Being a real-life FBI agent isn’t nearly as cool as TV makes it seem…
…so being a stunt actor was really the just next logical choice!
I was in high school, spending my afternoons on “cia.gov” as Criminal Minds played in the background, trying to find a job that perfectly combined the need for grit, cleverness, creativity, and badass fighting skills. It didn’t take long before I realized that real-life agents, while extremely badass in their own right, rarely dominate in 15-person fight sequences with only a pencil and their sadistic ingenuity, and the last thing they care about is making an audience go “OHHHHH” at the site of their latest takedown.
Fast forward a few years to my discovery of stunt performers: I was ecstatic to learn those pencil-wielding badasses DO exist, and that the stunt industry is in fact the perfect amalgamation of everything I love—martial arts, acting, and hard-freaking-work. In retrospect, my path to stunt acting began when I was a kid; but it wasn’t until college when everything fell into place.
“Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.”
- William Shakespeare (Measure for Measure)
I’ve been an athlete my entire life, first as a gymnast, then a competitive acrobatic dancer, and especially a martial artist. Martial Arts has been the core of my training since I was 7—my parents insisted I needed to learn to defend myself in a way that didn’t involve tap-dancing someone to death. They signed me up for Karate classes at a nearby dojo, and at the time I don’t think any of us realized the impact that would have on my life. I soared through the ranks of my dojo all throughout grade school—earning my first-degree black belt, then my second, then my third, then becoming a sensei and teaching until leaving for college. My thirst to learn as much about martial arts as possible led me to find other styles in college, namely kickboxing and Brazilian Ju Jitsu. For a brief period of time even I believed I may have a stint as an amateur MMA fighter, until I remembered the other love of my life: performing.
Alongside all the sports and academia in my childhood, I always maintained a passion for performing. Gymnastics and dance taught me from a young age how to have a stage presence, but it wasn’t until I started theatre that I truly began to unravel my inner performing artist. In high school, I latched on to my resident thespian troupe and took part in countless acting classes, school plays, and statewide thespian competitions. I had this little acting bug growing inside me, and soon high school acting wasn’t enough to feed its appetite. So, I found acting classes outside of school at Truthful Acting Studios. I learned Meisner and Chekhov and audition technique. I met and trained with real working actors for the first time and realized that I couldn’t NOT be a part of this industry. Much to my parents’ dismay, I abandoned their dream of having a third engineer-for-a-kid and went to college with visions of being a professional actress and stuntwoman.
After spending a couple years in live stunt shows (shoutout to All For One and Marvel Universe LIVE! Age of Heroes for giving me my own personal “stunt college experience”) I made the leap to Los Angeles and dove into the film and television industry. Film was an alien medium to me, the quirky thespian who was sometimes even too big for the stage. But I quickly learned to love it. It’s in film that I’ve learned the value of nuance, stillness, and unabashed authenticity in a performance that you really can’t match except in the tiniest of black-box theatres. As an acting teacher of mine once said, “The camera sees what the camera sees.” And boy if that isn’t the truth. The brutal honesty of a camera lens has made me mature as an actor and stunt performer more than I can ever explain. Thanks to the tough love of 60 fps, as well as a plethora of incredible mentors (thank you Vlad, Manny, Bryan, Jay, Jerry, Skyler, and so many more), I have learned so much in my first two years as an Angelino. I’ve been fortunate to work on some amazing sets where I promptly and naturally made a fool of myself, and yet because of that took away so much knowledge for the next ones. My experience, training, and passion for the craft grows nonstop, and I can’t help but feel like I’m only just at the base of my exponential curve.
Words cannot express how excited I am to continue my exploration of artistry, athleticism, performance, and how I can use these things to make a difference in the world (because that’s what it’s all about, right?). If you’ve managed to get through my ramblings and feel the same passion as I do, I sincerely hope to work with you in the future. After all, us crazy artist types have to stick together.