History
(Like a life story, only classy.)
I was born in Midland, Michigan, the son of an engineer and a musician, which was definitely an intense route to a STEAM education. I was the oldest of four, and the only one born in a hospital. That was only because my mother, who'd become a nurse out of sheer Midwestern practicality, was on duty when her water broke and didn't feel like driving home. Yet people wonder how I became a lifelong stoic in the face of adversity.
We moved to New York when I was still an infant, then to Atlanta when I became a teenager, which contributed to my accidentally Midwestern newscast standard accent. By then I had two brothers and a sister to mutually torment. I also developed an early habit of voracious reading, often of something besides what I was supposed to be reading at the time. My babysitters were a revolving semi-feral pack of folk musicians, martial artists, bellydancers, and miscellaneous vagabonds, who only encouraged my expanding vocabulary.
We moved to New York when I was still an infant, then to Atlanta when I became a teenager, which contributed to my accidentally Midwestern newscast standard accent. By then I had two brothers and a sister to mutually torment. I also developed an early habit of voracious reading, often of something besides what I was supposed to be reading at the time. My babysitters were a revolving semi-feral pack of folk musicians, martial artists, bellydancers, and miscellaneous vagabonds, who only encouraged my expanding vocabulary.
Norse and Celtic genetics gave me the build of a dumpster and, odd for my family, a discernible neck. Despite this, I eschewed a family tradition of playing football, growing bored with it early. By High School, my preference for the Tae Kwon Do dojang and the school theater were well and truly established.
The family tradition I did fall into was Renaissance Festivals. I could tie down a bodice before I could tie my shoes, and was well into my twenties by the time I got used to shaking a woman's hand instead of kissing it. I was never the musician, though I've got a decently trained Baritone voice that survived wartime hearing loss. Over the years I've done comedy, swordplay, pulled a rickshaw, been a vendor, and all manner of odds and ends. While I haven't worked faires for years now, they are a part of the village that raised me, and I try to visit at least a few every year.
The end of college saw me with a degree in theater and a love of stage combat, but a look destined to make me a character actor for life. And roles for that sort of thing were few and far between, particularly when younger than 30. On top of that, I had absolutely no desire to go anywhere near New York or L.A. Fortunately, there was a war on and my secondary talents were needed. I became a U.S. Marine, serving as a machine gunner in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
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While I collected my share of war stories and sea stories, I can't say I was a particularly stellar grunt. I was overweight and overeducated, but without enough sense to shut up about it. A bad case of honor over loyalty didn't help. I spent most of my time running the company armory. I did wind up learning a good bit. The biggest being that I was a much better advisor than I was a leader, at least by Marine Corps standards.
I left active duty in 2009, just as film and TV production began to really take off in my Atlanta home. Being able to do what I loved and not having to move to California or New York? Yay! I began working as an actor, fight choreographer, armorer, and technical advisor all over the Southeast. I'd work for theaters, short films, colleges, webseries, even an opera at one point.
Like every other artist out there, I had a typical succession of day and night jobs. I was never a waiter and only rarely did retail, but a lot of day labor and warehouse work filled my resume over the years. I've also been a bouncer, a chess coach, and a trivia host, among other things. For a few years I was even salaried, working as a dispatcher for a shipping company. I hated the place, though. When the local management weren't incompetent, they were racist, sexist, and treated everyone from our contract drivers to our customers like crap. I eventually got fired, two months after I signed on to an agent.
Pictured: portrait of a drunken buttmunch.
Image courtesy of Tristar Pictures.
Just after getting fired from the hellhole, I signed up to be an extra in Billy Lynn's long Halftime Walk. I rarely did extra work: too distinctive looking and too big to fit the costumes, usually. But that movie just needed bodies in seats. It was one of the easiest jobs I've ever had. Yeah, the pay sucks. But sucky pay when you're spending the bulk of your time sitting on your ass catching up on your reading ain't a bad deal at all. All you gotta do is pay attention, shut up, and do what you're told. It ain't glamorous, but once you're comfortable with the fact that you're essentially a prop that needs to be fed and watered occasionally, who needs glamour? The ones who took the job then went hiding in corners of the old GA dome to stay on their phones all day annoyed me.
Anyways, my second or third day of filming (I was booked for a week), they needed someone dressed in away team colors to be a drunken jerk. And there I was, in the same sweatshirt wardrobe had given me, smelling of the nonalcoholic beer props had thrust into my hand. So they wired me up and placed me at the end zone seats. Ang Lee told me to get as loud as I wanted at the back of Steve Martin's head. And so, for a few glorious takes, my trained baritone made a rather outrageous claim regarding what the home team did with horses loud enough to reverberate throughout the Georgia dome. My mother is still proud of me.
The line gave me both a pay bump and union eligibility if I wanted it, though it would be a few years before I finally indulged in the latter.
Anyways, my second or third day of filming (I was booked for a week), they needed someone dressed in away team colors to be a drunken jerk. And there I was, in the same sweatshirt wardrobe had given me, smelling of the nonalcoholic beer props had thrust into my hand. So they wired me up and placed me at the end zone seats. Ang Lee told me to get as loud as I wanted at the back of Steve Martin's head. And so, for a few glorious takes, my trained baritone made a rather outrageous claim regarding what the home team did with horses loud enough to reverberate throughout the Georgia dome. My mother is still proud of me.
The line gave me both a pay bump and union eligibility if I wanted it, though it would be a few years before I finally indulged in the latter.
My first and thus far only appearance in Variety.
After the Parkland shooting, I left the theater and effectively retired from fight choreography. In live shows, I was still making peanuts and not having any sort of upward movement career-wise. Worse, being a gunman in a performing arts culture sucked. I was cool when everything was tactical and shiny, then some dipshit would shoot up a school or a mall and all of a sudden anyone who had a gun was the devil himself. It was like being the girl who was popular while in the backseat on Saturday night, but nobody would make eye contact with her in church on Sunday morning. Well, you can only get treated like that for so long before you start telling people off, and I had reached my limit.
So I quit, burned my certifications and sold off pretty much all of my rental stock to concentrate on film acting. Within a year, I'd made a guest appearance as Lil' Baby's driver/muscle in the MTV movie How High 2. At the same time, I'd discovered a flair for fiction writing, and less than a year later had my first novel, Lumberjacks of Banshee, going into slushpiles.
These days, I'm writing an urban fantasy series called The Grunt's Grimoire and living the film and TV actor's life of auditioning a lot and working when possible.
So I quit, burned my certifications and sold off pretty much all of my rental stock to concentrate on film acting. Within a year, I'd made a guest appearance as Lil' Baby's driver/muscle in the MTV movie How High 2. At the same time, I'd discovered a flair for fiction writing, and less than a year later had my first novel, Lumberjacks of Banshee, going into slushpiles.
These days, I'm writing an urban fantasy series called The Grunt's Grimoire and living the film and TV actor's life of auditioning a lot and working when possible.
So that's the story thus far...
