Acting

Interview with Myself

Why do I want to be an actor?

Well, I am an actor, damn it!

This essay was written at the behest of one of my professors during my second year of graduate school at the University of Washington. I have long admired Jon Jory and appreciated the frankness of his challenge. I took it seriously and delved deep. Perhaps too deep. It’s uneasy to look at now. As if I am looking back on a younger, more innocent, naive version of myself. I’m reluctant to share it but also compelled, for there is truth to it. It’s certainly autobiographical…. almost foolishly.

Well, you be the judge.

Most of my life I’ve wanted to be somewhere else, something else or someone else. As I get older, this happens less or with less immediacy, either way, when I began acting there was a certain element of escapism motivating me. Life is so much easier when someone else is writing the script for you and another person directing you, helping you to make the right choices. Acting is so much easier than really living a life.

The more I got into it, the more I found that it exercised this eternal restlessness and infallible human curiosity that stirred in me. I’ve always been very fascinated with people: what motivates them? How do they think? What do they think? Do they think at all? And most importantly, why can’t they be more like me? I think I’m interesting and complex… on a good day. I make mistakes; I learn and grow. I think and feel and experience, but how is this for others? What is their experience? What is their story?

As acting grew deeper in me, I realized that I could do nothing else. No office job or ordinary existence ever fulfilled the churning in my chest that fed on creativity and action, movement, doing—not ordinary doing, but active doing, doing something meaningful, something that meant something and added up to something, was a part of something greater, something important, which pleased me more than my own life.

During this time, I began to understand that acting, writing, directing are all parts of a whole. That whole was storytelling. Once I realized this, I saw that my entire life had been preparing me for this task of storytelling. I remembered entertaining myself in the idyllic lonely mountains of Idaho for years far from other children, telling myself stories, acting out stories, inventing heroes, odysseys, epic adventures and stories of true love and time travel, living a full life in my imagination for years and years and years… and then never really stopping the stories. To this day, these stories in my head entertain me, distract me, only now, I’ve decided that I’m going to tell them, one way or another.

My town didn’t have drama opportunities so I became a runner and I ran alot. My senior year we lost the state cross-country championship by one point. If I could have beaten either of the two boys in front of me—both an arm’s length, we would have won. They were right there and I almost had them but I told myself that this was enough, I had tried hard enough and ran fast enough, this was my limit. I’ll never forget that day as long as I live, because if I would have tried just a little bit harder, I could have been a winner. I don’t want that to be the story of my life.

Because I remember another day after school, when by chance, I looked up into the clouds that dotted the bright sky blue sky. Amazed by the frumpy majesty of these rolling and churning pillows, I looked deeper into them. One in particular had a massive fluffiness stretching tall and wide like an empty screen, empty and eager to be filled with an image, and then, as if answering the call of the clouds, I saw my face up there and had my first ever serious contemplation on the differences between destiny and “big dreams”. After all, I was just a lowly country boy from Idaho and it could never happen, not in a million years but a year later when I was registering at my University, I sought out the cross country table, which was empty. Next to it was the drama table and they encouraged me to audition for a play called King Lear. So I did and I became a spear-carrier. But in the next play, I was the prince. And that is, as they say, that.

Yet, if it could be only one thing that motivated me, it would be this: I want my friends from back home to see my work and my family, especially my dad… Because I miss them all tremendously and I could have been them, still there at home with a job, a family, a pick-up truck—which I still want anyway—and this insatiable energy that back then revealed itself as mischief—illegal and otherwise, but now as an actor, it’s considered creative.