From Green Beret to Actor

I thought I wanted to be a cowboy, and I guess you could say (for a time) I was.

Born and raised in Montana, we made just enough to get by, my mom taught me to break horses, and that's how I made money all through middle and high school. Coming up, I loved storytelling, film theater, animation, music; the arts felt important. I wanted to tell stories, but I grew up surrounded by traditional ideas. Our parents beat it into our heads that money was the number one priority, they struggled, and they didn't want that for us. In school the idea was "get your diploma so you can get to work" become a cog in the machine. We didn't have a theater or film program. So I did what was expected of me. After high school I had to think about what I wanted to do; I thought, "I want to be James Bond,” something about being an undercover super-spy, spoke to 17 year old me.

I joined the Army; I spent 10 years in the reserves. I got an engineering degree, became an electrician, and started my own construction company. All the while, though, something was missing. Now and then I'd jump onto google and search for casting calls or voice acting gigs. I wanted to connect with people, an audience, communicate tragedy and comedy, but I didn't know how.

I became frustrated with the Reserves, and I started to think about the whole James Bond angle; after all, that's why I joined; maybe that would be the answer to finding fulfillment. I needed a change so I took a leap, and went to Army Special Forces Selection. I made it through, and what followed was three years of Green Beret training: running for hours through the jungles of North Carolina wearing hundred-pound rucks and night vision goggles, sleeping in swamps for weeks on end, full-on role played tactical missions, jumping out of helicopters and airplanes, seemingly endless psychological evaluations and tests, classes on tactics and foreign relations, and 8 months of Chinese language training. I ended up getting that Green Beret, but while there, being so close to the military's bureaucracy and still having no real way to express myself, I found I needed to be somewhere else.

I needed to work in the arts, and I was finally going to scratch that itch, the acting itch. Upon further investigation I decided acting school was a good place to start. So I signed up for the Acting BFA at Utah Valley University, near where my Special Forces team was stationed, and when I wasn't deployed or training with the military, I was acting, taking every acting class I could. I had to make up for lost time. I was in class with a bunch of theater kids just out of high school who had been acting their whole lives and who all seemed to be much better at it than me, but I was stubborn. I was in love with it; that act of giving catharsis and context to life, it changed me; it made me a better person. I found that my life experiences, my past lives, helped bring depth to the roles I played. I was performing Shakespeare, Shaw, Shepherd, and Chekhov; these poets, these masters of the human experience, taught me to see beauty in new ways. I felt like I finally understood the power of story and my calling in life. My contract with the military ended in 2019, and since then, I have devoted my life to storytelling. And if I had to choose one thing to do for the rest of my life, it would be that.