We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Gage Robinson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Gage, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.
I’ve known from a very early age that I enjoyed making others smile and laugh. I found entertaining my friends and family to be wildly thrilling and rewarding. While I had many endeavors in the arts as a child, it wasn’t until junior year of high school that I realized that being an actor/creative was my ultimate passion and lifeline. I can recall the exact moment in fact: I was given the honor to play the Phantom as a swing understudy in our schools production of Phantom of the Opera. That night as the show launched into its final reprise, I completely lost myself in the art and when I came to and the audience was on their feet, tears in eyes, I knew… “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life”.
From there, I immediately began my search for theatre schools across the nation and wound up at my dream school: The University of Texas at Austin. From there I moved to LA and began my pursuit of living my dream.
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.
Howdy! My name is Gage and I was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. From a very early age I discovered that I had a love for, and a knack for, making others laugh. I always found myself trying to entertain others as often as I could. In high school, I began refining those skills by taking theatre classes which ultimately led to a BFA degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Through and through I am an actor, I love every aspect of it from the meat of the character development to how to best light a scene to portray the right tone. I find joy in discovering new layers of characters in a script and then translating them into grounded, connected scenes. Above all else, I love the team work it takes to produce both stage and film. It takes a village to ensure that all pieces of the puzzle are in the right place and can been seen and heard properly… I call it magic.
My most proud moment comes from my last magic show with the cast and crew of Stupid Games. We shot an 86 page script in 6 days all on a 10k budget. This team had heart, passion, gusto, and of course, MAGIC. As an ensemble cast of 6, it required total buy in and laser focus to pull off shooting 14 pages a day. I am so blessed and so proud to have worked along side such amazing and magical human beings. I love making film…. err.. movie magic as it were ;)
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
For me, the most rewarding aspect of being an artist is knowing (and sometimes seeing) the impact of the art on the audience member. I love the fact that when you watch a movie I acted in, that you were taken out of your own world and got to enjoy the emotions of the story I was helping to tell. And selfishly too, the reward is also the job… acting at times can be quite cathartic and even transcendent. With each new role I play I get the unique opportunity to explore sides of me I never knew I had.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
The 2020 Pandemic was a hard time for most… I was living in LA at the time with a great job and acting opportunities coming left and right, As soon as the country shut down I found myself in a pickle: take the odds of scraping by in LA, or, find an opportunity that may lay outside of the city and come back when you can… I chose the latter and took up a nannying job in Montana for that first summer. From there, I moved back to my college town of Austin, Texas to take a sales job while saving and plotting to get back to Los Angeles. And through dedicated hard work and persistence, I made my way back to LA where I am thriving now more than ever.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @therealgagerobinson_
- Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/gage-robinson-213519aa/
