He’s well-informed, an art house movie buff and also terribly quirky. “He’s still the same guy,” his best friend, Dr. David Klein, assured me when I ran into him with Harley about a year ago in a Toronto bar. The only difference, Klein conceded, is that Harley now goes to the Vanity Fair party on Oscar Night.

Consider this: On another day, when we’re at the Opus Hotel having lunch in their pretend-French-Left Bank restaurant, Harley shows me his old-school business card: his name is simply typed in classic black on ultra-heavyweight card stock. Turns out the inspiration for it came from the now famous scene in the flick American Psycho, where Christian Bale’s character compares his business card with a bunch of businessmen, fetishistically discussing paper thickness, typefaces and finish. This is the guy who can not only quote entire scenes from movies but has also lifted props out of them for, ostensibly, Harley: The Real-Life Movie.

It’s the same thing when I get a glimpse of what is perhaps his most prized possession: his mobile gym, which, he says, is the world’s largest. Designed specifically for movie locations, Harley travels all over the continent with it, including to Manhattan, where he pumped iron with Will Smith on the set of Hitch.

The place glistens. A set, if you will, straight out of Harleyworld. Fifty-three-feet-long with cathedral ceilings and so-soft leather (no vinyl here!), it’s all natural light and fully electronic. The maple-leafed gym bunny’s answer to the space arm that Canada so proudly built for NASA’s shuttles.

The scene is so intimate that it later gets me wondering if he ever, y’know, gets a little too close to his clients, especially when he’s working with some of the most beautiful people in the world, and training is so, y’know, hands-on. “You have to become asexual,” he categorically says when I pose the question over Indian dishes at Vij’s (not part of the 5-Factor Fitness program, by the way). “They’re not celebrities to me. Their wealth and celebrity are stripped away when they’re in a track suit and struggling.”

Harley has us head off in the Vancouver-cliché rain to Yaletown’s yuppie-yippie Urban Fare to shop for Halle Berry because one of the things that he will do for his most prized of clients is to cook for her when they’re in the same city, as well as eat with her. First thing he does when we get to the luminously lit shop is to stock up on pomegranates. “She’s a huge pomegranate freak,” he tells me. “It’s our superfood!” I nod, looking at the fruit and thinking this is as close as I’m going to get to Catwoman on this trip.

We get Halle some steak (“She loves red meat, but we only eat it once a week”) and some dragon fruit (“I like to mix it up”), but no dessert (“She’s not a sweets person”). Watching him glide under the bright lights of the supermarket, loving every second of it, I’m mercilessly sure of one thing. Harley definitely isn’t just a trainer. He’s a fitness mystic, and he’s on a mission. 

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