Ramsay's screen debut was opposite fellow Montrealer Elias Koteas in the film Malarek (1988). Ramsay and Koteas went on to appear in two other films together, Hit Me (1996), and Collateral Damage (2002). Ramsay's first lead in a major motion picture came when he was cast as Carlitos Paez in Director Frank Marshall's film Alive (1993), the biographical survival drama based upon Piers Paul Read's 1974 book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, which detailed the story of the Uruguayan rugby team that crashed into the Andes mountains.