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It is Halloween night, but no one here in this café on Toronto's Parliament Street needs to dress up in costume. They are already rich in character. Outside, in the small backyard next to the alley, men stand in a circle amidst discarded boxes, piles of miscellaneous junk, a rusted truck and plastic chairs, spewing cigarette smoke and expletives into the spooky warmth of a Toronto fall evening.

Nicholas Campbell fits into the scene, perfectly cast with his look of handsome dereliction. It is not the first time the celebrated character actor has suggested a seedy location for a media interview. “I often do them down at the race track,” he explains. “It's exciting, and the girls seem to like it, “ he cackles, suggesting that he is complicit with the media in promoting his image as a mythic bad-boy of Canadian drama.

Best known for his role as the coroner on CBC's long-running TV series Da Vinci's Inquest (1998-2005), he runs his hand through his long, grey hair and speaks in a smoky, barroom voice, a low, friendly mumble, punctuated by an easy and frequent laughter. His legs jitter like jackhammers as he drinks coffee. The only thing calm about him are his piercing blue eyes, clear and sure in a face that's worn as an old shoe.

Campbell has had a hard time adjusting to life post-Da Vinci and its regular paycheque, but he is in a moment of resurrection – once again.

Last Monday, he made his debut in a new part that will last until the end of the season as the father of Graham Abbey's character in The Border, the popular Gemini-nominated CBC-TV drama. Campbell is also nominated for a Gemini, for his stunning performance as a reclusive cowboy with a troubled past in The Englishman's Boy, the CBC miniseries adapted by Guy Vanderhaeghe from his celebrated novel of the same name.

He is also making a comeback on the stage. Last week, he opened in Festin, directed by Jason Byrne, at Toronto's Berkeley Street Theatre. And with Ted Dykstra, he is developing an ambitious theatrical project. Based on Leo Tolstoy's novella The Kreutzer Sonata, it involves music, dance and the spoken word.

Stories about Campbell always precede him.

The son of a wealthy family who attended Upper Canada College, the exclusive Toronto private boys' school, and Queen's University, he owes hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Canada Revenue Agency in back taxes. He is broke. He is a gambler. The 56-year-old father of three grown children doesn't own a car or a house and reportedly hasn't had a credit card since 1991. His romantic life is in ruins, too. Three marriages have ended in divorce. Disaster is the most loyal girlfriend of the man who has been called Canada's Nick Nolte, it would seem.

But who is the man beneath the stories? Is his bad-boy image just a costume?

“Maybe I have encouraged people to think I'm a little wilder than I am sometimes,” he admits sheepishly at one point. “I'm really kind of conservative and a scaredy cat. You can't find my name at any rehab centres.”

The truth about Campbell is not simple. He has his demons, he admits. But his behaviour has more to do with the perilous beauty of feeling the world than it does with wanting to sabotage his participation in it.

It is often assumed that he rebelled against his background. But he loved his years at UCC, he says. “I have great memories there. There was this high level of expectation.” At Queen's, he planned on studying law, until he happened to take a course in theatre during his first year. “I felt really lucky that I knew what I wanted to do.” Upon graduation, he moved to England to attend the London Drama School and the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. The early part of his career was in the theatre, with small parts in movies, including A Bridge Too Far and the Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me. His family was always supportive, he adds.

He has never been a drinker. His drug habit was mostly pot. “I came from the drug generation, but I never did hard drugs – never heroin, some cocaine. But it was not the love affair that people think it was. Drugs are not something that have touched my life as much as people think out there.”

He takes responsibility for his debacle with Revenue Canada. “I kept avoiding it and avoiding it,” he says. During the seven seasons of Da Vinci's Inquest and the one season of Da Vinci's City Hall, which was cancelled in 2006, he caught up on some of his back taxes. “But the bill kept going up with penalties. I did okay,” he says of his repayment schedule. “But 75 per cent of it is interest.” He doesn't like to divulge how much he still owes. When pressed, he does. But the candour makes him nervous, and he asks that the amount not be published. “As soon as you say a number, it sounds like, this guy is an asshole. He didn't pay the government. I look like a fucking idiot,” he explains., wincing slightly. (Let's just say that the amount he owes is enough to pave a lot of roads.)

His gambling at the racetrack is also the stuff of legend, he insists. “I am irresponsible about buying horses,” he allows. But he doesn't bet on races. “The way I see it, you get given only a certain amount of luck in this world. Everyone has luck. But you only get so much, and to me, I don't want to use a good portion of it betting at Woodbine or in a poker game. I sweat the results so much that I don't enjoy it.

“I see my whole life as a gamble,” he adds, as a mumbled afterthought. And by that, he means his pursuit of a career that is built on nothing more than the hope that someone will hire you for a gig next week.

Acting has been his greatest addiction, he says. Ask him about his work with Chris Haddock, the creator of Da Vinci's Inquest, and he will go on a long tangential spree about their creative collaboration and the way Campbell was encouraged to ad lib on the set. “I would read the script once, and then put myself out there, almost like on a tightrope with no net. Or I would try to get myself talked into a place where I don't know what I am going to say next … I can literally talk myself out of knowing what the next line is, and then reaching for it. …” He trails off, laughing a bit, and shaking his head at the memory. Acting is a drug because “you can get away from your own experience and that is really exhilarating,” he explains.

He is curious to know how others live. He has a favourite bar, Soupy's Tavern, in downtown Toronto, which is frequented by a down-and-out crowd. “That place did more to shape my career than drama school and Queen's together. It was like a soap opera with characters. Forget about me forgetting about my taxes. They didn't have Social Insurance Numbers or a driver's licence. There are other ways of looking at the world than what UCC and my parents told me.”

But if the acting life has brought satisfaction, it also creates insecurity. “You are vulnerable to feelings,” he says quietly. “And you are vulnerable to getting a wrong view of yourself, good or bad, and most times bad.”

Without prompting, he expresses a series of doubts and regrets. “I haven't allowed myself to be successful as a director,” he confesses. He directed several episodes of Da Vinci's Inquest as well as the 1992 documentary, Stepping Razor: Red X, about the death of reggae star Peter Tosh. “I don't have the same fire about getting things done,” he laments. He is close to his children, two of whom live with their mother in California. But still, “whatever sadness I feel everyday is wishing things had gone differently. I wish I could be going home now to help them with homework.”

Nicholas Campbell, a bad boy? He is too painfully self-aware to be incorrigible.

His dilemma is a drama of identities. He can portray others with chilling conviction. But about himself, he is far less sure.

Consider it the ironic plight of the talented actor.