"I'd like to think it's not as base a thing as just 'Hey, look at me,'" says actor Raoul Bhaneja of the spark within. "But I think deep down there's always been this desire to entertain people, to be at the centre of attention".
The 21-year-old Ottawa actor has enjoyed being the centre of attention ever since he began getting laughs from school friends with his Louis Armstrong impersonation.
At nine, he took a Lakeshore Players summer acting course. But he started getting seriously hooked at 14, he says, when he took to the vulnerable stage of Ottawa Little Theatre and appeared in several productions, including The Day They Kidnapped the Pope and Stalag 17 .
"OLT's a pretty great place," says Bhaneja from Montreal, where he is completing his final year at the National Theatre School. "They go all out and you can't help but get swept up."
Born in Manchester, England, he came to Canada as an infant with his Indian-born father and Irish-born mother. He attended Ottawa public schools except for during the four years he spent in Germany, where his father had an External Affairs posting.
A student in the Canterbury High School drama program, he was also a member for two years of the school's National Championship improv team. At 16, he was performing Shakespeare in public places with Ottawa's Company of Fools, and by 19 - shortly after being named a winner for a script titled Michelangelo in the National Arts Centre's ninth annual Young Playwrights Search - he was acting in the 1993 Ottawa Shakespeare Festival's professional summer productions.
Last year, Bhaneja and partner Birgitte Solem toured their darkly comic Sad Surgeon across the Canadian fringe circuit, winning kudos for it from Montreal to Toronto to Saskatoon.
"I think Raoul is really going to go places," says Gil Osborne, artistic associate in the NAC's English Theatre department. "He's definitely hot."
At the National Theatre School, Bhaneja has been involved in productions of Kander and Ebb's Florence, The Red Menace, Shaw's Major Barbara, and the Feydeau farce A Flea in Her Ear . In between, he has studied everything from stage combat and 15th-century dance to Stanislavsky based scene studies.
After finishing up in Montreal, Bhaneja plans to "head to Toronto and get in line.
"Sure I'd like to have five Oscars 10 years from now. But I think you have to have realistic goals."
For Bhaneja, that means looking back and knowing that he was part of the growth and change in Canadian theatre.
"It's a very dynamic time to be on the scene."