Action hero Taylor Kitsch heads junior hockey’s pipeline to Hollywood

Before Taylor Kitsch was a player in Hollywood, he was a player in the truest, most authentic sense, plying his trade in junior hockey rinks in Western Canada. If you're reading this, you likely know that already, since almost every media profile mentions that the Canadian-born star of the mammoth-budgeted action flick John Carter played for a British Columbia Hockey League team called the Langley Hornets.

Kitsch played for the Langley Hornets (now the Westside Warriors, playing out of his hometown of Kelowna, B.C.) in the early 2000s. A knee injury led him to realize his pursuit of hockey had runs its course, so he became a male model, once living for months in an unfurnished New York City apartment with zero electricity and no furniture. Of course, he earned his big break when he was cast as Tim Riggins, the guys-wanna-be-him, girls-wanna-be-with-him antihero of TV's Friday Night Lights. (To a true fan, Riggins' greatest moment wasn't going to jail to spare his brother's family, but buying beer as an underage high school student in a Season 1 episode despite an obviously fake ID. Cashier: "Here you go, Sergeant Riggins.") Kitsch has still kept a skate in the game, even staging a fight with David Boreanz during a celebrity game.

Now the 30-year-old actor seems destined for a fame that will surpass that of his castmates, which is saying something given that FNL, in sports terms, had a pretty deep bench. Kitsch is not the only former junior hockey player to make a career in acting. There is a theory that among athletes turned actors, football players tend to have the most success since they're used to being coaching and taking direction. Running through a play multiple times is probably similar to retakes. Time was, ex-hockey players becoming working actors was rare. Until better head and facial protection was adopted, the risk of being dinged by an errant stick or puck tends to take a tolls on someone's appearance. Plus the sport was Canadian-dominated, while the film and TV industry was heavily concentrated in the United States. However, times have changed, so we may see more actors who played serious hockey in their youth.

Here are just a few:

Nathan West, Detroit Whalers — Remember the male cheerleader in Bring It On who was just in it to meet girls? That was West. Do not be all high and mighty; of course you saw that movie.

Just a few years prior to that, West played 16 games as a goaltender with the-then Detroit (now Plymouth) Whalers of the Ontario Hockey League in 1996-97. By any measure, he's succeeded as an actor, although he's not as well-known as is spouse, Chyler Leigh. (The two became engaged during filming of Not Another Teen Movie.) The former netminder has appeared recently on the popular dramas (well, someone's watching them) Grey's Anatomy and Bones. Although he played goal, the Alaska native had strong enough skating skills that he played Team USA forward Rob McClanahan in 2004's Miracle.

(To this day, yours truly recalls a student-journalist friend giving Bring It On a glowing review headlined, "2-4-6-8, Bring It On is really great." That fellow is now a Ph.D., so this will be used as blackmail to get a job when he becomes president of a university.)

Wyatt Russell, Brampton Capitals — Speaking of people with ties to Kurt Russell, there's his son, who was a junior goaltender in the early aughties. It might be a cheat to include Wyatt Russell, since being the the son of dad Kurt and Academy Award-winning mom Goldie Hawn no doubt opened some doors in the acting game.

There presumably were no such advantages conferred on Wyatt Russell in hockey. He ventured north at age 16 in 2002 to play for a Junior B team called the Richmond Sockeyes, with Kurt and Goldie buying a $5-million home in the region so they could play the role of hockey parents. Wyatt Russell eventually headed east, playing two seasons in the second-highest tier of junior hockey. Since hockey did not pan out, he's followed his parents and half-siblings Kate Hudson and Oliver Hudson into acting. He was in last summer's comedy Cowboys & Aliens, which, uh, I didn't see.

Lochlyn Munro, Langley Eagles — Kitsch's fellow BCHL alumnus is probably a first-ballot inductee into I Know That Guy Hall of Fame. The character actor, whose recent credits include a guest spot on The Mentalist and a role in the Oscar-winning Unforgiven, played defence for the Shuswap Totems and Langley Eagles in the 1980s. Then known as Rick Munro, the future actor showed his rugged side by racking up 244 penalty minutes in just 49 games one season.

Munro also used his hockey buddies as inspiration for his character Cliff O'Malley in the 1998 comedy Dead Man On Campus, which thanks to the casting of a very young Jason Segel, still has a cultish shelf life on cable. Surely a few junior teams watched that on their bus back in the day.

Jared Keeso, Strathroy Rockets and Listowel Cyclones — The Canadian actor has not gone Hollywood — yet — but it would not be true to hockey to omit someone who has played Don Cherry, twice. Keeso has played the divisive Hockey Night In Canada commentator twice in CBC mini-series (Keep Your Head Up, Kid and Wrath of Grapes, which premiered last month).

Keeso, whose uber-Canadianness is further confirmed by the fact he has a Canada Day birthday, played in a very strong Junior B circuit around his hometown of Listowel, Ont., as a teen. As he told the National Post recently, "I honestly thought until I was 18 that I'd be on a college scholarship somewhere or maybe playing in the NHL, even though I was never a goal scorer." However, his father pointed out to him he was a "corner guy" and perhaps it was time to seek another profession.

Neate Sager is a writer for Yahoo! Canada Sports. Contact him at neatesager@yahoo.ca and follow him on Twitter @neatebuzzthenet.