Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Simon Gissler. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Simon, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you have an agent or someone (or a team) that helps you secure opportunities and compensation for your creative work? How did you meet you, why did you decide to work with them, why do you think they decided to work with you?

Early into my time in LA I was working the front desk of a theatre in Hollywood. Utterly dazzled by the new city around me, I’d take tickets from audience members and sign in actors and chomp at the bit, daydreaming about the night I’d be the one performing on the stage down the hall.

In my head I had a checklist of things I needed to get done to make that happen: headshots, agent, reel. “If only I had headshots, an agent, and a reel,” I thought, “then I’d be on the same playing field as everyone else.”

One night I was sitting at that front desk a few minutes before a comedy show, pretending I wasn’t eavesdropping on a conversation happening a few feet away from me in a crowded hallway. The longer I listened, the more sure I became that one of these people who was waiting in line was absolutely, 100%, a real Hollywood agent. In other words, he held the keys to the kingdom.

I didn’t say anything at first. I watched him walk into the show he’d come to see and spent its runtime thinking about what I’d say to him when he came out. When the time came I did my best to politely introduce myself and make it clear that I was new to the city and in the market for an agent and that I’m so sorry for listening in on you guys, but I heard you say YOU’RE that thing! Here let me write down my phone number and email address for you on this scratch sheet of paper! Agents need actors, right? I’m one of those! We might be great for each other! Here!

He stopped me before I could finish writing “@gmail.com,” shooting an embarrassed glance at his friend who was smiling and trying to get out the door. He kindly wrote down his own address and told me to send over my materials. Yeah, maybe we would be a good fit. I thanked him, he left, and I never emailed him.

I had nothing to send him.

No reel, no headshots. I told myself that I’d make gathering those things my main objective so that the next time a chance like this came I wouldn’t make such a fool of myself. Buuuuut I’d just recently gotten into exercising so maybe if I waited just a little longer I’d look better for my headshots. I want to show off my best self right? And the footage I have of myself doing film projects in college doesn’t look all that great, so maybe I shouldn’t try to throw together a reel just yet.

I got slimmer and I didn’t get pictures taken because I felt I could still look better. I got footage of me from doing little indie short films here and there and I didn’t edit them into a reel because I told myself if I waited a little longer I’d have better footage soon. You only get one first impression, yeah? Gotta showcase my best self.

It’s been more than 6 years since then. I still don’t have an agent. I tell myself it’ll happen when it’s meant to., that maybe someone will refer me or something. Heck, some friends have offered, and for some reason I hesitate. I’m almost always busy on some creative project or another. They tend to be things that I make myself or that friends just ask me to be in. It’s funny how a thing that I told myself was so important stopped being something I deliberately pursued. I don’t feel like I’m in such a rush. Do good work consistently, I think, and maybe it’ll speak for itself. I won’t pretend to know if that’s true, but I choose to think it could be.

Simon, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Hey! My name’s Simon Gissler. I’m a Los Angeles based actor, but in the pursuit of acting I accidentally became a ton of similar things too. These days I’m also a comedian, writer, and filmmaker. It’s hard to say which one I’m the “most” because I think they all feed into each other.

I got my start doing school plays and then going through a traditional theatre college at a university back home in Nebraska. When I got here to LA almost 7 years ago, a friend introduced me to the Hollywood branch of the Second City comedy school and I really loved it. I ended up interning there in exchange for free improv classes until Covid killed the place. From that experience, even though I didn’t enter this field explicitly with the intent of focusing on comedy, I sure ended up running in a direction that keeps coming back to it.

These days after a bit of disillusionment with the traditional Hollywood approach of auditioning for other people’s projects en masse and crossing my fingers that they pick me out of a thousand man lineup, I’ve kind of shifted gears to a mindset of picking myself instead. I make small indie films and put up live shows very cheaply, tapping hardworking, talented personal friends who I think would have fun and also get something valuable to themselves out of the experience. I reach out to people who’ve wanted a chance to take a stab at certain positions on set they might not normally get to and I hit up friends who I have a hunch would be good at playing characters maybe a little different from the ones they’re usually type cast as, but most of all I work with people who I just genuinely love hanging out with.

…And then I put myself in them too (maybe to the detriment of the end product) because I’m also a performer and I’m not going to just let everyone else have all the fun.

I know that I’m surrounded by talented artists who I love dearly and in an industry that these days somehow feels both oversaturated and stagnant at the same time, I take a lot of pride in doing my best to help create opportunities for the friends I *know* are awesome to share themselves. Together we’ve made projects that make me really happy: a Christmas cabaret in a friend’s backyard, a film about me falling in love with a plastic skeleton, a sketch comedy show about dirt. They’re funny, very weird, often unexpectedly heartfelt and covered in the fingerprints of people I love.

By myself I’m a character comedian. It’s a sub genre of comedy where performers basically do a funny monologue while pretending to be someone other than themselves. They give me a chance to experiment with maniac ideas for silly moments that don’t need to have enough gas in them to justify me roping in a lot of other people to make them happen. I don’t think that makes them worse. They scratch a different itch than big flagship projects because I don’t have time to overthink them. Plus, pretending to be a picky tour guide or an edge lord tooth-powered superhero by myself for a few minutes at a late night hole in the wall show in a roundabout way DOES make me feel deeply connected to a community. Usually I’m in a lineup of people doing more or less the same thing, and seeing them take turns getting up from the audience and trying to make each other laugh feels like such a beautiful reminder that even though we’re all on our own journeys, none of us are really in this thing alone.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Aside from my usual mantra of “Make dope s*** with good people,” I always say I want to make the kinds of things a kid in the Midwest could watch on their laptop. Growing up in a relatively small town in Nebraska, I knew I wanted to be an actor, but it was a dream that felt far away. I had a bit of a love-hate relationship with Broadway. It felt alienating to me being told that the best theatre in the world was happening there, but knowing that I probably wouldn’t get to see it. To see a play on Broadway you either need to live in New York or be able to have the time and resources to go there. It’s a luxury.

So I coped and told myself that it wasn’t for me. Instead a lot of my favorite things I watched during formative years weren’t even TV shows but ended up being web series on YouTube made by regular determined and creative people with a shoestring budget. BlameSociety Films out of Madison, Wisconsin was a huge inspiration to me. They made a goofy show about Darth Vader’s younger brother Chad running a small grocery store, and it’s clear that they just shot it in their hometown with their friends. Shows like Martin Billany’s Yu-Gi-Oh Abridged, Felicia Day’s The Guild, StarKid, and countless more showed me that you don’t need have a massive studio, or to be born in one of a few specific cities to make shows that are awesome and meaningful to the people who see them. Their art made me feel connected to the world outside my state, and the reason any of them found me as a high schooler is in no small part due to the fact that I was able to watch them online for free.

I want to be for other people what those shows were to me. I don’t think any live show that I’ve set the price to has cost more than a regularly movie ticket would be, and often they’re way less (I am prepared to eat these words someday when the reality of a production bankrupts me). Maybe it’s a little preachy to say, maybe it’s obvious, but I think art is for everyone. I don’t want money to be a thing that stops people from seeing the things I make, whether it be in person or online. And just as much- I want people to walk away from seeing my stuff feeling like maybe it wouldn’t be so hard for them to get a couple friends together and make something too.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I don’t make a living- or usually any money at all- doing the things that I think of being related to my profession. I work a relatively low paying day job with what I’m sure must be below average hours. I’m not being backed by family or independent wealth in any greatly significant way. For the past six years, I’ve worked retail jobs, concession stands, PA gigs, summer camps and children’s after school programs.

I live in Los Angeles because I knew that this place would give me more opportunities to be involved with the world I wanted to be a part of- and it has. But it’s incredibly expensive, and pairing that with the kind of jobs I tend to hold means that I really do struggle. I think most people out here do. It’s kind of weird marrying the idea of those truths with the fact that I’m a college graduate. I took the loans, did the whole four years, got the degree, all of it. Nothing I went to school for has meaningfully helped pay for my education, let alone my rent.

I feel like if I really wanted to become financially secure, I could make that happen. I’m not saying it would be quick or easy, but I think I’m a smart and determined kid. Objectively, *some* people get to have decently paying salary jobs at companies where they work nine to five or something like that- why not me? Well, I think I tell myself that a higher paying job would want a higher commitment. They’d own me. They’d want me to prioritize the job that’d give me stability over the things that make life worth living. I could have had a desk job back home in Nebraska. If I just do that here and come home dog tired with just a enough strength and time to recover for the next day of work, then what was it all for?

I work part time jobs and scrape by with the thinnest margin for financial error because then I can spend time before or after my shifts making art: writing, rehearsing, learning lines, exercising, doing shows, shooting little films. If I have an opportunity to work on something that I know will feed my soul, I feel like I reliably stand a chance of being able to get out of work for it. I may have to hustle, pick up a shift, and make some ground back later, but I won’t regret what could have been. Or if the creative work has to come after a shift at my day job, less hours means I know I’ll still have the energy to give my best self to the work that means the most to me. This decision almost guarantees that I’ll be poor and tired for a long time (maybe forever). But if the thing I get in return is a chance to live a life without “what-ifs”, it feels like an easy choice to me.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @simongissler https://www.instagram.com/simongissler/?hl=en
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@simongissler
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@simongissler

  Cocoa & a Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d1k1U-_QU4&t=3849s&pp=ygUQY29jb2EgYW5kIGEgc2hvdw%3D%3D

  Plastic Bones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCrO8LAB9-U&t=17s

  Voyage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1zTys6uQic&t=257s

  Email: sigissler@gmail.com

Image Credits

Joshua Contreras, Ethan Gathman, Levi Wicked, Lori Lusk, Cozi Orlen.