Devon Bostick visits The Empire State Building in New York City.Roy Rochlin/Getty Images
Toronto’s Devon Bostick just might be Canada’s best accidental rock star.
When it came time, in 2011, to film the second sequel to the actor’s hit franchise Diary of a Wimpy Kid, in which Bostick played the older brother of the title hero, he took a crash course on drumming to master his character’s garage-band bona fides. A decade and a half later, and Bostick cannot seem to stop facing the music, with the actor recently learning everything there is to know about the guitar in order to co-star in Mile End Kicks, the buzzy new Montreal-set romcom from Canadian director (and occasional Globe and Mail film critic) Chandler Levack.
Not that Bostick, 34, believes he should be headlining arenas instead of occupying space on the big screen – or that he should even be allowed near a live audience.
“Against everyone’s expectations, including myself, I’ve somehow been able to do it. It’s always been a case of, ‘How the hell is this even going to happen?’” Bostick says during an interview from his home in New York. “Luckily, for this film, the songs that I had to learn just rip. They’re very catchy, and I’m not just saying that before I had to listen to them 500 times.”
In Mile End Kicks, Bostick seems like he’s playing a character moviegoers have seen 500 times before yet feels jaggedly fresh and inspired. As a sensitive guitarist named Archie, a PEI transplant who moved to Montreal’s most anglophone-friendly neighbourhood in the summer of 2011, Bostick gets to play a love interest who is as charming and winsome as he is deluded and completely over his head.
And when Archie meets an awkward but determined music journalist named Grace (Barbie Ferreira), a Toronto transplant who cannot quite see the perfect boyfriend material that is right in front of her, Bostick gets to tap into deep reservoirs of passive-aggressive yearning. Think of Jack Lemmon in The Apartment, if the character wasn’t an insurance clerk but played in a band called Boner Patrol.
With TIFF premiere of Mile End Kicks, Chandler Levack is more than just almost famous
It is the kind of breakout role that any rising Canadian actor would happily spend countless hours learning every musical instrument known to man in order to snag. Even if Bostick hasn’t made all that many Canadian films before. In addition to the Wimpy Kid movies (three between 2010 and 2012), Bostick has worked with such globally recognized filmmakers as Bong Joon-ho (Okja), Rob Reiner (Being Charlie) and Christopher Nolan (that’s Bostick in Oppenheimer, suggesting that Cillian Murphy’s title character use an implosion-type nuclear weapon for the famed Trinity Test).
“The first meeting I had with Chandler, she kind of grilled me as to why I hadn’t made more films here. I guess I just haven’t been asked,” Bostick says with a laugh. “Maybe it’s because I left for the U.S. a while ago, and there’s this perception of, ‘Oh, he won’t do that.’ But it made no sense to me. I want to be in more Canadian stuff. Even if there’s the perception maybe that when you’re in Canada, you have to leave to become wanted. And then when you’ve gone, it’s like, how dare you leave?”
Any cross-border tensions seem to have cooled now. After Mile End Kicks made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in the fall, Bostick earned a Canadian Screen Award nomination (his first) for Best Performance in a Supporting Role (Comedy).
“I had watched Chandler’s first film, I Like Movies, and it felt like the stakes for this movie were so high. I had to do this, I needed to be in this movie, because Chandler creates something that’s to specifically Canadian and specific to her own experiences, but feels universal, too,” Bostick recalls.
For Levack, Bostick embodied an underdog energy that stood as a direct contrast to Grace’s other potential suitor, the pretentious but charismatic-in-his-own-dirtbag-way singer Chevy (Stanley Simons).
“The joy of writing a romcom is getting to write about your own ideals of love. You get to invent your own fictional boyfriend and infuse them with all the warmth and humour and tenderness that you wish to find in a person,” Levack says in a separate interview. “Devon has the most brilliant combination of vulnerability and comic timing. To me, he’s Billy Crystal and Seth Cohen and Tom Hanks all in one.”
Devon Bostick and Barbie Ferreira.Joe Fuda/Supplied
It helped that Bostick could personally relate to Levack’s semi-autobiographical story of broke, culture-sector-adjacent English-speaking twentysomethings trying to make a life for themselves in 2011 Montreal.
“I had a lot of friends at that time move from Toronto to go to Concordia, and I remember going up there a lot for like spring break and to experience being a Torontonian in Quebec and just irritating everyone by your existence,” the actor says. “Which is fair. We should have all learned French.”
The drums and guitar will have to do for now – though Bostick is quickly expanding his on-screen portfolio. In addition to some high-profile upcoming roles (including Ron Howard’s new war drama Alone at Dawn, in which he co-stars with Adam Driver and Anne Hathaway), Bostick was recently in production on an untitled Montreal-shot drama that he wrote alongside his friend, the Australian director Cody Fern, which stars Sarah Paulson, Dianne Wiest and Naomi Watts.
“When you’re an actor, you’re kind of at the whim of everyone else, so it’s been nice to have a little sense of purpose with this script,” says Bostick, who has been toying with the screenplay for years alongside Fern after the pair met at the Sundance Lab’s acting program. “I know it’s a dream come true. I mean, to have Dianne Wiest saying words that I typed down, it’s amazing and so silly.”
Mile End Kicks opens in theatres April 17.