Colm Feore is a triple threat on the acting front -- on film, TV and the stage.

With one foot planted in Hollywood and his heart back home in Canada -- where he is a triple threat in TV, films and theatre -- Colm Feore has the ideal career for a working actor.

"I've been very lucky treating all of them as means to an end," Feore tells Sun Media about his opportunities from Hollywood screens to the Stratford stage.

"To what end? Becoming a better actor! So the film cross-pollinates with the theatre. The television sometimes subsidizes films that don't have any money. And the theatre invests both of the others with a kind of depth and a weight."

That depth and weight is precisely why Clint Eastwood cast the 50-year-old Feore opposite Angelina Jolie in his period drama Changeling, a true story of misogyny, corruption and murder in 1920s Los Angeles.

Feore plays the crucial support role of police chief James E. Davis, an architect of misery for Jolie's single mom. When her child goes missing, the LAPD executes a devious plan of misinformation to make up for their own blunders in the case.

Changeling makes its DVD debut tomorrow, in time for Oscar night. Jolie is a leading contender for best actress.

The DVD includes two docs, one showing the Eastwood-Jolie collaboration, the other profiling Jolie and her real-life, pre-feminist role model, Christine Collins.

Feore, who also has a featured role in the TV series 24, has tremendous respect for quality actors and quality people, Jolie among them. But he is in awe of the 78-year-old Eastwood as "an icon of world cinema."

Changeling, Feore says, could only have been made by a wily old vet. And Eastwood should have been Oscar-nominated for direction.

"I was really surprised," he says of the oversight. "Not that I have any experience in these things in terms of the to-ings and fro-ings of the Academy. But I thought it was really mature filmmaking. And it is his darkest film to date."

Eastwood famously directs in what seems like a casual manner, although he comes fully prepared and expects his actors to be, too, Feore says.

"Clint doesn't say 'Action!' and 'Cut!'. He says, 'Go ahead ...' and 'That's enough, okay, stop ... ' It's just easy-peasy and it changes the dynamic of the entire floor because everybody goes: 'We better be listening!' You've got to be on your toes. So, if something extraordinary was happening with Angie -- if she was just being radiant in the moment -- he never cut."

That produced the magic that generated Jolie's Oscar nom, Feore says. And most scenes took three takes maximum, some less.

"There are scenes in that movie that I am so intensely proud of," Feore says, "and not because I think the acting is all that compelling, particularly me or everybody else. But it is that we achieved something magnificent in the collaboration."

Eastwood, says Feore, "couldn't be more charming." But he also gave very specific direction and set up even the large crowd scenes -- such as the chaotic media circus at the train station -- with detailed instructions.

Then he let his actors loose.

"If we are rockin' and rollin'," Feore says of filming that train station chaos, "I know how to find a camera lens. So I'm not going to ruin a take because I get obscured behind some pinheaded extra who doesn't know what he's doing. I know 'this' is where I can go and keep the reality of the scene flowing.

"If you can get that in one take, refine it in two or three takes, and then you're done? That's terrific filmmaking!"

Oscar-worthy filmmaking!