Jian Ghomeshi’s four-storey Townhouse in Cabbagetown feels like some avant-garde sultan’s ultimate bachelor pad: there’s a 50-foot atrium, soaring windows, walls painted in wine tones, low-slung furniture and jewel-bright silk pillows heaped about the fireplace. To complete the mood, an Arabic dance version of “Rock the Casbah” plays on the stereo. He lives alone, and it took him months to renovate the place—he didn’t want the clichéd, sterile loft. “I like warmth,” he says, popping open a bottle of shiraz.

He is more charming, and not as excessively (and at times unconvincingly) hip as he is when he appears on television or radio. As the former host of CBC’s national arts show Play, and a frequent sidekick on George Stroumboulopoulos’s Red Bull–spiked current-affairs show The Hour, Ghomeshi has been cast as yet another cool guy du jour by a network desperate to funkify its frumpy image. But there’s too much of the hand-waving front-row schoolkid about him to be truly cool. He’s keen to take on the plum role of hosting CBC radio’s yet-to-be-named new arts magazine show, premiering April 16. “This is radio based around ideas,” he says with a smile, “and I love to satisfy people’s curiosity.”

He’s nervous about the new show, about getting his very own platform again: “I just hope it doesn’t suck. Otherwise, I’ll be the Persian version of Chevy Chase. Remember when he had a talk show and it sucked?” This one will play to Ghomeshi’s renaissance man image: the weekend after our interview, he’s heading to Halifax to sing (just him and a guitar), then to Whitehorse for another gig. He sits on the board of the Stratford Festival, gives talks to students on Canadian identity and has a sideline as a music manager. (His latest protégé is a singer called Lights, whom he describes as “the Canadian Björk.”)

Part of the joy he derives from his work seems a direct “take-that” triumph over the vulnerability he felt as a kid. He talks a lot about feeling like an outsider and wanting to fit in. Born in 1967 to an Iranian family, he was raised in Uxbridge, a white bread suburb of London, England. (Kids at school called him “Blackie.”) When Jian was eight, his father, an engineer, fell for the romance of Trudeau’s Canada, and the Ghomeshis (his older sister, Jila, is now a professor of linguistics at the University of Manitoba) moved to a modest apartment in Don Mills. They moved again a few years later: “I was in an extremely white, conservative Anglo part of Thornhill, and that’s when I denied my heritage: Why don’t I have a little pert nose like Robert Redford? People would say, ‘Hey, Jian sounds French,’ and I’d go, ‘Yeah, it’s French!’ ”

His feelings of rejection kindled his desire for centre stage. He’d first sampled the limelight at four, when he appeared in a televised British talent show playing the bongo drums. He also liked to play the part of the TV host, by muting the sound during hockey games and doing the voice-over. And in Grade 9, he started a band called Urban Transit. “I thought I was Jim Morrison,” he says, laughing. “I would sing ‘Riders on the Storm’ and lie like a stoner on the stage.” But despite his fondness for the floodlights, he never felt he could secure any solid public renown. “I remember thinking, at 12, I could never be a guy in the media, my name’s too funny.”