"Early on, someone said to me 'You're not good-looking enough to be a leading man and you're not ugly enough to be a character actor,'" recalls North Vancouver-based actor Ryan Robbins. "I said 'Well I can ugly myself up a little bit but I don't know if I can get any prettier.'"

Happily, that early assessment was well wide of the mark. Robbins has rarely been idle since he got into professional acting, playing a series of character roles and now looking forward to taking on that leading-man mantle.

Robbins met with the North Shore News just after returning from Comic Con in San Diego, where he represented several local television shows -- Sanctuary, Riese and the upcoming Dream Detective -- at the international pop-culture conference.

"It was absolutely bonkers," says Robbins, who plays Henry Foss in Sanctuary and Rand in Riese. "I'm not really used to the getting-recognized thing. But wow, on the panel at Comic Con, you couldn't see the back of the room. I said 'Wow, our little show (Sanctuary) is pretty popular' and someone said 'Yeah, you're in 183 countries.'"

Robbins was invited to speak in San Diego in part because those three projects are right at the forefront of an emerging trend in television: shows that are developed independently and released over the Internet before (hopefully) being picked up by a network.

"When Sanctuary started as a web series, it literally made history," Robbins says. "Then I got involved with Riese and it's taking off now too. The web is a great platform. As filmmakers, we used to create short films as a calling card for yourself and you hoped people would see them in the festivals, and when your short film gets lumped in with a bunch of others you hoped that it would be a charming enough package that people would want to see it. Now we have the web as a way to get much more attention -- potentially -- for your project. It is a much more significant calling card."

Sanctuary, a science-fiction show that follows a team of scientists who harbour and study misunderstood lifeforms, started life in 2007 as eight webisodes. The network Syfy picked the show up and it's now heading into its third season. Robbins is a core cast member as the team's garrulous security expert.

"Sanctuary still feels like the underdog: the little show that could. There's no studio behind us and no up-front money like you would have for a regular show. So when SyFy says to them, 'OK, we want 20 episodes this year,' they have to go out and get that independent financing. They're like their own independent studio. But because of that we have the most amazing crew and the most amazing cast. They're not able to pay everybody as much as some of these other shows can, so the people who are there are there because they really believe in the show. I love that environment."

But Robbins is no stranger to big-budget productions either, having played recurring roles on the hugely successful show Battlestar Galactica and in the spinoff series Caprica.

Originally from Victoria, Robbins took a circuitous route into acting -- literally. He developed a strong interest in performance while in high school but after graduation he packed his bags for Australia and ended up working for a traveling circus troupe.

"Not on purpose, it just happened that way. I thought $1,100 would last for a year. I was 18, I didn't know," he says, laughing. "I did everything from clowning to stilts, acrobatics -- that's how you get paid in circus: the more you can do the more you can get paid. I drove a giant rig and my cargo was lions and monkeys. I was on the wrong side of the road and I was a teenager. It was insane."

From Down Under, Robbins travelled through southeast Asia picking up jobs directing commercials before heading back to B.C. when a friend said he could help him find work as a stuntman. Robbins was supplementing his income with some warehousing work but after a workplace accident left him unable to throw himself down the stairs for a while, he directed his energy into another project, the rock band Helenkeller. It was during one of Helenkeller's shows that Robbins got to talking with a local filmmaker. And just as the band broke up, the phone started to ring with acting work.

Next up for Robbins is The Dream Detective, in which he plays Aaron Street, a luckless narcoleptic with an unusual ability.

"When he panics or has a heightened state of emotion, he falls asleep, like narcoleptics do," says Robbins. "And in this state, he dreams. Turns out the dreams are real and he's actually witnessing crimes as they happen. And so the FBI gets a hold of him and says let's see if this thing is real. In his dreams, he formulates this character of this dream detective where he's suave and he's cool, he's tough and he's rugged and solving crimes. But in his waking state, where he's also trying to solve crimes, he's not suave or cool and all he has is his wits and sense of humour to get out of these sticky situations. And of course there's the girl that kind of wants nothing to do with him but secretly thinks maybe there's something to this guy. It's very clever. It's very fantasy-noire and dark. The music is really great."

As with Sanctuary and Riese, The Dream Detective is a web-first project, but Robbins says the producers have big multi-media plans if the online audience approves.

"These guys are all business. The agenda is laid out: they've got graphic novels, novels, video games, CDs, web, all this media right across the board that I will be the face of ---- which is quite overwhelming. But it shows you how far we've come in a few years. When we did Sanctuary, it was impossible to make any revenue as a web series. Now, four or five years later, it is actually quite possible to make revenue on the web."

Despite being involved in so many different shows in various stages of development, Robbins wears the workload lightly.

"I worked really hard to get here and I started quite late. I didn't get my first paid acting gig until I was 26. So what do I want to take a day off for? If people are going to hire me to do projects and the projects are cool, I'm going to do the project. Why wouldn't I?"

balldritt@nsnews.com