When Jay Baruchel was a kid — a skinny little half-Jewish half-Irish Catholic kid in a rough part of Montreal, where he had a knife pulled on him on the first day of seventh grade and carried a Swiss Army knife the rest of the year, always worried he’d pull out a fork if he had to use it — his dad wanted him to play hockey. His dad wasn’t a big guy either, but Serge Baruchel was a fighter, boy. Serge Baruchel was a skinny Paris-born son of Italian-speaking Egyptian Jews who moved to a non-Jewish part of Montreal, and he was fighting his whole life.

“If he got in a fistfight, that would be the best thing that happened to him that week,” says Baruchel, sitting in a Toronto diner with his hood up, trying for comfort rather than anonymity. “When I was a kid, we’d be out and about, and for me, because I was a kid, I thought it was cool. For my mom, who was married to him, she was scared s---less. It was like being in a minefield everywhere we went.”

Baruchel, 34, is one of Canada’s most recognizable actors. Among other things, he was the lead in Judd Apatow’s late, great Undeclared when he was 18, four years into his career; he was in Million Dollar Baby and Knocked Up and Tropic Thunder, and he is the lead voice in the How To Train Your Dragon franchise, and the lead in the FXX series Man Seeking Woman.

And, of course, there is Goon. The broad, profane 2011 comedy about a hockey fighter was co-written by Baruchel and Evan Goldberg, and it was a love letter to the enforcer. It opened with blood splattering in slow motion onto clean white ice in big fat crimson drops, followed by a tusk of a tooth, flipping and falling. There was some subtlety, but not too much.

Then, in the summer of 2011, fighters Wade Belak and Rick Rypien committed suicide, and Derek Boogaard died from an oxycontin overdose. In 2010, even with elegies for fighters in full swing, there were 714 fights in the NHL, per hockeyfights.com, and 171 games with more than one fight. Last season, those numbers were 344 and 50. Now, Goon: Last of the Enforcers — Baruchel’s directorial debut — hits theatres Friday.

“The other times I’ve been (this) nervous is just my anxiety disorder, which is going on a talk show or a red carpet,” says Baruchel. “This is my kids going off to school.”

His father played hockey, too, on a local Jewish team with a big menorah on its jersey. They had pennies thrown at them one time. Baruchel asked a friend who had played with his dad what kind of player he was: He was told, your dad liked to finish his checks. Yeah.

Baruchel is a huge Montreal Canadiens fan, and he loves fights, which puts him in line with a lot of hockey fans in this country. His mother and father loved the fighters best, and Baruchel was raised in that faith. He loved the chaos, the honour and the mythology, sanitized as it might often be.

“I can’t argue against people who say it has no place, because it doesn’t: You’re playing hockey, you’re not fighting,” he says. “But I also grew up in this country . . . I can’t argue with someone who thinks it has no place and belongs in the past. But I adore it.”

His favourite hockey movie is Les Chiefs, a documentary about a Slap Shot-like team in a Quebec minor league. His view has changed; he knows there’s a toll, the way we all know. In the first movie, titular goon Doug Glatt is a deeply dumb guy who discovers he can fight, and starts playing hockey. The truest line in the movie comes from veteran enforcer Ross Rhea, played by Liev Schreiber: “You know they just want you to bleed, right?”

But Doug suffers no real anxiety, and never loses a fight, not really. In the sequel the goalposts shift. If the first movie was boy meets hockey, this is hockey meets boy.

“He is fighting dizzy throughout the movie,” says Baruchel. “We didn’t want to beat people over the head with it, but he’s not in the throes of a depression, absolutely not, but he’s dealing with concussion symptoms throughout the movie.”

But Doug’s career is mostly threatened by a shoulder injury, and he has to decide whether to risk ruination or provide for his nascent family. Rhea, the self-assured veteran, finds himself in a fights-only exhibition that features real-world NHL fighters George Parros, Colton Orr and Brandon Prust. It’s based off the Battle of the Enforcers exhibition that took place in Prince George, B.C., in 2005. It’s sad.

The movies are comedies, but they also chart the voyage of the enforcer, and a voyage of the hockey fan. The longer they fight, the more you know, the harder it is to cheer with your whole heart. The love of fighting endures, though. The myth endures.

At the end of the credits of the first movie were the words, “For Serge Baruchel.” Baruchel’s dad was notorious in criminal circles, and while there was a chance at a more respectable life when his son arrived, Baruchel started supporting his family in his early teens, after his dad left. They didn’t speak after a blowup at 16 when Serge called, drunk or high or both. Serge overdosed on heroin when Baruchel was 21.

When Baruchel says this movie is like sending his kids off to school — well, sort of.

“When I was 12, my dad saw a thing for a weekly acting thing in a church basement,” says Baruchel. “He said, ‘You talk a lot, this might be the thing for you.’ Here’s the weird thing about my dad: He wanted nothing more for me than for me to play hockey and for me to play catch with him in the backyard, and I would purposely (throw) dead-arm, and when he hit me in the mitt I would fall over as if he hit me too hard, because I wanted to watch cartoons, and I would go up to my bedroom with my G.I. Joes and I would make my movies and stories. The kids outside throwing a ball, it paled in comparison to the universes I was creating in my bedroom.

“So I’ll say this: he was bummed, but the minute he knew that I had something, he leaned into it.”

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His father bought him Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the first of thousands of movies Baruchel would eventually own; Serge would rent movies and if they were left in the VCR in the morning, Baruchel could watch them, too. His parents bought him film books. They backed up their boy.

“The lump in my throat is him not being able to see Goon, because that was me meeting him halfway,” says Baruchel. “I never played hockey, but I could do my version of that, which is this. My dad was a pretty old-school guy. A lot of people wouldn’t find him pleasant or palatable. He was incredibly ignorant and racist about a lot of stuff, a f---up who was always in and out of jail, and that guy had a p----y artist for a son and he f---ing told me to be that, and would kill anyone who stepped in my way. Like, that’s my boy.”

Baruchel could have made a movie about Ross Rhea, the career hockey player who had to fight to stay in the game, and suffered for it. But he made it about a Jewish guy who was bouncing around, aimless, who was secretly a superhuman fighter, and who once he had a family had to decide whether to settle down before he broke. Fighting in hockey is a mirror of ourselves in this country, sometimes crooked and distorted, and this is a proudly Canadian movie. It is one story about fighters, as they vanish.

Maybe like a lot of hockey stories, it’s a story about something else, too.