It isn’t easy being green. Ask Stefan Karl.

The versatile Icelandic actor is playing the title role in Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas, delighting audiences at the Sony Centre through Dec. 30. He loves his job (“even on four-show days”) but does get a bit tired of seeing an emerald-hued visage staring from his dressing room mirror.

“Last Saturday, I was in makeup for 13 hours,” he says, still managing an infectious grin. “It takes so long to put on and take off, it’s better to just leave it as it is.”

That’s how I find him on this particular day, with two shows behind him and one still to go, perched on a chair in his spanking-new dressing room at the Sony Centre, coffee cup at the ready, wearing a black t-shirt and sweat pants, his natural dark hair bristling free, but that unmistakable Grinch makeup covering his face.

How did a nice boy from Hafnarfjordur wind up in a place like this? He was born Stefan Karl Stefansson in 1975 in Hafnarfjordur, a small city about 10 km from Reykjavik in 1975. “Very early on, I had an interest in performing,” he says.

Luckily, there was a thriving community theatre in town, “where everyone from bankers to taxi drivers would come together to put on plays. I did my first one when I was 13. We all wrote it ourselves and called it You’re At the Top of the World, You Idiot! It was the story of a young man, from being a sperm to graduating from school. Kind of a Woody Allen sort of show.”

By the time Karl was 16, “I was spending most of my time at the theatre.” That cost him a great deal of bullying from his less arts-minded classmates.

In 2002, he founded an organization in Iceland called Rainbow Children. He hoped it would “reach out and help those children who had been bullied like I was and had no one to talk to about it.” It’s thrives today and has spread to many other countries.

Fresh out of school, Karl began working as a puppeteer on television and turned professional in 1994. He studied at the Drama Academy of Iceland, but didn’t find it a comfortable fit.

“I was interested in commedia dell’arte and physical clowning, but our principal didn’t accept that. ‘Acting is not about making faces and changing your face,’ he used to say, but I disagreed.”

Karl takes some time to explain how intense, but different, the theatre scene is in Iceland from North America.

“We do a lot of Icelandic plays and people love to come to them. My wife is a playwright and currently has two commissions, one from the National Theatre of Iceland and one from the city theatre of Reykjavik.

“We have no agents in Iceland, no managers, not even a real actors’ union. But that’s Iceland for you. Our policemen don’t even carry guns. Iceland is a special place, only 300,000 people. Our problems are different. It becomes personal right away. It’s all much closer. Someone in your family always knows someone in parliament.”

I asked Karl if he feels all that helped contribute to Iceland’s recent financial woes.

“Because Iceland is so small, everything effects everyone much more quickly. America is a thousand times our size. The same thing may happen to them, it will just take longer. Everyone thought if one bank collapsed, we’d still be okay, but they fell like dominoes.”

Karl is quiet for a moment, thinking of his troubled homeland so far away, then smiles and is back to what makes him happy: the theatre.

“I finally graduated from the Drama Academy in 1999 and got hired by the National Civic Playhouse. I played the Dentist in Little Shop of Horrors.” He laughs loudly. “Yes, even then, I was the villain!”

Karl was embarked on a successful Icelandic theatre career, playing such roles as Cyrano de Bergerac, Puck and Jake Quinn in Stones in His Pockets. That Irish black comedy became, in Karl’s words, “the most successful show ever performed in Iceland. We did 180 performances in such a small country!”

Then he was asked to go to Lazy Town.

It all started with Magnus Scheving, an Icelandic gymnastic champion who was become distressed about the physical inactivity of the young people in his country.

“He wanted the kids to get healthier, so he created this musical called Lazy Town. He played Sportacus, the fitness fanatic and I was Robbie Rotten, the guy who liked to stay indoors and sleep.”

They performed it to great success at the National Theatre of Iceland, but Scheving had bigger dreams.

“He was crazy enough and believed it in enough that he decided to go international,” Karl remembers. “All of a sudden he had a deal with Nickelodeon, they bought 40 episodes and we built a whole high-tech studio in Iceland.”

Karl had one problem. He didn’t speak a word of English. It’s hard to believe now, hearing his perfect grammar and vocabulary with an accent only occasionally creeping in, but in 2003 this would have been beyond him.

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“I had to hire someone to teach me English. He would ask me to tell him my life story in English. I would try and he would correct me every step of the way and bit by bit, that’s how I learned.

“The whole adventure started to roll. We shot the first season for nine months. Aired in August 2004, became a huge success in 140 countries including Canada on YTV. Fabulous way beyond any expectations. There were 28 episodes in second season, which took 11 months to film. Green screen, real time, CGI, one of the most expensive kids’ shows ever made.”

Maybe that’s why it ended after 52 episodes and Karl found himself in Los Angeles, unemployed and nearly broke. “You could say that, like Iceland, I sometimes had trouble managing my money,” he comments wryly.

He spent his last $600 to fly to New York to audition for the touring company of Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

“It was like a lottery. If I lost, I lost everything.”

He’s now in his third season of touring North America and alternately delighting and frightening young people.

“When I approached the Grinch, I realized he was a world-famous character and everyone has their opinion on how he should be played. You have to exclude Jim Carrey and Boris Karloff and say ‘I’m going to do it my way.’ You have to be able to see yourself in the character and bring something of yourself to the role.

“While the Grinch is physical and funny, I try to get into the emotional side of it, because kids love drama. He’s a complicated guy. He wants to be bad, but at the end of the day, he’s a softie.”

Karl loves his work so much that he’s not even looking for the next “big thing” out there on the horizon.

“I don’t have a dream role. It hasn’t been written yet.”

FIVE FAVE VILLAINS OF STEFAN KARL

Wile E. Coyote: He was my favourite bad guy as a kid and he still is. I would laugh so hard and yet feel sorry for him. He wanted to be so evil, but he couldn’t.

Co. Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds: He scared the hell out of me. In the opening scene of that movie he was so evil, I didn’t know what he was going to do next.

The Joker: I loved both Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger, even they had totally different approaches. It’s the character I find fascinating. So demonic, so bad.

Annie Wilkes in Misery: Such a hyper maniac! I’ll never forget that scene where she broke James Caan’s legs. Who would have thought she’d go that far?

Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins): Everything he touches is magic. A relaxed, elegant serial killer. You had to fight the fact that you actually liked him.