We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Elijah Noble El. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Elijah below.

Elijah, appreciate you joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

I learned by doing and by watching. It’s funny because people complain that I don’t watch movies like a normal person, but I guess I can’t anymore. I’m always studying, always on the lookout, especially for things I want to improve on. Currently, I’m constantly searching for how to pull back more and more without sacrificing anything of substance.

I also went to school for acting, which gave me the building blocks to set me on my way. Classes on acting for the screen helped me get used to the way I look, the way I sound. It doesn’t unnerve me like it used to. I forgot who but someone once said you have to watch your work like a boxer watches their matches back. See where you went too far, where you didn’t go far enough, where you were disconnected and shouldn’t have been, things like that. It’s important. So I’m glad I’m used to it now.

I think one thing that I think stood in the way of learning more was not really having a mentor type. When I was younger I think I craved that, someone in this field who championed me, believed in me, took me under their wing and showed me the way. But I’m making my way. Things I was promised years ago that never came to pass I’ve managed to accomplish on my own. In an environment where theater professors all played favorites, when you’re that young and hungry you seek out mentorship, but I’m fine without it now. I have a lovely support system and very inspiring, talented friends and peers who have had a hand big or small in shaping how I approach my craft. It takes a village and the love and admiration I have for them I can’t express enough.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am an actor and writer. I’ve been acting since I was 16 and started onstage. My first professional job was a sci-fi series called Electron Blade back in 2017. Created by TK2 Films, it was visually gorgeous and full of talented people in front of the screen and behind it, but for a bunch of different reasons it eventually got shelved and so we all just kind of moved on to other work, but it brought me a lifelong friendship with many people including the person who hired me on, Callie Bussell, a gem of an actress and creative, and a close friend. It truly was a passion project for many involved so hopefully Electron Blade can be unearthed one day.

Around the same time as we were filming that series I found another lifelong friend in Rodriguez Jennings, director and writer of the black and white crime thriller Honour Among Thieves and the upcoming romance short film Sunset Drive.

Back during the summer of 2020 I wrote, directed, and starred as Nico in the romance drama short film Goodnight and Goodbye, about a troubled sex addict seeking out help from a therapist. That film reunited me with Rodriguez who worked the camera and played the therapist and Callie who was my co-lead playing Nico’s conflicted girlfriend, Bonnie. The film screened at venues such as the TCL Chinese Theater for the HollyShorts Film Festival’s Monthly Screening Series, the Cinema Museum in London for Exploding Cinema, Station Beirut in Lebanon for the Lebanese Independent Film Festival, and elsewhere, garnering awards and things like that along the way.

It was quite a special time, the creation and rollout of that film. Having my mother and friends attend the premiere, at that same premiere having a man come up to me after it was over to shake my hand and thank me for making it because it made him think on his own life and struggles. Things like that I won’t forget.

I’ve been in multiple works since then but most recently I had a small role in the upcoming Brazilian thriller Quase Deserto, directed by José Eduardo Belmonte. It’s about immigrants witnessing a murder and stars Westworld’s Angela Sarafyan and the 2004 Silver Bear award winner Daniel Hendler, the latter of which was my scene partner. I felt an immense sense of imposter syndrome being there, but everyone was incredibly lovely and helped me feel welcome.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

At this point in my life, it’s about making things personal to me. With each character I do I try and leave a little bit of my pain or my love, or whatever it is the character calls for, behind in them. In writing, you can write about anything you want and you can get that catharsis. When you’re portraying a character saying words that you didn’t write in a film that you’re not directing, you have to find a way to make it mean something to you, you have to find a way to make it your own. When it comes to me I think there’s, among other things, specifically a pain and a love that I can bestow onto these characters. Perhaps it’s therapy of sorts, for pain I can’t seem to put down elsewhere.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

I was just thinking on this the other day, how far I’ve come when the biggest voice telling me to stop was my own, because I felt it didn’t matter. When I was younger I had my life centered on completely different things and that was all kind of taken away from me in the blink of an eye, and not much mattered after that. What did acting or writing or any of that matter? My dear friend, Meggie Royer, is a poet and in her work she always speaks of not knowing what to do with ones pain, like it’s something tangible. Where do you put it down? How can you hold someone when you’re busy holding that? (I think we get that monumentally powerful visual idea from the legendary poet Richard Siken. We’d probably both admit to being acolytes of his.)

So that’s where I get the figure of speech from here. I think on it a lot. I had all this darkness and all this pain and confusion rotting inside of me, so instead of dying I turned to what I always knew which was writing and acting. I kept going when my own body and my own mind wanted me to stop. Goodnight and Goodbye centered on that theme, keeping yourself open to the good that comes with life, even if it means risking more horrible, traumatic things happening. An earthquake’s always going to come, or a mugging, or oppression, but the sun is also always going to come, so is a butterfly. You have to keep yourself open to the beauty and the good that can come in life.

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