Let others congratulate the Toronto Maple Leafs -- or criticise them in some cases -- for being the first major-league sports franchise ever to lend their logo to a gay-themed movie.
Tom Cavanagh, who stars in Breakfast With Scot -- about a gay ex-Leaf and his partner who adopt a young boy -- is mainly thankful that they made his job easier.
"It scared me a bit to see the name Maple Leafs in the script," the amiable Cavanagh said in an interview during the Toronto International Film Festival. "I'm always aware that people will write about a football team in Dallas and then it ends up being the Dallas Cowpokes or something.
"You could have written 30 pages of script setting up who my guy was. Or I could put on a Leafs sweater. All credit to the Leafs and the NHL for saying yes when they didn't have to."
A good Canadian boy who learned to skate on a backyard rink in Ottawa, the former star of the TV series Ed and Love Monkey plays Eric, an ex-Leafs enforcer, in Breakfast With Scot. But he really only gets a handful of scenes on skates (the movie opens with the hit in training camp that ends his career). In fact, he and his former Love Monkey co-star Ben Shenkman (whose character Sam is a sports lawyer), play the straightest, most in-the-closet gay couple imaginable. It's when a flamboyant 11-year-old named Scot (Noah Bernett), whose nascent sexual identity is clearly "out," enters their lives that their carefully constructed wall of denial begins to crumble.
It's worth noting that in the acclaimed book that Breakfast With Scot was taken from, neither Eric nor Sam is in the sports world. But Cavanagh says sports was a good backdrop for the movie's theme.
"It's not just a gay thing," Cavanagh says, "it's about what people are comfortable with other people knowing about their lives. But (Eric's) world is an extremely macho, male-driven, testosterone-drenched world.
"I mean, I don't know when anybody's ever going to come out in the sports world. The most recent was (former NBA centre) John Amaechi and he waited, like, three years after he'd retired to announce he was gay.
"And he was involved in the arts, he was a book reader, very intelligent. When a guy like that doesn't come out, it tells you something about the resistance that's there."
If the script alone wasn't enough, slapping on the skates was a pretty good enticement.
"You can't skate around Copps Coliseum without thinking about Gretzky passing to Lemieux," he says, referencing a Canada Cup moment. In his spare time in New York, he plays in what he calls "the BHL, the Burnett Hockey League," an ad hoc shinny circuit organized by David Letterman exec producer Rob Burnett, the CEO of Letterman's World Wide Pants production company and erstwhile producer of Ed. "It would be so cool if you could mention the BHL," he says, "it's some pretty good hockey."
Could they beat the fabled North Hollywood League (home to players like Alan Thicke and ex-MacGyver Richard Dean Anderson)? "Are you kidding? We could kick -- their -- a--!" he says emphatically, with a laugh.
From the rink to the court, Cavanagh recently wrapped his feature directing debut, an as-yet-untitled indie film about a young female Harlem court hustler. Friends like Shenkman, Richard Kind and Taye Diggs lent their acting talents.
"We have established people, some excellent actors who also happen to be friends. It's not as if I have huge influence because I starred in Ed. It's like if they tried to use my name on the Maple Leafs. They'd have said 'Who? Ed? What's that?' "
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