Tom Cavanagh laughs when asked if he has any tales to tell from the ski trip he and brother James took to Whistler a few weeks ago.

"There's plenty of funny stories," he said. "I don't think any of them belong in your paper, because your paper is still esteemed, right?"

The 43-year-old Ottawa native and actor, who now lives in New York City with his wife and year-old daughter, says he gets back to the capital several times a year to rendezvous with his far-flung family. Ottawa has become a meeting place, mostly because it's where his Crown attorney brother calls home.

Life now might not be as high profile or critically acclaimed as it was during Ed, his popular four-season NBC show that wrapped in 2004. But Cavanagh, who hasn't been able to find a television or movie project that stands out ever since, is fine with that.

"If you think it's a good horse, then you ride it," he told Sun Media from New York. "If it doesn't win then that's how it turns out. But I think you keep a pretty clear conscience if you're just trying to do things because you think they're good projects."

One of those projects is the direct-to-DVD flick Sublime, a psychological horror flick in which Cavanagh plays a man admitted to hospital for a routine procedure only to find his sanity tested. Cavanagh said he was drawn to the project, from first-time director Tony Krantz and screenwriter Erik Jendrenson, because the role was more about what wasn't in the script than what was.

"He took a very small incident -- someone going into the hospital for a very routine operation -- and turned it into this wide-blown expose on fear," says Cavanagh. "I thought that was good because a lot of the horrors that can be visited on people can be visited in everyday form."

Sublime is one of four independent films Cavanagh did last year. Gray Matters, with Heather Graham, had a limited release last month and is headed to video; Two Weeks with Sally Field is playing in New York theatres; and Breakfast With Scot, in which he plays a retired Toronto Maple Leafs player, is still in post-production.

There was also Love Monkey, the hour-long drama-comedy for CBS with Jason Priestly that was yanked after three episodes.

That experience, and another, failed pilot, hasn't soured Cavanagh on television. He also expects to do more guest episodes on NBC's Scrubs, where he pops up each season to play Zach Braff's ne'er-do-well brother, and is currently at work shooting a new Showtime documentary series at the Smithsonian called Stories From the Vault.

"I think you get a little more wary about the things that are said to you before you launch into pre-production," he says adding with a wry laugh, another key is to pay attention to how the "backslapping and handholding" is holding up.

"It's always funny to see who is actually calling," he says. " 'Hi, I'm the second assistant to the studio staff, here are your notes.' "