History
I was born in Midland, Michigan, the son of an engineer and a musician. A childhood bouncing from there to upstate New York and eventually Atlanta contributed to my accidentally midwestern newscast standard accent.
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, preferring the Tae Kwon Do dojang and the school theater. I also developed an early habit of voracious reading, often of something besides what I was supposed to be reading at the time.
The family tradition I did fall into was Renaissance Festivals. I was never the musician, though I've got a decently trained Baritone. Over the years I've done comedy, swordplay, pulled a rickshaw, 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, a love of stage combat, and 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.
I can't say I was a particularly stellar grunt. Overweight and overeducated, without enough sense to shut up about it. 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, even an opera at one point.
Along with that, I had a typical succession of day and night jobs. I was 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.
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.
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 sucking dick 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.
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.
