Photo: Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
File No. 764878 · Adjudicated
Cobie Smulders
Actor — The Avengers, How I Met Your Mother, Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
Born
1982
Birthplace
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA
Citizenships
CA
Canadianness Score
🍁🍁🍁🍁🍁
5.0/ 5
Weighted across 2 scored criteria
Designation
Bleeds Maple Syrup 🍁
Born, raised, and still says “out for a rip” unironically.
Scorecard
Path A — born on Canadian soil
I. Origin
✓
Born on Canadian soil — yes
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA
—
Canadian parentage — not scored
No Canadian parents on record
—
Citizenship on record — not scored
Automatic by birth
II. Residency
✓
Formative years spent in Canada — yes
Raised — British Columbia
—
Lived in Canada by choice — not scored
Residency on record as an adult
—
Worked or filmed in Canada — not scored
Credits filed north of the 49th
III. Cultural evidence — not scored
Section III is recorded for the file only. Birth on Canadian soil already settles the matter.
—
Publicly claims to be Canadian — not scored
Says so, out loud
—
Canada claims them back — not scored
Claimed, enthusiastically
The verdict
Born in Vancouver to a Dutch father and an English mother, Cobie Smulders played Robin Scherbatsky on How I Met Your Mother — a character whose Canadianness was a running gag for nine seasons. She's a real Canadian playing a fictional Canadian, which is either meta or just Tuesday in Vancouver.
