The great stunt double

Like most things with cult status, comic conventions elicit fervid devotion from those in the know and blank stares from everybody else. The week I arrive in Toronto, the streets are buzzing with young Canadians dressed in alien T-shirts and brown Jedi robes. One girl stands at the traffic lights, touching her temple until the cars stop, a female Professor X miming mind-control on a line of baffled taxi drivers.

While street conversations are peppered with references to Cylons and the proper attire of Superman, I can't help but feel the city has provided a perfect metaphor. Like many a superhero, Toronto leads a double life. The third-largest centre for film and television in North America – a veritable "Hollywood North" – Toronto has stood in for cities as diverse as New York and Paris, Tehran and Morocco. Whatever a film studio needs it to be, Toronto delivers enough details to convince as a stand-in on the silver screen.

This leads to an obvious question: beneath the frequent costuming, does Toronto have a personality of its own? Bruce Wayne is boring without the Batsuit, after all.

On the strength of my time in the city, the answer is yes. There are a number of sites easily recognisable to a film connoisseur but each is worth a visit in its own right. My hotel, the Fairmont Royal York, was used for a scene in the film Red during which Bruce Willis shoots up the convention floor kitchen.

This fact is rather dull when you hear a little of the hotel's folklore, however. There are rumours of two resident ghosts, one of which has been seen in the corridors wearing a red satin smoking jacket. Then there's the six-hive apiary of bees on the roof and the space for 10,000 people at dinner time. Addicted to statistics, the hotel management tells me they serve 188,123 kilograms of vegetables each year to guests.

A short stroll from the Royal York, the Distillery Historic District stars in more than 1700 films. But its 47 brick buildings have been renovated into a cultural landmark, an old trans-shipping hub that remains the largest preserved site of Victoria-era architecture on the continent. Like SoHo in New York, art galleries sit beside restaurants and boutiques, all contained within the same spaces that once housed horse carts and industrial machinery. This quickly becomes a theme in explorations of the city; places used in movies often end up being more interesting than their cinematic counterparts.

Casa Loma is another case in point. Last seen as the mutant school in the X-Men films, it's actually a rambling 98-room estate with secret passageways and incomplete bowling alleys. It was used as a hidden research facility for sonar technology during World War II. Visitors can explore the Gothic architecture on self-guided tours.

In search of a characteristic Toronto neighbourhood, I head to Cabbagetown. Though its gabled Victorian mansions have stood in for New York's brownstones and San Francisco's row houses, it has a small-town feel that makes it seem, without a set dresser, an incongruous haven in the big city. The original Irish residents planted cabbages in their front yards; today you're more likely to see carefully tended English gardens of box hedges and flowers, ivy growing up the street lamps, or a film crew attempting to capture the area's unusual charm on camera. I spend a full afternoon looping through the neighbourhood's several blocks. Once the poorest part of Toronto, now, as it often goes, it's an enclave for the wealthy.