDonald asked him to write the script of Roadkill and to star as the aspiring serial killer whose ankles are too weak for hockey. The cult hit was followed by Highway 61, also written by and starring McKellar. In 1992, while a resident at the Canadian Film Centre, he wrote and directed the acclaimed short Blue (explicit sex and David Cronenberg).

"As a writer he can drive you crazy," says François Girard, dark kinetic hair and delicate bones, a Gallic version of his friend and partner, sits at a desk in a darkened editing room to point and click across a movie shot in five countries and five languages and covering three centuries in the life of a musical instrument. "He works night and day but is the slowest writer I've ever known. Something is written only after studying all possible permutations around a specific point in a scene; then he moves to the next point. The result is a tremendous economy and an immense quality to his writing."

To find his characters, to find his voice, McKellar walks. Kensington Market is an excellent footpath. It is that rare place in this deferential city where pedestrians consider themselves equal to the combustion engine and refuse to wait for instruction to proceed. "I rehearse strategies in my head. What I really do is try to find the puzzle. It's about one central thing, something propels it forward. Once I figure that out, the rest is easy. Curtis [Twitch City's antihero] is inarticulate, so I have to decide in each scene why he isn't talking: he's being passive-seductive or whatever. I have a good sense of character without it being overly analytical and schematic, and I think I have a good empathetic ability. I read a lot, and that informs my sense of what a character is and how people think, and I do a lot of research.

"I am stubborn and possessive about my writing. It is one of the reasons why I don't move to Hollywood." When I first met McKellar, it was impossible to believe this statement. I saw him as too benign, too malleable, to survive L.A. But the serene facade conceals an implacable nature. There have been many offers.

"For example?"

"Sitcoms, film parts, writing. I don't want to be specific," he mumbles. By now the evasion routine is familiar to me. He is vague and protective about so many aspects of his life; nervous of how others will view him.

"It seems so presumptuous or foolish to talk about this, that I am flaunting this or turning things down out of laziness or fear of perhaps self-assurance. I can tell you that Universal talked about a rewrite of Bride of Frankenstein. That sounded interesting, but I just never followed through. I was too busy."

Tinseltown holds little appeal. "The smallest change in a traditional Hollywood structure is seen as objectionable," he explains. "We can only subvert ideas that are already there. Glenn Gould was a traditional artist's biography and a conventional narrative, but by blatantly exposing the film's three-act structure and its thirty-two scenes, it was disguised as something revolutionary."

The Augusta Company honed his confidence. McKellar, Tracy Wright and Daniel Brooks questioned every line and every gesture in every play, tearing apart theatre's meaning and purpose. "In a way it was always about personal power, fighting for one's own beliefs. We were forced to defend opinions. I simply internalized the collective."

The Red Violin is the largest, most expensive, most ambitious project that McKellar has yet worked on. His intention was always to push the limits. A gracious, gentle-hearted manner pacified Chinese officials and Hollywood moguls alike. "Everything is about saving face, so you have to always seem like you are complying with their concerns while really you are just giving them another chance to say yes." McKellar is talking about the Chinese and the days upon days of negotiation that resulted in not one line being lost during the Shanghai portion of the filming. But the same quiet strategy was obviously used on Hollywood backers a who balked at subtitles and demanded A-list actors. "They wanted to approach Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves to play the English aristocrat. We fought and fought and fought. We agreed to approach Jack Nicholson because there was no way he'd do it, he doesn't do small movies. We didn't approach Keanu Reeves because we thought he might actually say yes."

Mid-afternoon at the Kensington Cafe, McKellar blithely asks for a menu and orders appetizer and entree. At earlier meetings he would wriggle and lower his head in a gesture of apology before ordering his food. "Are you sure this is okay? I haven't eaten all day." Now, my secondary role as a provider of free meals is simply accepted, understood by us both. A woman laden with groceries approaches our table. She recognizes McKellar from years before when he dated her daughter, but she cannot remember his name. She knows only that his father is a lawyer. "That was important in Lawrence Park," he laughs.

"I am afraid of comfort. I actively resist lovely things in my life," he mutters, and the brushed-metal frames are removed from his nose and subjected to a frantic cleansing. "I grew up in a very comfortable upper-middle-class household with very good liberal parents [his father, John, is a QC and an arts patron, sitting on the Canada Council and a number of theatre boards], but it was an oppressive comfort; delicate subject...don't want to... I developed resistance as a way of protecting myself, as a way of separating myself, just as performing was. I read every black-liberation book, I read a lot of Chinese communism, went through the Beat thing, and what I adopted became ingrained in a way that affected my lifestyle. Sometimes this choice is a productive thing and sometimes destructive; sometimes it is just a reaction that I should think through. It affects my relationships; they go on forever, they are tortured, complicated, up and down, big fights, last for years."

Discomfort grows, sentences trail away; his complexion, through the dark stubble, is tinged with pink; the thick mat of chest hair emerging from the T-shirt begins to tremble. I push my advantage.

"When a woman seems to find comfort in a relationship, do you become nervous, back off?"

"I can't believe I am having this discussion, it is bringing back so many nightmare conversations. Yes."

He squirms, managing to look all the more attractive.

"I have affairs on trips. I travel a lot."

"Because you think you can easily say good-bye?"

"It never works out that easy, but it always seems as if it should. I'm not fighting bourgeois entrapments, I am apparently not in need. I always feel that if I want to I can get that wife, that house, those children. I guess I always saw life and romance as inevitable and my life in between, my career, as stalling. My personal life is always getting me in trouble. I'm not very good at defining...but I keep my personal life very personal except with the people involved. And even then..."

"That could explain why things are never resolved."

"You could be right there."

Which brings us neatly to the six-part series Twitch City, the story of a man and his neuroses. "I was at a reception in 1994 and Ivan Fecan [then vice-president of English television networks for CBC] was there and said, 'I would like to work with you,' and I said jokingly, 'How about a new King of Kensington,' and he said, 'Put a proposal on my desk tomorrow.'" Fast-forward over much walking and its results, including the discreation of the original King (Waxman's character is butchered by a bag full of tinned cat food in the opening episode), to a series of phone messages that aggregate as: "I'm afraid we can't do your show; we have all been fired." Much Corp dithering, too ridiculous to document. Then, early in 1997, at the dilapidated end of Front Street, Bruce McDonald shoots Twitch. McKellar, toying with the conventions of sitcom, highlights a generation of the overeducated and under-employed who grew up with television as a family member. He takes on the role of Curtis, an agoraphobic cheapskate living in Kensington Market.

Now there's the danger. McKellar is not Curtis -- despite the obvious links. "In many ways it is people's perception of me, even strangers', and that's what I expand on, play around with. It both creates and explored my own personal mythology." Large slices of McKellar's emotions feed his writing despite constant attempts to shield himself from commitment and sentiment. "He is good at protection," says Girard, "at keeping his secrets. Don is a lot of contradictions: full of doubt and certitude. We travelled a lot together on Red Violin and Glenn Gould. He doesn't show off how extensive his knowledge is, but if you walk into a museum or an art gallery, he becomes your guide. He is one of the most erudite people I have met. Yet he accepts his own insecurites. To live and work with them gives him strength and courage for other things.... The dichotomy is essential to any healthy artist."

Tracy Wright, one of the Augusta Company cofounders, first met McKellar at university. "I fell in love with him instantly, on sight." Though the couple are no longer lovers, they remain the closest of friends. (We come across her in the market, and as they confirm a time to see Boogie Nights at the Uptown, their fingers twine absently together.) "All these years later," she tells me, "there is still a mystery to him."

Sitting on the notched green living-room floor on the autumn afternoon, McKellar and I watch Last Night rushes. I've brought cappuccinos; I can't trust him to offer refreshments. I was offered a chair, but the circular basket affair needs a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull to be truly appreciated. His cell-phone rings, and I rag him about possessing such a gewgaw. "The production company made me take it. You're not going to put it in the story, are you?"

Last Night marks McKellar's debut as a director of feature films. On the dusty TV screen an acquiescent group of Torontonians play out their final hours. They are quintessential Canucks: melancholy and polite. McKellar has chosen to play a familiar character: the gentle man, out of his depth, life out of his control. It is the note he is most comfortable displaying (though in the café he took umbrage at this suggestion and dug hard at the dregs of his leek soup.) McKellar's limitations as an actor highlight his abilities as a writer. I see him as a wordsmith, not the creative trinity. He writes of a stationary generation camouflaged with comedy; of the ecumenical language of music; of necrophilia, excrement and an opinionated prick -- a real one (not yet filmed). Other occupations allow him to embellish his primary purpose.

McKellar is still elated from the shooting that ended only two days earlier. He beams at qustions, bounces up to point at the screen, explains casting, camera angles and credit placement, examines how he comes to choose such a theme: "When I was little I was very feverish once and ran into the street trying to warn people of the end of the world. I remember how worried my parents were. 'What happened?' 'There was a bad man and he...' The inarticulate child's version of events fell apart as I talked."

I move to gather up my belongings; we detour to examine his artwork -- abstracts and animals he's painted on quilted mattress fabric. An alphabet of storybook creatures lies on the kitchen counter. None of his illustrations shows the object named. Y IS FOR YO-YO reads the caption under a smiling green hippo.

Another leave-taking. McKellar is quiet for a moment, looks at me, considers, swears me to secrecy and tells a story. A cruel, unjust, outrageous story. Then he traces how the personal enters the professional. "When I was writing Last Night, I knew there was something that had interrupted Patrick [the lonely character McKellar portrays], separated him from his parents and his high-shcool friends, and it took me a long time to realize I was getting into a very personal emotional period. Shooting became extremely bizarre. At one point during a speech I felt I was going to start sobbing and called, 'Cut,' but then as a director thought maybe I should have allowed the scene to continue. It was the most schizophrenic moment of my life."

"He is never where you expect him to be," says François Girard. "One night I heard Don sing Frank Sinatra at a karaoke bar in Taiwan; it made me think I didn't know him at all."

© Toronto Life magazine