But every chance McCormack gets, he heads to the city where it all began. Here's a sojourn into the woody and western Canadian city where his career was born.

Tell us about your introduction to Vancouver. There's an incredible fireworks competition every year in Vancouver, usually starting during the first weekend in August. It's an international thing. It's three different countries every year, and they each have a special night where they put on, like, a 20-minute fireworks show. So over the course of a two-week period, you'll have four different fireworks nights. My wife and I met in Calgary, where I was shooting Lonesome Dove. The first time we came to Vancouver together, I had a small apartment downtown, and the cab was coming over the Burrard Street Bridge, and he had to stop. He couldn't go any farther because the traffic was blocked off for the fireworks. So we had to walk, with our luggage, a long way from the Burrard Street Bridge to my little apartment. But we were walking through the hundreds and hundreds of people who were lined up on the hills watching the fireworks. And the only people moving were my wife and me, and it was like we were the king and queen, and everyone else was on bended knee, and we were just walking through the crowd with the fireworks going off. It was a pretty cool way to say hello to the city.

What should you know before you go? The thing about Vancouver is that no one in the rest of Canada really knows about it; they don't talk about it. No one in Vancouver wants the rest of Canada to come there. It's the best-kept secret - there's no winter. I mean, I arrived on February 2, and people were in T-shirts. It was just stunning. And the Pacific Ocean is a big part of the city. It's not like L.A., where the Pacific Ocean is only really part of Santa Monica. In Vancouver, the ocean is part of the whole city.