Just as there’s no one right way to act, there’s no one right way to learn to do it. Ask a room full of actors how they acquired the skills, life experience, and confidence they needed to be successful at their craft and their trade, and each will give you a different answer.
Or ask six actors and you’ll get six stories of aspiration, hard work, and finding their light. As their individual journeys demonstrate, the best place to study acting is the place that both meets your needs and pushes you to become even more yourself.
Abigail C. Onwunali
Not too long ago, 2022 Princess Grace Award winner Abigail Onwunali was preparing for a career in medicine, not theatre. When she told her family she had been accepted to Yale, they assumed she meant its School of Medicine. Most members of her Nigerian American family work in the medical profession, including her parents, who are both nurses. Though Abigail had studied human development and family sciences with a focus on child development at the University of Texas at Austin (where in-state tuition is currently $11,766), the way she got into that school was via a speech-and-debate scholarship.
“I got addicted to it,” Onwunali said of speech and debate, which she discovered in middle school and went on to excel at through high school and college, amassing a record of 13 national championships. While she studied to become a doctor, she kept what she thought of as her “hobby, the thing that I wanted to do outside of the stress of going to organic chemistry class. It became my safe haven to get away from the stress of preparing for the MCAT.”
Though she no longer intends to practice medicine, Onwunali still appreciates the value of her educational path, as she says she needed the time to try to understand this part of herself.
“I think at some point, I realized it was no longer that I wasn’t trying,” Onwunali said. “I think I did everything I possibly could. But I just couldn’t see myself—I couldn’t see my future. I saw it kind of miserable. Deep down inside, I know that my calling to healing wasn’t through medicine.”
She turned to a college mentor, who advised her to take a risk and try something else. At this point, Onwunali was performing slam poetry in College Station, Texas, and watching other friends pursue their creative passions. Feeling sure of her own talent but knowing very little about acting schools, she applied to four MFA programs and received final callbacks and acceptances from two schools.
“I had no idea I was signing up for one of the best acting schools in the country,” she said. It wasn’t until she arrived at Yale for the audition that Onwunali realized the enormity of the opportunity. Like many other emerging artists, Onwunali’s path was characterized by “a lot of naïve fumbling, but meaningfully falling onto things, and figuring out, ‘Oh, this is my calling. This is actually where I’m meant to be.’”
She marveled at the volume of information she was able to absorb during her MFA training (for which tuition was free) just by letting go and trusting the process.
“It may take years for you to be able to understand some of the things that you learned,” said Onwunali. “But to be able to keep yourself in practice and keep yourself available and open as an actor is the training that I learned at Yale. I really do feel like I could do any role safely. The training really did help me feel confident in myself as an actor, because I didn’t have that. There was talent, there was potential, there was drive—I just didn’t have the confidence. I didn’t have the assurance that I knew how to train myself for a Broadway production in a month and learn five tracks.”
Onwunali went on to understudy a role at the New York Theatre Workshop, filling in for an actor who was injured. She learned that role in just three days. Most recently, she understudied five roles in Jaja’s African Hair Braiding at Manhattan Theatre Club. When she’s not onstage, Onwunali teaches science and public speaking to students in the Bronx and New Jersey.
To those looking to pursue their passions, Onwunali advises, “Step into that part of yourself that wants to dare to be bold. Don’t think about it, just free fall into the experience and see what happens, because your life could really change. Mine’s really changed [180] because I decided one day to just do it.
“And believe that you’re enough as you are. You don’t need to work on anything but to be yourself when you come into this new step and phase in your life. You are exactly where you need to be.”
Caroline Chu
You wouldn’t know it today, but Caroline Chu used to be painfully shy. Growing up in Chicago, she remembers being picked to play a speaking role in her fifth grade student assembly. “I cried and cried and cried,” Chu recalled.
After the tears dried, her parents and teachers encouraged her to give it a try anyway. She faced her fear, stepped into the spotlight, and realized performing wasn’t so bad after all. Though Chu continued to perform in plays throughout middle and high school, and participated in the National High School Institute Cherubs program at Northwestern, when it came time to apply for college, she wasn’t looking at acting programs or preparing for auditions. She planned to study literature or marketing and add theatre as a second major.
As it turned out, the theatre major at Northwestern was a capped program—meaning that students could not declare theatre as a secondary major. So Chu double majored in Theatre and English literature, and earned a certificate in integrated marketing communications. She specifically chose Northwestern’s BA program (where tuition is currently $64,887) because of its flexibility.
“It was the only place I knew of where you could really go full throttle at both theatre and something else,” she said. “The idea of being an actor or an artist is pretty scary, and so having something else that I knew that I was passionate about, and a school that would support my academic pursuits outside of theatre as well, was really important to me.” She credits the decision to broaden her studies with helping her stave off burnout and reserve her creative classes for artistic expression.
As a mixed-race actor, Chu also appreciated the chance to choose the acting teacher for her two years there—in her case, Sandra Marquez, whose guidance “made all the difference,” Chu said. “It was really important to give due consideration to taking courses from a non-white acting teacher, because the experiences of a white working actor are very different, and the lessons that are applicable from their lived experiences would not have been as relevant to me.”
In fact, Chu’s first professional acting job, playing a character called L in Jiehae Park’s Peerless at First Floor Theater, a role she booked during her sophomore year, was also her first experience playing a character that matched her identity. It was also the first place she was “able to meet other artists and people who have spent their whole lives making this a career. Seeing people in action who have made it work for those lengths of time was really important in sustaining my hope for the rest of my life, and also giving me a picture of what that would look like.”
Since graduating, Chu has taken various theatre workshops and on-camera classes. Acting education at the university level is very theatre-focused, she noted, while working in film and television can require a different skill set. She’s also had a chance to do more learning on the job as part of the cast of The Play That Goes Wrong, which she toured with in 2021 and is now performing in Off-Broadway. She also works as an assistant to an art consultant.
“In any production that I work on,” Chu said, “I feel like I always come away having learned a lot more than I came in the room with.”
Enoch King
Growing up in Atlanta, Enoch King didn’t know any performers besides his father, chief cook at South Fulton Hospital, who also practiced the gospel tradition of shape-note singing. King himself first joined the chorus in middle school and continued singing as part of the visual and performing arts magnet program at Tri-Cities High School.
His earliest memory of his eventual mentor, drama teacher and director Freddie Hendricks, was during a rehearsal of The Wiz in his freshman year: King was standing in the pit, singing with the chorus, when one of the actors onstage suddenly altered the blocking. “What are you doing? You don’t just change the show like that!” a voice called out in the auditorium. It made an impression.
King learned his first monologue, Marc Antony’s eulogy from Julius Caesar, in a 10th grade theatre class. “It was instantaneous,” King said. “I fell in love and I was done.”
King crossed paths with Hendricks again when he came to critique the students’ final monologues. “He came up to me afterward and he was like, ‘You need to be in drama.’” King switched his specialty from chorus to theatre. Of Hendricks, he said, “He has the ability to let you know that you are capable of things that even you aren’t aware that you’re capable of.”
Hendricks was also the founding artistic director of the Youth Ensemble of Atlanta, a professional African American youth theatre company and training ground, which he encouraged King to join. “Being at YEA really shifted the course of my career,” King said. Members of the ensemble learn how to act, sing, dance, write, and devise, all while telling their own stories.
“YEA was created for young people to create their own shows about the things that are affecting them and matter to them,” King explained. “We were taught that we were professionals, and that when we were doing shows, we had to approach it from a professional level. We came with the mindset of using our own words, using our own voices, using our own bodies, in order to create the show. And we were told and learned that we could do anything, and be anything that we wanted to be…That was a beautiful space to be in, where we got to learn who we were.”
The connection was even more personal for King, whose mother passed when he was 17 years old. “Theatre was an outlet that I was able to use to express my grief,” he recalled.
He continued working with YEA after graduation, beginning to choreograph, teach, and pass down the ensemble’s lessons to the next group of students. At the same time, King was going on auditions, building connections in the Atlanta theatre community, and dividing his time between jobs at Planet Hollywood, All Star Café, and Kroger. He made the decision to jump into an acting career with both feet and forgo higher education.
“I tell people all the time, high school kicked my butt,” King said. “I’m not going to pay people money for four years to kick my butt some more. For me, I do enjoy learning on the job.”
His first professional acting gig paid $500 a week—in a show that opened on Sept. 11, 2001, and closed within the week. There was a silver lining, though: One of the show’s producers was a casting director who asked King to audition for the film Drumline, in which he landed a role. King said that those early experiences taught him to stay grounded.
“I learned to just take a breath,” he said. “I still have to tell myself that even just being in the spaces that I’m in, like, take a breath. It’s okay; you’re here for a reason. You deserve to be here. Don’t let that imposter syndrome kick in…Also, always bring a jacket, ’cause at some point, it’s gonna get cold.”
Justin David Sullivan
It’s hard to believe that & Juliet star Justin David Sullivan didn’t grow up belting out Britney Spears or Katy Perry, as they currently do eight shows a week. But for Sullivan and his two siblings, who were homeschooled, the household soundtrack mostly consisted of Christian pop music (“Kidz Bop: Praise and Worship,” quipped Sullivan, who uses he, she, and they pronouns). Her family was active in her church community, where she first learned to sing. Despite this sheltered start, Sullivan became involved in musical theatre when he enrolled at a public high school. Her first production: Little Shop of Horrors.
“I got bit by the bug and never really looked back,” Sullivan said. “I took every opportunity I could to perform, whether that was talent shows, student assemblies, or whatever. I was singing the national anthem at the basketball games. I just loved it so much.”
Sullivan’s love for the spotlight, though, was at odds with social pressures to hide aspects of their identity as a trans nonbinary queer person. “I knew that I was queer from the moment that I entered this world,” he said. “Having to navigate that my whole life was very hard for me, even as a young kid, and especially going to high school, where you’re constantly forced to be perceived.”
Musical theatre provided her an expressive outlet, even if Broadway aspirations seemed far-fetched at the time, given the limited representation of queer folks and people of color (Sullivan is of Mexican and Korean descent). “I just didn’t see myself reflected in what we were seeing,” they said. “It just seemed so inaccessible for me.”
So did acting training. Sullivan first attended community college for two years and completed his general education requirements, then transferred to UC San Diego, where he earned a BA in Communication and declared an acting minor as a way to take performing arts classes, even though he opted not to complete all the requirements (current in-state tuition there is $18,480). But Sullivan found that their communications classes piqued an interest in social justice and historical movements, as well as providing a practical business mindset that they put to use every day as a working actor. Though she acknowledges that there have been moments when she might have benefited from the rigorous preparation of an acting degree, she doesn’t see her educational choices as a barrier to success.
“If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from being where I am and meeting all the people that I get to meet who are my peers on Broadway,” they said, “it’s that there is no linear path to Broadway. There is absolutely no guidebook. We all end up here from different walks of life, from different training, from different backgrounds, different programs.”
His own path to Broadway was indeed circuitous. Though she subsidized her studies with grants and loans, Sullivan worked all through community college and university to support herself, juggling retail jobs, box office gigs, internships, work study opportunities, and finally a position at a marketing agency in Southern California. They listened to cast recordings during shifts and kept a picture of New York City as the background on their computer to keep the dream alive. And he kept auditioning, but casting offices didn’t know how to place a trans nonbinary performer.
“I was constantly being told, ‘You’re incredible, but we’re so sorry, we don’t have anywhere to put you, we don’t know what to do with you,’” they said. “‘You’re too queer, too brown, you don’t fit in the box.’” But Sullivan turned this heartbreak into fuel. “I made it my mission to show up until I was perfect for what they were looking for—to show up and unapologetically be myself and not change myself to try to fit their mold.”
It eventually paid off. In early 2020, she booked a production of Sister Act, which closed down because of COVID. In 2021, they moved to New York and found representation through an agency showcase. In their first meeting, they were asked which shows they could see themself performing in. He immediately answered & Juliet, a pop jukebox musical headed to Broadway from the West End.
“There was a role in that show that was so perfect for me, and I absolutely needed to be seen for it,” she said. “It was just perfect. I love pop music, and I knew that this character just resonated so deeply with me and my own experiences and struggles.”
It took six months of his agents submitting and lobbying, and one in-person callback, but eventually, in fall 2022, Sullivan made his Broadway debut in the role of May in & Juliet. They have since received plenty of acclaim and attention in the role, but before last year’s Tony Awards they made a historic, and heroic, decision about how they would be perceived: They opted to abstain from consideration for a Tony nomination rather than compete in either gendered acting category.
“I think for so many people, especially young people, who are looking up to these big Broadway stars, wanting to emulate them, and wanting to be just like them,” Sullivan said, “the most powerful, the most special, the most important thing that you can be is yourself all the way through to the bone.”
Maricruz Menchero
As with Abigal Onwunali, Maricruz Menchero’s route to the theatre ran through a speech program: When she participated in a local oratory competition, another contestant’s father encouraged her to audition for a community production of The Music Man. She landed the role of Alma Hix.
As her family moved around Texas for work, Menchero had to choose between high school theatre and soccer. She chose the latter but got tired of “getting injured and riding the bench,” so she headed back to theatre and choir. When it came time to consider college, she opted to study architecture, as her strongest school subjects were math and drawing, landing a spot at the University of Notre Dame (current tuition: $62,693), where she’d attended their Latino Leadership Conference.
But while working at an architecture firm in Dallas after college, Menchero auditioned and was cast in a local production of Les Misérables, rekindling her passion for theatre. She decided to apply to graduate school.
“When I decided I wanted to pursue training, I really didn’t know too much about conservatories—I just applied to grad school,” she said. “Because, as an architect, you go to undergrad, then you go to grad school.” She soon realized, though, that it wasn’t a great fit. “The programs I was looking at—I just wasn’t ready,” she conceded. “I had no formal training under my belt. Most of my experience was in musical theatre, and the programs I was applying to were mainly focused on straight acting and drama.”
Then a chance encounter at a multi-school audition opened a different door. While searching for the restroom, she met the adjudicator for the Stella Adler Evening Conservatory, who encouraged her to audition. She did, got in, and it inspired her to move to New York City, where she worked full time as an architect while studying at Stella Adler (current tuition: $13,000). Though exhausting, it proved to be a financially smart decision.
“It was challenging, I will not sugarcoat it,” she said. “A lot of my friends did part-time gigs; I did full-time. I would be at work from 9 to 6, and then run to Stella Adler from my office, and class would start at 6:35. I was never early. I was on time. And I did that for two years.”
At Stella Adler, she practiced her craft alongside fellow career pivoters, international students, and emerging and established artists, most of whom were in their 20s and 30s, though there were also some in their 50s and 60s. It was after that training that she applied to MFA programs, and was accepted on her second try to the Theatre School at DePaul University (where tuition is currently $38,773, minus a scholarship ranging $14,000-$17,000).
“The audition process was two monologues, one classical, one contemporary,” she said. “They had us do a movement class, and then there was an interview. I so appreciated that they sat down to talk to us, because for a lot of other schools, you’re in and you’re out; it feels like a cattle call, and they don’t fully see you. But I felt like I was fully seen at DePaul.”
While Menchero is grateful for the training, experiences, and mentorship she received during her MFA, she has one note about the curriculum.
“My biggest critique of my program, and any type of acting institution or traditional acting school,” she said, “is that we learn about the craft of acting, but we don’t learn about the business of acting. That has been one of my biggest frustrations.”
After completing her MFA in 2020 and facing an industry closed down by the pandemic, she pursued an extended year of online study with international instructors Benjamin Mathes and Helena Walsh. Walsh’s lessons include techniques to calm the nervous system, familiarize the unfamiliar, and become more attuned to the complexities of an actor’s unpredictable environment, while Mathes’s teaching is designed around passion and career goals, helping actors find alignment between their passions and their purpose for pursuing an artistic life. “I think this was a real gift that came to me during the pandemic, because it felt like the perfect way to top off the training that I had received prior,” said Menchero.
Her first paid acting gig: an LG commercial, which she booked with her father after filming an audition tape from home. When we spoke last November, Menchero was on strike with SAG-AFTRA, so she was focusing on Spanish and English voiceover work and upgrading her at-home studio space. She was also working as an executive and personal assistant in the design department at the Lowell Hotel.
What continues to inspire her? Menchero shared a quote by David Augsburger that she learned from one of her professors: “Being heard is so close to being loved that, for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.”
Sky Lakota-Lynch
Sky Lakota-Lynch grew up right outside of Philadelphia, but didn’t start paying attention to what was playing at the nearby Walnut Street Theatre until much later. Though he attended theatre camp at 5 years old and fell in love with being onstage, he felt the need to bury those passions to fit in with his peers.
“I sort of pushed that down as I got older,” Lakota-Lynch said, “because I did sports and I wanted to be socially acceptable.”
It wasn’t until 11th grade at North Penn High School that he took his first acting class. From there, he absorbed as much theatre as he could in the Philadelphia area and beyond. He was cast in North Penn’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and later landed the lead role of Jimmy in the musical Thoroughly Modern Millie. When retired NPHS theatre director and program founder Cindy Louden saw Lakota-Lynch’s performance, she told him he belonged in New York. She took Lakota-Lynch on his first trip into Manhattan to see In the Heights. After seeing actors who looked like him onstage, Lakota-Lynch realized she was right.
“It seemed like actors sort of dropped out of the sky, like astronauts,” Lakota-Lynch said. “It was just so far from me. My dad is full-blooded Native American; my mom is first-generation Ethiopian. There were no actors who looked like me.”
Lakota-Lynch applied to theatre programs but his coursework didn’t meet the colleges’ academic requirements. Luckily, though, a representative of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy saw Lakota-Lynch’s senior production and offered him a partial scholarship. Lakota-Lynch moved to New York and completed two years of AMDA’s Integrated Conservatory Program, while working three jobs (tuition for the program is currently $46,928).
His next stop was Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre’s two-year conservatory program, which he called “truly life-changing” (current tuition is around $19,000). Students in the conservatory program are evaluated at the end of their first year and must be invited back to attend the second year. The threat of being cut from the program “really kicked any sort of high school mentality out of my system,” Lakota-Lynch said. “It gave me an end goal, which made me really care about my craft. It made me start going, okay, how can I be the best actor? How can I show up as the best version of myself every single day?” Even those who are cut, he said, learn a valuable lesson about rejection, “something that a four-year school or BFA may not teach you.”
When he started out, Lakota-Lynch said, he kept trying to be what he thought casting agents wanted, rather than just showing up as himself. That’s easier said than done, of course. As he put it, “You see the end goal—you see Patti LuPone, you see Jeff Goldblum. It took them a long time to become their own island. I graduated and I was trying to be an island too quickly. I just wasn’t grown up enough; I didn’t know enough about myself yet.”
In 2017, he was part of the ABC-Disney Discovers: New York Talent Showcase, which introduced him to his manager and helped him secure his first job, a recurring role on Netflix’s Iron Fist. Most valuable from the showcase experience, though, was the insight it gave him into the casting process.
“What I learned is that casting is always on the actor’s side,” he said. “They always want to find the person as fast as they can. They’re hoping that you’re going to fit the role, because it makes their job easier. That really debunked all the fear in me about going in and auditioning.”
After Iron Fist, Lakota-Lynch lived paycheck to paycheck until his agent called with an unexpected opportunity: the role of Jared, originated by Will Roland, in Dear Evan Hansen. Lakota-Lynch hadn’t seen the musical but he read the script, fell in love with the story, and felt he understood the character. Lakota-Lynch decided not to see the show before auditioning, hoping to present his own interpretation of the role.
At the audition, he met casting director Tara Rubin for the first time with a gash across his forehead. (He had been accidentally punched in the face on a film set and attempted to cover it up with makeup.) Accustomed to network TV auditions, where actors are encouraged to think on their feet, Lakota-Lynch started improvising. In hindsight, he admitted he probably shouldn’t have experimented with material from a musical that had just won the Tony.
“I went in and I was just improvising and being myself,” said Lakota-Lynch. “The funny thing is, when I showed up to the audition, everyone in the hall was dressed as Jared Kleinman: They were all wearing the glasses and the shirts, and I came in there, tattoo out, just a normal kid. I think that’s what really gave me the edge—that I wasn’t trying to be Will, I was just being Sky.”
Three callbacks later, Lakota-Lynch made his Broadway debut as Jared Kleinman, becoming the first male actor of color to join the cast of Dear Evan Hansen. Lakota-Lynch will return to Broadway this month as Johnny Cade in The Outsiders.
Lakota-Lynch’s advice to aspiring actors is simple, and could apply to other subjects of this article, many of whom who lingered at the stage door and kept their acting dreams on the side until they just couldn’t anymore: “If you stick around the barbershop long enough, you’re bound to get a haircut.”
Alexandra Pierson (she/her) is associate editor of American Theatre.
