Acting is not a profession that offers job security or a guaranteed six-figure income. What it too often offers is plenty of self-doubt and steep odds of becoming a "star." But for two recent Carnegie Mellon graduates, it also offers a chance to follow their dreams.
Introduction
They were each en route when they got the call that would change everything.
Scene I
Megan Hilty was about to catch the overnight Greyhound. She had just sublet an apartment in New York City and was heading back to Pittsburgh to sell her car and pack her things. In a few days, she would graduate from Carnegie Mellon's musical theater program. She already had her first job lined up–the national tour of Little Shop of Horrors. She was all set, she thought. No more community theater or waiting tables for her. That was good.
But it was about to get even better. Forget the Little Shop tour. The blockbuster musical Wicked wanted her as Glinda's stand-in. By the time the bus rolled into Pittsburgh early in the morning, every passenger knew. Megan Hilty was going to Broadway.
Scene II
Eight months after the acting major's graduation from Carnegie Mellon and about 100 auditions, one commercial, and a few bit parts later, Gaius Charles was in a rental car, driving down a busy LA freeway, when his cell phone rang. He had spent the whole day trying to stay fresh as he auditioned for a role in a television pilot again. And again. And again–until pretty much all of the creative staff from the studio and the network had seen him. It was his manager calling, with Charles' agent, the guy who negotiates the contracts, already on the line. Whenever the two were conferencing, it usually meant something good had happened. Charles pulled over. He listened to what his manager was saying. For a moment–right there in the middle of frenetic Los Angeles–he felt like the world around him had stopped. Friday Night Lights, a new television series, wanted him in the ensemble cast. Two weeks later, he's in Austin, baby, as his character, Smash, would say with a cocky smile.
Scene III
If you're a drama student in Carnegie Mellon's College of Fine Arts, life outside the Purnell Center is pretty much a theoretical construct. You've gotten by on four hours of sleep, which is about the only time you have to call your own. You've spent all day in classes, reaching deep down and pulling out your very own messy soul, right there, on command, in front of everybody. Then, for first- and second-year students, it's off to work on mandatory production and set crews while upperclassmen have rehearsals that last easily until close to midnight. Finally, you're back at your room or apartment, which just means it's time for homework. For four years, you've worked as hard as anyone can. And you know that there's still only one guarantee: The line on your résumé–graduate of Carnegie Mellon's School of Drama–will make you stand out.
The School of Drama could rest on its laurels–the first school in the country to award a drama degree (1914), or its reputation for rigorous conservatory training in a university setting, or the stars it can claim like Cherry Jones, Rob Marshall, Stephen Schwartz, Holly Hunter, Albert Brooks, Steven Bochco, Ted Danson, Nancy Marchand, James Cromwell. That's all without mentioning the constellation of grads in the industry–successful directors; producers; lighting, costume, and set designers; casting directors; agents; production technicians. There are so many alums in the business that some call them the Carnegie Mellon Mafia. They help make connections–getting new actors into auditions or bringing the top talent agents, casting directors, personal managers, and directors to the Carnegie Mellon senior showcases in New York and Los Angeles. In some cases, usually for the students in design, directing, and production, they might be able to offer actual jobs. In any case, they're the ones bringing the rookies into the pipeline.
"Even at that, the swift ascension of Hilty (A'04) and Charles (A'05) into the spotlight is astounding," says drama professor Don Wadsworth. "This is not how it happens for 99 percent of the world," he says. "Not even for the fortunate and talented world of Carnegie Mellon actors."
Scene IV (i.e., the backstory)
Hilty sang everywhere she went. She sang in the living room, she sang sitting at the computer, she sang while she cleaned her room–all of which was kind of odd because neither of her parents sang. They liked music, though, and they played the soundtrack from the original Music Man and Manhattan Transfer. Hilty's mother was tone deaf. She'd read somewhere that if tone-deaf mothers sang to their children, their kids would be tone deaf, too. So at bedtime, when Hilty begged for a lullaby, her mother got Hilty's dad.
As it turned out, Hilty had a big, big voice. She tried to sing like an opera singer and copy the styles of other people. Secretly, she wanted to be Whitney Houston. She always knew in her bones she would make it to Broadway–someday. And the two years she had spent in southern Oregon after high school, doing cabaret theater and waiting on tables, made her confident she could make a living as an actress. It didn't hurt that older actors from the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Festival encouraged her to set her sights higher. "You need to audition for Carnegie Mellon University," they told her. "And if you get in, you need to go." And so she did.
When she was invited to audition for the replacement cast of Wicked, the casting director first sat her 5th row center at the Gershwin Theatre to watch the original company. "There's no way anyone can do this show after Kristen Chenoweth," she thought, "let alone me, from nowhere, who has no credits." She had absolutely no expectations going into the audition. Later she would say that gave her a leg up in the end. All she wanted to do was make them laugh, make them think they hadn't wasted their time bringing her up from Pittsburgh. She would have had a heart attack, she says, had she known that she was actually in the final callback.
Her audition was in front of the whole creative team– the producers along with director Joe Mantello and composer Stephen Schwartz (A'68) of Godspell and Pippin fame. They studied her for eight minutes as she performed. They laughed. You did your job, she told herself afterward. You can go back and graduate now and go on tour. Then her agent called to tell her congratulations–she was going to be the standby for Jennifer Laura Thompson, who was taking over the role from Kristen Chenoweth. She was thrilled. Then, when she came back down to earth, she panicked. "I thought for sure, since they only saw me for eight minutes, that they were going to call me out at any second and see I was a fraud," she says now. "I didn't think I belonged there. It took me a while to get comfortable in my performance and to know what I was doing was OK. I didn't have to do someone else's show."
Scene V
The first thing you probably want to know about Gaius Charles is what the heck is with the name? Did he switch first and last names, maybe, for a stage name? The second thing you want to know is how to pronounce it. Here are the answers: It's guy-us, and he was named after his father.
Charles had decided, by the time he was five or six, that he would be an actor. He made his decision after seeing how much his grandmother enjoyed soap operas. I could do that. That would be easy. He tested the notion in seventh grade, when he was in his first play. The spark was real. Acting classes, school productions, and a neighborhood performing arts program followed.
After attending a high school for performing arts, he applied to six of the big-name acting schools. Five of them accepted him in a flash. Carnegie Mellon wait listed him. If they're putting me on the edge, he thought, then that's the school for me. He laughs about being an academic overachiever. The first few months, he carried a briefcase to class. He was looking to score high, get a great GPA, maybe make the dean's list. Finally, one of his professors took him aside. "Listen," he told Charles, "we have to grade you because we're at the university. But this is more about your work, your craft." Charles nodded and smiled. He understood it on paper, he says, but it took him a long time to accept that simply being a good student was not going to do it for him.
After graduation, he moved back to Teaneck, N.J., to live with his family while he tried to get his start. He went on scores of auditions, just kept grinding along, he says. By November, he was worn down, ready to throw in the towel. But Charles is a deeply religious man. In what he calls a moment of faith, he wrote this down on a piece of paper: I want to be the lead in a TV show in months. In God I trust. He put the paper on the wall right above his desk so that every time he flopped down after an audition, whether it went well or not, he would see it and keep his faith. By February, he was signed to a contract. Friday Night Lights, set in the fictional town of Dillon, Texas, captures the high-pitched fervor many Texas communities have for their high school football teams. Charles plays his character, Brian "Smash" Williams, large. Smash is the star running back, all bravado and emotional bling–the anti-Charles. The night before Charles taped his audition in New York for the role, he was worried. I'm not this jock, I don't play football, I'm from New Jersey, he was thinking. What am I supposed to do? To clear his head, he decided to go for a jog. He ended up in the ER with what he thought was a broken foot. It turned out to be a sprain, but still, it reinforced his insecurity about playing an athlete. As luck would have it, he didn't have to show up at the audition on crutches; the casting call was moved back a week, giving him a little time to relax, do some research, and work his script. Now people who know him can't believe he's Smash. People who don't know him can't believe he's not Smash.
Scene VI
As the standby for Glinda, Hilty had her own dressing room–with cable. (She didn't even have cable in her own apartment, she says.) All she had to do was be in the building or within five blocks of the building with her pager and cell phone while the show was going on. She could have dinner with friends; she could go to see another show. She could go to the gym. She could watch the show. But after a while, she was so nervous about stepping into the role that the stage manager told her to stop watching the show.
"They hired you because they want you," he said. "They don't want you to do Kristen's show. They don't want you to do Jennifer's show. They want to see you and what you brought in the audition."
"So I had to sit down with the script and let go of all the things that made me nervous and approach it like I'd approach any other script, the way I was taught in school," she says now. "And that's something I learned, too. If I don't make it my own, it's not going to be honest."
Hilty's name went up on the Broadway marquee in May 2005 after a year as a stand-in. And it stayed up in lights for another year, to generally good reviews.
Scene VII
Charles had no idea how things worked the first time he walked on the set of Friday Night Lights. He didn't know that several pieces were being filmed at once. So when he saw players doing tackle drills over in the corner, he jumped right into line. Meanwhile, all the production assistants were on walkie-talkies trying to figure out where he was. All the other stars were sitting behind the lush video village with their names on the backs of their chairs, taking it easy, getting into character. "You know you don't really have to do that, right?" they said when they finally found him. "We'll call you when we need you." "I was so green," he says now.
But not so much anymore. He has 22 episodes under his belt. As played by Charles, Smash has become a nuanced, conflicted character who has dealt with racism, the loss of his father, and the use of steroids during the season.
Friday Night Lights was a critic's darling all year. Along the way, because of the raw way the show is filmed, Charles says he learned a lot about acting as well as cinematography and directing and being a camera operator. Whether he continues to play Smash next season, the early tally for Charles' career is indisputable–he scored big in his first real gig.
Scene VIII
And so did Hilty. She's now in Los Angeles, playing Glinda in an open-ended production at the Pantages. What does the future hold for her? She says she's exploring some wonderful opportunities to return to the Broadway stage.
Closing Scene
So, although nothing is ever a guarantee in the arts, one thing is clear: The Carnegie Mellon Mafia has two new members.
Sally Ann Flecker is a Pittsburgh-based freelance writer.
