Sean Maher

Sean was recently in Vancouver doing re-shoots for an episode of Human Target, and he was nice enough to agree to meet with me one evening. I’ve had the chance to meet him previously at conventions, so I already knew he was a lovely person, and chatting with him that night confirmed that he’s a wonderfully kind and agreeable man. He was very relaxed throughout the evening, and it was apparent that he’s very happy with his life at the moment! We talked casually for a while, then proceeded to do an informal interview for the website. Here is a transcription of that conversation.

Please do not reproduce this interview in its entirety anywhere, and credit us if you are reposting a quote!

SM.i: So to start, we had some questions about your career. How did you get into acting? In high school, yeah?

Sean: Yeah, in high school. Somebody’s written somewhere that I went to a musical theater sleep-away, a camp, and it’s partly true. The first show I ever did was Jesus Christ Superstar, at a summer camp, and then I came back to school and did Bye Bye Birdie. Then, the summer after that, I did West Side Story. I played Tony and I think that’s probably the summer that changed my life. That’s when I think it clicked. It was sort of the essence of doing a show, in the theater, coming together with a group of people... And that summer, it was the first time that I’d really, really experienced that to its fullest. I always remember that curtain call, of West Side Story, and I had never felt that happy in my life. I’d never felt that fulfilled. I’d never felt that high in my life. So, I always remember that. I was 16 years old and it was just this amazing summer, and it all had to do with the work and the other actors and... And then that was it. When I went back that year, back to high school, we were doing Into the Woods, and we were quite blessed because we had such a core group in my class. Like my friend, who I’m still quite close with, Eyal Podell, who’s a working actor. David Harbour, who’s a working actor… There were two other girls... And we were a core group of very serious kids who wanted to really act, and then there were a lot of very serious lighting designers and very serious directors. So, we had so many people who wanted to do more, so I think our drama teacher - she just let us go. So by the time I was a senior, we were doing three or four productions.

SM.i: Wow, that’s pretty intense.

Sean: Yeah, and I was still singing a lot, so we were doing concerts and one-act plays and plays and a musical and then the senior musical, which I directed. So it was just very easy for me to just go full steam ahead with it while I was still in high school.

SM.i: So you were singing before you got into acting then?

Sean: Yeah, I started with singing.

SM.i: Interesting. When did you start that?

Sean: You know, I don’t remember. Honestly? I don’t even know how that happened. I feel like I just opened up my voice – OK, another part of the first question. When I saw Into the Woods on Broadway with my mother, that’s when I decided that this is something that I wanted to do. Before that I had never considered acting.

SM.i: How old were you when that happened?

Sean: Oh gosh, I want to say 14 or 15, I don’t remember, kind of young. I was so blown away by that. I feel like maybe I got the album or something and just tried to sing once, and I was actually quite good at it. So yeah, it’s a joke – that I sort of just opened up my mouth and just decided to sing one day, and I was blessed with this beautiful voice and so… Then I went to NYU for musical theater, and then from musical theater to this brief stint at the experimental theater wing before I ended up at Playwrights Horizons for two years.

SM.i: So you were trained in theater. How did you go from that into camera work?

Sean: It was actually sort of a fluke. When you graduate from NYU, they do league nights, where they take a small group of the graduating class and they present them to managers and agents and casting directors and producers, etc. So I auditioned – there’s two separate ones, there’s a musical theater one and a drama one. I auditioned for the musical theater one and got in; and then I was doing a production of Yerma at Playwrights Horizons the night that I was supposed to perform, so I couldn’t do it. At the time I was so upset, because I never thought I’d get into the drama one. I always thought, "Oh my voice, my voice is my thing." So, I got into the drama one - much to my surprise - and I performed for that. There was a casting director’s assistant there for one of the soaps. She brought me in for an audition, my very first audition, and she was like, "We want to test you for this soap, you need an agent. Do you have an agent?" And I was like… I had no idea. She was like, "I’m going to make some phone calls for you." Next thing I know, I run back to my apartment and I’ve got messages on my machine – this is back when there were answering machines – and the first person was Stephen Hirsh. He was my very first agent, he was the first person I ever met, I sort of fell in love with him, and that was it. I went with him. There were just more camera opportunities, and then the first job that I booked was a lead in a pilot. [ed: Ryan Caulfield]

Click on the link for more :

http://seanmaher.info/excl20091206interview.html