Acting

The first time I did any acting was for a small, regional TV production in Denmark. We got to use an old museum as our set, specifically a classroom from earlier in the 1900s, and the director gave me one of the lead roles that was nevertheless still modest. It was a good experience for me as a child and confirmed that performance art was something I wanted to do more of.

Serious acting tracks in Denmark were fairly consolidated, so where I lived we had to make do with local theater groups. Doing plays like that is still fun, and outside of this it was possible to read about the craft and learn things on my own as well. Getting better at acting is mostly just about acting more while paying attention to the mistakes we all make along the way.

After I moved to the United States as a late teenager, I soon met a theater director named John Patrick Rice. He had basically managed to put together an entire theater program at a college in Nevada, using his own acting experience from New York and elsewhere to teach students there. He recognized that I was serious about the craft and cast me as one of the leads in a production of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors that was put on in 2003. During that rendition I also met an artist named Joe Pachak who had been tasked with designing the set, and we all had a good time working. My fellow cast members were warm and welcoming, which helped me enjoy this first-hand introduction to American culture even more. I did other plays too, mainly smaller, modern, and experimental productions, collaborating with all manner of different people.

In 2004 I received the college President’s Award for Outstanding Student in Speech and Theatre. My academic record had been good, but ultimately I decided it was time to seek a challenge and prepared to leave the state without ever really considering a degree in anything. John connected me with an old friend in New York, but ultimately I ended up in Los Angeles instead.

At the time I was already working on putting together an independent film using a screenplay I’d written. Shortly after arriving in the city, I finished another script, leaving my acting mostly on hold. Having met a few helpful producers early on, I would occasionally use their referrals to attend masterclasses for acting and audit interesting courses in the hope of continuing to hone my skills, but at the end of the day I haven’t done much in the way of actually performing since.

The audition process never appealed to me, which is true for many actors, and that fact also had influence on my desire to work behind the scenes instead.