Actor Jared Keeso returns to hockey roots with starring role in Heritage Minute

Former junior hockey player Jared Keeso didn’t turn his back on the game when he decided on his career path as an actor.

And the man who first achieved screen fame for his award-winning portrayal of coach-turned-broadcaster Don Cherry is hardly worried about being typecast in hockey roles.

In fact, the 30-year-old laughs at the suggestion, clearly relishing the thought.

“I want to be the John Wayne of hockey movies, so I’ve got a long way to go before I accomplish that,” says Keeso, the star of a new hockey-themed Heritage Minute released by Historica Canada.

“Anything and everything hockey, I want to do. There are so many good hockey stories to be told; if I have it my way, I’ll be a part of all of them in one way or another.”

You remember the Heritage Minutes, right? An entire generation of Canadians grew up watching them on TV, entertaining history lessons told in 60 seconds. Who can forget the excitement of an epileptic woman who tells Dr. Penfield that she can smell burnt toast? Or the frantic dispatcher who is desperate to stop a train before Halifax is devastated by an explosion?

Historica Canada brought the Minutes back in 2012, after a hiatus of about eight years. The latest episode, narrated by George Stroumboulopoulos, tells the story of the Winnipeg Falcons, a hockey team that was discriminated against at home but managed to come through the First World War and win the first Olympic hockey gold medal, in Belgium in 1920.

The project came to Keeso’s attention in early 2014, when director Grant Harvey was working with Adrian Holmes, Keeso’s good friend and co-star on the TV drama “19-2.” Harvey was aware of Keeso’s hockey background and asked Holmes to inquire if Keeso would be interested.

“I was all in. Hockey and a Heritage Minute? That’s a pretty easy sell for me,” Keeso says. “I jumped on board and went to Calgary.”

Historica Canada president Anthony Wilson-Smith says it was an easy decision to cast Keeso in the role of Hebbie Axford, the Falcons team president.

“We just all looked at what he had done and who he is,” Wilson-Smith says. “He has a very strong presence, and we felt immediately – here’s our man.

“The fact that he has such a high-level background in hockey was important to us because we knew he would be very comfortable. You put him in a dressing room scene and you know he’s actually lived that, many times. He’s going to represent that well and understand it.”

What the team behind the project hadn’t counted on was Keeso bringing an even more personal touch to the role. The Heritage Minute embraces the Falcons’ military experiences and how the First World War affected them, and it turns out Keeso has some family military ties.

“We just cast him because we thought he was perfect,” Wilson-Smith says, noting that Keeso opened up in a special behind-the-scenes video produced at the same time the Heritage Minute was filmed.

“We didn’t even know of this emotional connection he had until he started going on about it, talking about how he wanted to get this right for the sake of his grandfather and his brother. He was aware that he was playing a real person and it was important to bring that person to life.”

Historica Canada received funding from the federal government to produce two new Heritage Minutes to commemorate the centenary of the First World War. The Falcons episode, first presented in a couple of public premieres and released in time for Remembrance Day, will be followed later this year by another one devoted to Canadian nursing sisters. Both were the creations of Calgary production company Corkscrew Media/Stir Films.

The Falcons Minute has been well received and has already surpassed 100,000 views on YouTube. Wilson-Smith says the episode and its predecessors have proven Historica Canada’s contention that history is not a boring subject, of interest only to older people.

“History cuts across all age groups when you present it in a way that everybody likes,” he says. “The biggest, most visible area of support for the Minutes is from about age 24 through 40, because that’s the generation that grew up seeing them on television. There’s a level of great fondness to it.”

“There’s a huge nostalgia factor there,” Keeso agrees. “It was an amazing thing to be a part of.”

The Listowel, Ontario native, who now lives in Vancouver, has been keeping busy both in front of and behind the camera. He recently finished filming the second season of “19-2,” which will begin airing on Bravo on January 19. Keeso stars in the intense police drama as Montreal cop Ben Chartier.

“It’s going to make some waves, I can promise you that,” he says of the upcoming first episode, centred on a school shooting. “Buckle up. It’s unlike anything you’ve seen on Canadian TV before.”

Among his other projects is a development deal with Bell Media to turn his popular YouTube comedy series “Letterkenny Problems” into a weekly sitcom. He hopes to have more news about that later this month.