Heartthrob hits the stage

Here’s the astonishing thing about Jake Epstein: What you see is what you get.

The star of TV’s Degrassi: The Next Generation is currently appearing as C.B., the Charlie Brown surrogate, in Dog Sees God, the ironic deconstruction of the legendary Peanuts characters that’s playing at Six Degrees at 2335 Yonge St. in Toronto.

Epstein, 22, has been a performer for almost all of his life, making his professional stage debut in Soulpepper’s Our Town at the Royal Alex before appearing on The Zack Files, prior to Degrassi and then going on to a stint at the National Theatre School.

But sitting opposite him at a midtown pub, he seems less like the quintessential teen heartthrob and more like the kind of guy you’d like to have with you on a cross-country ski trip.

“I was a jock,” he laughs, “hardcore sports all the way down the line, but I heard that if you auditioned for this arts school, you got time off school and that sounded good to me.”

He insists he was blindsided when he walked into Claude Watson to study theatre and found himself within a year working for Soulpepper Theatre.

After that, it was on to Mirvish Productions, where he played the Artful Dodger in Sam Mendes’ production of Oliver!

“I never really thought that this would be my profession,” he admits. “I thought it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed doing it.”

Without even trying, he got cast in shows like The Zack Files, but the big moment, of course, was when he was offered the role of Craig on Degrassi: The Next Generation.

Edgy and experienced beyond his years, young Epstein suddenly found himself doing things on screen he had never experienced in real life.

His character went through periods of drug abuse and violence that would have tipped the hand of many younger men playing the role.

He stayed with the show for five seasons, became incredibly popular and won a Gemini Award but then, one day, he found himself asking, “I’m 18 years old and I can do anything I want; why am I here?”

That question sent him away from the safety of a hit TV series and to the National Theatre School, where he found it “very hard and very humbling. They break you down and it was amazing for me.”

Since his graduation, he made a splash as Prince Charming in Ross Petty’s Christmas production of Cinderella, opposite his Degrassi co-star, Paula Brancati. But now he’s into something completely different with Dog Sees God, which takes all the classic tropes of the Peanuts cartoon strip and turns them on their head. The show begins with the death of Snoopy and finds Charlie Brown (or “C.B.” as he’s called here) trying to cope with the trauma.

“That’s a little strange for me to deal with,” he says at first, but then he laughs dismissively and says “no, it isn’t. What the hell, I’m in theatre!”