We recently connected with Carsen Schroeder and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Carsen thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

My parents are both creatives and ever since I was a kid, I was always consuming art. Films, Theater, Art Shows, I saw it all, all the time. I don’t think there was ever a point in my life where I wasn’t going to be a creative. I may have thought it would be cool to be a scientist at some point, but I never considered anything seriously besides performing. I actually started in dance, and from the time I was 3-14 years old, I thought I was going to be a ballerina. Not in the cute dream sense, but that I would dance professionally in a ballet company. I think I was 6 or 7 years old when I first started dancing with the Kansas City Ballet school and my mom took me and my sister to see the company perform at the Music Hall in Kansas City. I can’t remember what the show was, but I knew that one day I wanted to be on that stage. I did get the chance to dance on that stage for many years as a student performer, and each year was to work up to being a professional dancer. By the time I was 11, I was dancing almost 6 days a week for at least 4 hours a day. I did summer training programs, it was my entire life. Somewhere in there I did a little community theater and there were always acting elements to ballet. I loved performing in the Nutcracker every year because it was a chance to play a character. When I got cast as Clara in the nutcracker when I was 12, I absolutely knew that it was what I wanted to do with my life, at the time I just didn’t know that it was the acting side of it all that I was in love with.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am originally from Kansas City. I am a middle child and I grew up in a household surrounded by art and creativity. Through dance and high school theater I decided to go to school for acting. I got my BFA in acting form Columbia College Chicago. When I graduated from Columbia it was the very start of the pandemic, so all of my hopes of doing theater were dashed. After about a year after graduation, my partner and I decided to make the move to LA. I wanted to try film and he wanted to expand his music audience. Since being in LA, I’ve worked on multiple projects as an actor, but what I’m most proud of is how I’ve diversified my skills. From being on film sets, I became very interested in writing, directing and producing. I produced my own short film that I wrote, and will be producing my own solo performance piece at this years Hollywood Fringe Festival. I found a love for things behind the camera and offstage. I love acting, but I’m excited that my career has expanded into other avenues. I think it’s very beneficial as an actor to understand how everything around you works, and it’s exciting to make work for yourself. The audition game can be exhausting, and you know yourself better than any casting director, so why not write the roles you want to play.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I think people often are misguided on what it means to be successful as an artist. As an actor, your family is always asking you about when you’ll “make it”. They’re obsessed with the celebrity of it all and think that success comes from being famous, or from being in the top one percent. It can be really discouraging when you’ve just worked on an amazing indie film and you are so proud. Then all people can ask you is “where is it streaming?” or “This is your big break right?” They don’t realize, that the hardest working and most successful actors are not the 1%. It’s the people who are auditioning every day, and booking the day player roles, or creating their own work, or have a short film in a festival circuit. There’s no point when you’ve “made it”, I think success comes from asking yourself if you are fulfilled by the work you are doing and for me, the answer to that is yes.

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

When I was in college, everything was supposed to lead up to this senior showcase before we graduated. We would be auditioning in front of agents and managers, but first you had to audition to be in the showcase. I was a BFA student and it was almost an unwritten rule that the BFA’s all got into the showcase. Auditioning was just a formality, because we had already had to audition to get into the BFA program. When the showcase list came out, I wasn’t on it. Almost everyone else in my BFA class was. Throughout the whole program, our teachers and other students had put all this pressure on the showcase. This was how we would start our careers, and I didn’t make it in. At that point, I had 4 months left of school. I was devastated and I didn’t understand why I didn’t get it. I had experienced rejection left and right, but this was something that I had thought was guaranteed for me. So I had to pivot, I had to come up with a plan and have discipline to do it on my own. While my best friends all got to go to workshops with these agents and prepare for showcase, I did all the work on my own. Then covid hit, the showcase was canceled. All of my friends were stuck with the feeling that I had 4 months prior, but by that point I had done all this work, so I kept fighting and I took all of that effort with me to LA, and I couldn’t be more grateful for that experience, because it makes every win, feel even bigger.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @carsenndaily

Image Credits

Headshots By: Emily Lambert