How Old Is Jared Keeso? The Man Who Had a Tooth Pulled to Play Himself Better Is 42 and Still Unmatched
Jared Keeso is 42 years old. Born July 1, 1984, in Listowel, Ontario — which is, no coincidence, also Canada Day. He shares a birthday with the entire country. And the man has basically built an entertainment career that feels as quintessentially Canadian as that coincidence suggests.
But the age question is really just the door into something more interesting. Let me actually walk you through who this person is, because if you only know him from Letterkenny, you’re missing about half the story.
Quick Bio
| Detail | Info |
| Full Name | Jared Keeso |
| Born | July 1, 1984 — Listowel, Ontario, Canada |
| Age | 42 (as of July 2026) |
| Pronunciation | /ˈkiːsoʊ/ — rhymes with “LEE-so” |
| Height | 5’9″ (1.75m) |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Parents | Richard and Anne Keeso |
| Siblings | Alan and Abigail |
| Family business | Keeso Sawmill Company — operating since 1872 |
| Junior hockey | Played 2000–2003 (Listowel Cyclones, Strathroy Rockets, Kincardine Bulldogs) |
| Higher education | Half a semester at University of Waterloo — left to pursue acting |
| Spouse | Magali Brunelle (married 2018) |
| Known For | Letterkenny (creator/writer/star, 2016–2023); Shoresy (2022–present); 19-2 (2014–2017) |
| How they met | Beer league hockey while filming in Vancouver |
| Net Worth | ~$5–6 million (estimated) |
| Signature detail | Had a tooth surgically removed to better fit the Shoresy character |
Born on Canada Day. Of Course He Was.
July 1, 1984. Canada Day. The national holiday. He arrived in Listowel, Ontario — a town so small and rural it would later become the direct inspiration for one of the most beloved Canadian comedy series ever made.
His family had operated a sawmill there since 1872. Over a century before Jared showed up. The Keeso name was literally built into the community. When he eventually wrote Wayne, the protagonist of Letterkenny — the honest, stubborn, plain-speaking rural Ontario guy — he wasn’t inventing a character from research. He was writing from memory.
He played junior hockey from 2000 to 2003, skating as a centre through three teams: the Listowel Cyclones, the Strathroy Rockets, and the Kincardine Bulldogs. This matters later.
Half a Semester at Waterloo. Then the Decision.
He enrolled at the University of Waterloo. Left after half a semester to pursue acting. Moved to Toronto to start auditioning. His parents apparently supported this decision, which is either a sign of remarkable parental vision or the kind of thing that only seems reasonable in retrospect when the person actually makes it.
His acting debut was in 2004 — small roles on Smallville and Life as We Know It. His film debut came that same year in Eve’s Christmas. Nothing dramatic yet. Just a working actor building a resume with bit parts and TV movies while figuring out what kind of career was possible.
He showed up in White Noise: The Light in 2007. I Love You, Beth Cooper in 2009. Small roles, supporting work, learning what the camera needed from him. The kind of years that don’t make for a great highlight reel but absolutely make for a functional working actor.
Don Cherry: The Role That Changed Everything Before Letterkenny Did
In 2010, he played Don Cherry. If you’re Canadian, you already understand what that means. If you’re not — Don Cherry is a hockey personality so distinctly, loudly, aggressively Canadian that playing him convincingly is basically a national audition.
He did it in Keep Your Head Up, Kid: The Don Cherry Story for CBC and then returned for the sequel The Wrath of Grapes: The Don Cherry Story II in 2012. Both times he earned awards recognition. A Leo Award. A Gemini Award. Canadian television’s most serious institutions said: this man can act.
The Don Cherry biopics established Jared Keeso as someone the Canadian industry took seriously. Not a guy with a handful of credits. An actor with range, specificity, and the ability to inhabit a figure as larger-than-life as Cherry without disappearing into impression work.
19-2 and the NAACP of Canadian Television
From 2014 to 2017, he starred as Ben Chartier in 19-2 — a police procedural drama adapted from a French-Canadian series. Four seasons on Bravo and CTV. Lead dramatic role. Consistent, demanding work in a completely different register from anything that came before.
In 2015, he won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Continuing Leading Dramatic Role. That’s the NAACP of Canadian television — the actual institutional recognition from peers. He was playing a police officer in an English adaptation of a French show and he was doing it at the highest recognized level.
Here’s the key detail. While filming 19-2 in Vancouver, he was playing recreational hockey — beer league stuff — and met Nathan Dales on the ice. They started playing with Andrew Herr and Dylan Playfair, who were University of British Columbia students. All four of them would end up in Letterkenny.
Letterkenny Problems: $5,000 of His Own Money and 100 Million Views
In 2013, while he was building his serious dramatic career on 19-2, Jared Keeso quietly started posting short comedy clips to YouTube with his co-creator Mike Borden. They called the series Letterkenny Problems.
He invested $5,000 of his own money. Self-produced. Self-directed. No network, no studio, no conventional development path. Just a man from Listowel playing a character named Wayne who delivered quick-fire rural Ontario observations with deadpan precision.
The clips accumulated 100 million views. One hundred million. From YouTube sketches that nobody was supposed to care about except people who grew up in towns like Listowel.
In 2015, Crave picked up the concept for an initial six-episode run. In 2016, Letterkenny premiered properly as a full series — the first original program developed by CraveTV. By 2017 it had a Canadian Screen Award for Best Comedy Series, with Keeso himself nominated for Best Performance in a Comedy.
What Letterkenny Actually Is (For Anyone Who Hasn’t Watched It)
Set in the fictional rural Ontario community of Letterkenny — population somewhere around 5,000, depending on the season — the show follows Wayne (Keeso), his sister Katy, best friend Daryl, and an array of surrounding characters including the “Hicks,” “Skids,” and “Hockey Players” who make up the town’s social ecosystem.
The show’s linguistic signature is almost impossible to describe briefly. The dialogue moves at a pace that requires active listening. The wit is layered. References accumulate across episodes and seasons so that long-time viewers get jokes that newcomers don’t. The show rewards investment in a way that almost no mainstream comedy does.
It ran twelve seasons before concluding on December 25, 2023. Christmas Day. The finale. Jared Keeso wrote it. He also created it, starred in it as Wayne, executive produced it, and helped transform it from a $5,000 YouTube experiment into a series that earned him six Canadian Screen Awards.
He also refused to move to Los Angeles to do American television. That refusal to chase the conventional path is part of what made Letterkenny what it became.
The Shoresy Detail That Deserves Its Own Section
Shoresy — the spinoff series that launched in 2022 — focuses on the titular hockey player Shoresy, who had appeared throughout Letterkenny as a voice-only character. You’d hear him trash-talking from the ice. You never saw his face.
Here’s the thing. Keeso also plays Shoresy. The voice was always him. But when the spinoff required him to actually appear on screen as the character, he committed to the bit in a specific and kind of remarkable way.
He had a tooth surgically removed to fit the look of the character.
A tooth. Removed. So that Shoresy would look like a hockey player who’d taken pucks and sticks to the face across a career in the minors. This is not a man doing a performance. This is a man building a character from the inside out in a way that required actual physical sacrifice to pull off.
Shoresy ran through three seasons and has been praised for its humor and its unexpectedly genuine emotional depth. More seasons are planned under Keeso’s multi-year content deal with Crave.
The Bigger Films on His Resume That Tend to Get Overlooked
He’s appeared in actual Hollywood productions too. Elysium in 2013 — Neill Blomkamp’s dystopian sci-fi film starring Matt Damon and Jodie Foster, which made over $280 million worldwide. Godzilla in 2014. The Death & Life of John F. Donovan in 2018, a Xavier Dolan film co-starring Kit Harington, Natalie Portman, and Susan Sarandon.
These are not student films. These are international productions with significant budgets and recognizable casts. Jared Keeso was cast in them because his Canadian television work established him as someone that directors trust to deliver in supporting roles.
He’s also not particularly vocal about these credits. The Hollywood work is on his resume. He went back to Canada and built Letterkenny anyway.
Marriage to Magali Brunelle: The Private Chapter
He married Magali Brunelle in 2018. Details about their relationship and private life are minimal in public coverage — Keeso doesn’t make his personal life a content category. What’s confirmed: they’ve been together and the relationship is genuinely private in an industry that doesn’t reward privacy with coverage.
His dog Tierneh makes occasional appearances on his social media. That’s probably the most personal detail he consistently shares publicly.
The decision to stay in Canada, build an audience there, refuse the LA path, maintain a private life — these are all consistent choices from someone who knows exactly what he’s doing and what he values. The Listowel sawmill family didn’t raise someone who was going to chase conventional celebrity.
What He’s Worth and What That Reflects
Estimated net worth: $5 to $6 million. Built from years of working Canadian actor income, the Don Cherry biopics, 19-2, the development deal with Crave, Letterkenny writing and executive producing credits, Shoresy, film appearances, and the multi-year content deal that keeps producing work.
It’s not massive by Hollywood franchise standards. It’s exactly what a genuinely successful, persistently independent, deliberately Canadian creative career looks like when the person has been working consistently since 2004 without ever chasing the obvious American money.
The six Canadian Screen Awards he’s collected say more about the career than the net worth estimate does.
Final Words
Here’s the honest take on Jared Keeso at 42. He’s built a career that most people who leave small towns never build — not because he left, but because he understood what leaving and then returning actually gives you. He left Listowel, built a career in Toronto and Vancouver, and then turned Listowel itself into the most distinctive fictional rural community in Canadian television history.
The hockey background gave him the physical credibility for Shoresy. The sawmill family gave him Wayne’s stubbornness and pride. The beer league games in Vancouver gave him his cast. The $5,000 YouTube experiment gave him his empire. The tooth he had removed gave Shoresy his face.
Every piece of Jared Keeso’s life ended up in his work. That’s what genuine creative authenticity looks like when you actually commit to it rather than just describing it in press releases.
He’s 42. He’s still making Shoresy. He’s still under a Crave content deal. He’s still the most important Canadian comedian working in television.
And he did it all without moving to Los Angeles. Which, depending on who you ask, is either the most stubborn thing imaginable or the smartest creative decision made in Canadian entertainment in the last decade.
See also “Wendi Adelson age — And She’s Been Living Inside a True-Crime Hurricane Most of Her Adult Life“
FAQs
1. How old is Jared Keeso?
Jared Keeso is 42 years old as of July 2026. He was born on July 1, 1984 — Canada Day — in Listowel, Ontario.
2. When is Jared Keeso’s birthday?
July 1, 1984. Canada Day. He shares his birthday with the Canadian national holiday, which is either a coincidence or just fitting given how thoroughly Canadian his work is.
3. Where is Jared Keeso from?
Listowel, Ontario, Canada — a small rural community approximately 20 km north of Stratford. His family’s sawmill company, the Keeso Sawmill Company, has operated there since 1872. The town directly inspired the setting and spirit of Letterkenny.
4. Is Jared Keeso married?
Yes. He married Magali Brunelle in 2018. He keeps his personal and family life deliberately private and rarely discusses it in public.
5. Did Jared Keeso play hockey?
Yes, seriously. He played junior hockey as a centre from 2000 to 2003 with the Listowel Cyclones, Strathroy Rockets, and Kincardine Bulldogs. His hockey background is genuine and directly informs his work on Shoresy, which focuses on a hockey player in the minor leagues.
6. What did Jared Keeso study in school?
He briefly attended the University of Waterloo but left after half a semester to pursue acting in Toronto. His parents are described as having been supportive of the decision.
7. What is Letterkenny and when did it start?
Letterkenny is a Canadian comedy series Keeso created, wrote, executive produced, and starred in (as Wayne). It began from Letterkenny Problems, a YouTube series he launched in 2013 with $5,000 of his own money. Those videos generated 100 million views before being developed into a full series that premiered on CraveTV on February 7, 2016. The show ran 12 seasons, concluding December 25, 2023.
8. How did Jared Keeso cast Letterkenny?
He met Nathan Dales playing beer league hockey during the filming of 19-2 in Vancouver. Dales plays Daryl on Letterkenny. They later played with Andrew Herr and Dylan Playfair, who were UBC students at the time. All four ended up in the show.
9. What is Shoresy and did Keeso really have a tooth removed for the role?
Shoresy is the Letterkenny spinoff series launched in 2022, focused on the hockey player Shoresy — a voice-only character from Letterkenny who Keeso also voiced. When the spinoff required him to appear on screen as Shoresy, he had a tooth surgically removed to fit the appearance of a career minor-league hockey player. Yes, really. Three seasons have aired with more planned.
10. Has Jared Keeso appeared in Hollywood films?
Yes. Elysium (2013, directed by Neill Blomkamp, starring Matt Damon), Godzilla (2014), and The Death & Life of John F. Donovan (2018, a Xavier Dolan film starring Kit Harington and Natalie Portman) are among his film appearances. He also played Don Cherry in two CBC biographical films in 2010 and 2012, winning a Leo Award and a Gemini Award for the role.
11. How much is Jared Keeso worth?
Estimated at approximately $5 to $6 million, accumulated through his acting career, writing credits on Letterkenny, executive producing, the Crave multi-year content deal, and his film appearances.
12. Did Jared Keeso move to Los Angeles for his career?
No. He deliberately chose to remain in Canada and develop Canadian content, turning down opportunities that would have required him to pursue American television. That decision is widely credited as central to the authentic, distinctly Canadian voice of Letterkenny and Shoresy.
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