Last year we launched a revolutionary new column following the careers of five working actors in Los Angeles, mapping their successes, failures, and dreams. This year the Take Five column returns with five fresh faces just as eager to make their marks on the Hollywood landscape and share their talents with audiences everywhere.
Our in-boxes were filled with dozens of wonderful candidates. Whittling down our prospects to a mere handful of exceptional actors was difficult. But after careful discussion, we settled on the five you see before you. They include a Virginia transplant who had an epiphany at age 30 to move to Los Angeles, despite his fears, to pursue his acting aspirations; a CalArts graduate who has already appeared on House and Criminal Minds; a professionally trained actor and poet who has booked commercials, a recurring role on an Internet series and independent films while working nights at a bank vault; a middle-aged actor and former music composer who bravely decided a year ago to pursue acting with a little help from his elder sister, actor Lesley Ann Warren; and a go-getter who studied with Alec Baldwin and hit the industry full-force after college.
Check them out. Support them. Follow their dreams as you follow yours.
The Late Bloomer
Though Seth Caskey took drama classes in high school and theatre classes in college, he never thought he could pursue the craft professionally, especially not after he decided to get married at the end of college. "Fear completely took hold of me," says Caskey. "Acting and pursuing that professionally is a very unstable lifestyle, and I really felt the pressure of wanting to have some sort of predictable income to be able to support my family and to know where I was going to live and what I was going to be doing on a weekly basis." So he graduated college with a degree not in acting but in public relations and advertising. It seemed practical.
For the next six years he did community theatre in Virginia, working full time in public relations. Then four or five months before his 30th birthday, he flashed forward five years and saw himself working in front of a computer at a desk. One day at work, Caskey thought to himself, "If I have to look at my life and say, 'This is all that I am; this is all that I bring to being on this planet' -- it just depressed me." So he began to ask himself what motivated and excited him and what he felt he was meant to do. "It was acting. It's always been acting, and I ran from it because I was scared of it." Caskey began to question his fears and why he was avoiding something he loved. He came home that evening and told his wife he wanted to move to California and pursue acting professionally. Fortunately, she was entirely supportive. The couple moved to Los Angeles in September 2006.
To get the formal training he craved, he enrolled in the professional acting program at the Sanford Meisner Center in North Hollywood. The intensive program required that he study five days per week for 32 weeks. "We started with 18 students, and only six of us finished the program," says Caskey. "It was life-changing on so many levels. It was obviously a great personal-growth experience for me, but then actingwise I grew leaps and bounds."
Since finishing his training, Caskey has appeared in supporting roles in independent films and has focused on trying to find an agent and joining the Screen Actors Guild. He interviewed a few agents and is very close to selecting a commercial agent. "2008 is going to be a big year for me. Representation is definitely a top priority; getting a good, meaty role; building my demo reel," says Caskey, who is also developing a short with a screenwriter. Caskey will star in the project.
As for his day job, he has been able to do freelance graphic design from home because many of his Virginia clients supported his decision to pursue acting and wanted to continue to hire him.
To artistically feed himself between roles, Caskey turns to another of his great loves: cooking. He enjoys uncovering new recipes, creating new dishes, and experimenting with new marinades. "I love the preparation process of getting all the ingredients together and cutting them up, and you know, [sometimes] I pretend I'm on a cooking show while I'm cooking. I'm a bit of a dork," he says with a laugh.
The Quick Study
Annie Quinn first discovered her love of performing while in high school, competing in ice-skating competitions. The Chicago native enrolled in improv classes at Second City and performed in plays to explore her interest. Eventually she auditioned for art colleges and settled on CalArts in Valencia, Calif. She hit the ground running after graduation, landing a manager through the CalArts showcase. Quinn then quickly booked a role as one of the leads in a short American Film Institute thesis film, opposite Amanda Seyfried (Big Love, Mean Girls).
Quinn's momentum didn't stop there. The casting director from the AFI film was an associate for April Webster, and that got Quinn auditions for Alias and Criminal Minds. She landed both roles. She also earned a part in a national FedEx Kinko's commercial that since late December has aired so frequently that Quinn has been able to quit her day job and focus purely on acting. "Extra money, yeah," she says of the spot. "It's like the lottery." Her manager continues to get her auditions for guest-starring roles on series such as House, on which Quinn landed the part of Gina in the episode "Top Secret." With such an enviable streak of A-list roles, we at Back Stage had to wonder what Quinn's strategy was in the audition room.
"When I first started, I was so nervous to audition; like, I hated it," says Quinn. "I liked acting when you have the part, but because I'm dyslexic I was kind of, like, really afraid of it." But instead of enabling her fear, Quinn enlisted acting coach Margie Haber to teach her a few cold reading techniques. Reports Quinn, "She showed me what you need to do in order to be comfortable with the paper and with looking down and not losing your spot, and stuff like that, and how to work on the character before you do the audition. So that sort of changed a lot for me."
Acting enables Quinn to express the extroverted part of her personality that the world doesn't usually see. "I'm really shy, so I try to express other parts of me that are more outgoing and emotional and vulnerable," she confesses.
Quinn is coming off a bit of a dry spell. Aside from the House role in 2007, the year proved to be somewhat of a dud. She went out for many roles but didn't land them. To pay the bills, she took a job as a personal assistant to a screenwriter. "I just felt dry creatively because I was going to this job every day that didn't feed me creatively," she says. Not that the job didn't provide its moments of excitement: One day she had to pick up a three-tiered, pink birthday cake for her employer's daughter. Despite Quinn's protestations, the bakery insisted the cake would be fine resting on her passenger seat without a box. Much to her horror, as she made a sharp right turn, the cake plummeted into her dashboard. Quinn burst into tears. "I thought for sure, 'I'm going to be fired now,' " she recalls. Fortunately, her employer found the story humorous, the bakery mended the cake, and the only fallout was that Quinn arrived at her audition that afternoon with 10 pounds of pink frosting still glazing the interior of her car.
Things are looking up for her in 2008. In the last couple of weeks, she has auditioned for six commercials and a voiceover and went on a callback for one of them. She plans to audit a few acting classes before deciding on which direction to take her training. "My goal this year: I want to be a working actress," she says. "I want to just step into being a working actress and see if I can maintain that throughout the year, you know, with the success of my commercial sort of rolling right now and see if I can sort of filter that into other jobs. Personally, I just want to be more confident and stronger in who I am, because I am sort of shy."
The Lyricist
Actor Deon Lucas handles a lot of money -- sums that Will Smith and Denzel Washington hire accountants to manage, the kinds that buy Ferraris or islands in the Caribbean. But the money doesn't belong to Lucas; it belongs to corporations that send it to Bank of America every night after closing to be counted and sorted. It's an ideal night job for an actor. "They're very flexible. They're open 24 hours, so you can work any shift you want. My managers know the career I'm in, so if I miss a day or have to be late, it's cool," says Lucas, who generally works 2:30 to 11 p.m.
But he doesn't plan on handling other people's money for much longer. He hopes, as he has since graduating from the American Musical & Dramatic Academy in Los Angeles in 2004, to support himself through his acting soon and eventually establish a production company, produce his own projects, and buy his parents a house in the suburbs of Chicago, his hometown.
So far, Lucas is well on his way. Four months after graduating, he got an agent and booked a K-Swiss commercial, a Boost Mobile print ad, and a couple of student films. Recently he finished a performance in the independent film Set Apart, currently in postproduction. An Internet series Lucas landed before the strike is currently on hiatus, so he has been focusing on auditioning in the meantime and pursuing his other loves.
"I'm a poetic lyricist," says Lucas. "I do a lot of spoken word; that's what I do to keep those juices flowing, you know? I'm also working on a script, my first horror movie. I'm looking forward to finishing that one."
Writing aside, Lucas has a genuine love for acting that started at age 7, when his mother took him to an audition in Chicago. "Ever since then, I just knew that's what I wanted to do," says Lucas. In high school he took drama classes and community theatre courses and attended a few acting schools in downtown Chicago. After graduation, he enrolled at Long Island University in Brooklyn before transferring to AMDA in New York. When AMDA opened its doors in Los Angeles in 2003, Lucas moved here and into cushy campus housing in nearby Park La Brea. He has moved four times since then, due to rising rents and bad building maintenance; he now prefers to live alone because of unfortunate roommate experiences and also to stay focused on his acting. "I'm a very creative person. I think that acting's the main form of expression, because it's your body that you're using and everything you're using comes from within," he says. "I don't visualize myself doing anything else."
The Freshman
Richard Lewis Warren started acting a little over a year ago, which wouldn't be that remarkable if he weren't starting at an age when most baby boomers have buried their dreams and are waiting to collect their pensions. The actor has a creative past: For 17 years he was a composer, writing tunes for series such as Dallas, Remington Steele, and Laverne and Shirley. He also has a creative family; he's the younger brother of actor Lesley Ann Warren (Clue, Desperate Housewives).
He didn't admit his desire to become an actor until he took a sabbatical from composing to raise his children. When he tried to return to composing, the landscape of the industry had changed so drastically that he would have had to start from scratch to break in again. "I thought, 'Well, if I'm going to start over, I might as well do something I've always wanted to do,' and so I just decided to do the acting," he says.
To make sure he wanted to pursue the craft, he signed up to do background work. "I was there about five minutes, and I decided, 'Yeah, this is definitely what I want for the rest of my life,' " he says. He admits to using his sister to pull a few strings to get his foot in the door. One day, when he couldn't get through the Central Casting call line for an extras call for Desperate Housewives during a time when his sister was recurring as Teri Hatcher's mother on the show, he called his sister to see if she could help get him on the show. Soon the first assistant director had him on the phone, confirming his interest; then Central called, asking him to be an extra on the show. Through the extra work, Warren was Taft-Hartleyed into SAG.
Of his sister, Warren jokes, "She's like my consigliere. I mean, she basically helps me with everything. I go to her with all my questions and fears." She's the one who advised her brother to go to the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute; she'd studied with Strasberg in New York when she was very young.
Since Warren started studying the Strasberg technique a year ago, his acting has grown more refined. In the past few weeks, he began studying with a private coach from the school and since has landed five auditions -- one for an A-list film with Jamie Foxx, though Warren didn't get the role.
The Manhattan native has lived in Los Angeles since 1969, going through divorces and living in a variety of situations: a house in Hidden Hills while making $500,000 a year as a composer, and currently with his mother since hitting hard financial times unrelated to his acting aspirations. "I'm still part of the generation where a man is not a man if he's not making money," he says. "I had to learn to get over that and learn to recognize that my family loves me regardless of how much money I make or what I buy. That was a hard lesson for me."
Since he ventured into acting, Warren's life has taken on a more fulfilling energy. He landed his first role about a year ago in a music video for a band called Cannibal Corpse. "About 95 percent of the video was me, and I was playing this psychotic killer who goes around chopping people up and killing them and carrying the dead bodies into the woods," says Warren with a laugh.
The dark roles didn't end there. He was commissioned to play a knife-wielding priest in a horror movie produced by his nephew Christopher Peters (son of Lesley and movie producer Jon Peters, now divorced) and then a stroke victim who kicks the bucket in a straight-to-video feature, An Angel Named Billy. Warren has welcomed the challenges. He says, "I want something unusual to be working with. It gives me a lot more to work with, which is why I love playing the guy with the stroke."
His goals for the year, now that he has landed an agent, are to audition for more television and film roles and continue to improve his craft through training. He hopes to financially get back on his feet. He's currently working three jobs: doing extra work during the day, valet parking in the early evening, and working for OTX (a movie test screening company) from midnight until 4 a.m. "I don't need much sleep. I live on about two hours of sleep a day. I've always been that way all my life."
For now, the love of his children and the love of his dreams are restorative enough. He says, "I have two daughters and trust that they would still love and respect me regardless of what happened, and they've been great. They write me emails all the time and call me, saying, 'We're so proud of you. You're working so hard.' "
The Go-Getter
After actor Jamie Silberhartz finished her final semester at the Los Angeles campus of Emerson College in 2004, she had no problem transitioning from student to professional pavement-pounder. "I was super aggressive," she says. She scoured her college alumni list, emailed and called dozens of potential contacts, and went a little crazy with her submissions. "I did tons of mass mailings. Like, the amount of money I must have spent at the post office was obscene," she says. "I probably did, like, 10 mass mailings, you know, hundreds of people." But her persistence paid off. She landed her first commercial agent through her efforts.
Like many actors, Silberhartz has harbored ambitions to become an actor since a young age. At 4, she begged her parents to put her into her first acting class. The Long Island native grew up going to New York City to see Broadway plays and performing in community theatre before she went to Emerson in Boston, where she studied acting and film. But the training that left the biggest impression was under actor Alec Baldwin during a weeklong summer intensive at Southampton College in New York. Silberhartz applied to be one of the few students to study with him and was selected to join his class for two consecutive summers, in 2001 and 2002.
She admits that performing in front of Baldwin was intimidating at first. "He instilled in us this really hard discipline, and you don't want to let Alec Baldwin down, so you're not going to not know all your lines so well," Silberhartz says. "You couldn't fake it with him. You had to be completely prepared."
Learning the importance of preparation and professionalism early on paid off when she landed the role of Rachel Blake on a multimedia campaign for Lost titled The Lost Experience. "It was totally guerrilla-style, and the part was really meaty, and basically it was just me talking to a camera," says Silberhartz. "I had, like, 40 pages to memorize all by myself, just speaking to a camera. That was awesome."
Silberhartz, who played the daughter of the founder of the Hanso Foundation, later got to attend Comic-Con in character and interrupt an in-person appearance by producers of the show, yelling, "You have blood on your hands. You're murderers!" before being dragged away by security guards. She landed the role by submitting herself on Actors Access.
More roles followed, including a recurring part as a receptionist on Without a Trace, which she landed after auditioning a few times for the show. She also appeared in the comedic short Sissy Frenchfry as a cheerleader. "That was a great film because it was about essentially gay tolerance, and I loved it. It went on to win a lot of awards," she says.
She has also acted in quite a few TV spots, including a commercial for Loyola Marymount University and a cell-phone ad for Sony that featured only her thumbs. "It was like a thumbs-were-people kind of thing," she says. "We were, like, thumbs on spring break."
This year, Silberhartz plans to continue to pursue television roles, once the strike ends, and her major goal is to land a guest-starring role. She will also continue to act with a sketch-comedy group that had its first sold-out show in mid-January and has booked new performances at the Comedy Cocktail at the Highlands Night Club in Hollywood. "It's just a fantastic outlet with the strike and everything -- to be able to be putting something on feels so good," she says.
She also plans to continue to take classes in scene study and cold reading. She is currently studying under former Gilmore Girls casting director Mara Casey and Tim Craig at the Larry Moss Studio. She also plans to take more casting-director and SAG Foundation workshops. She says, "It's a never-ending battle. Even when you're really successful you could be without a job."
Nicole Kristal can be reached at nkristal@backstage.com.