We recently connected with Justin Winley and have shared our conversation below.
Justin, appreciate you joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
My formal theater education began at LaGuardia High School. The time I spent there taught me the skills necessary to bring a narrative to life; not the least of which being research. Even when playing a completely fictional figure, an actor can (and should!) take the opportunity to absorb as much knowledge as possible in the pursuit of embodiment. If I’m playing an ambitious local politician in 1973 Detroit, I’m researching what Detroit was like in ’73. What was the cultural temperature? What were the public needs? How were the Tigers playing that year? Even the most vestigial information is one more opinion for my character to have, and one more neural pathway to assist in my temporary inhabitance of said character. In that sense I learned to make “mental costumes” long before the point of dress rehearsal, and this practice has continued to assist me as I’ve matured in my craft.
Justin, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
If I were to distill what I think makes me good at what I do, it’s that I’m always willing to learn more about it. I can point to educators and mentors throughout my life who helped guide me to the next point of my development. In fifth grade, a literature teacher named Mike Veve bonded with me over graphic novels and sparked my early love for poetry. In eighth grade, a teacher named Peter Valdez who taught literature and math and ran an afterschool film club was the person to suggest I audition for LaGuardia’s drama department and help me prepare. My sophomore year drama teacher Jon Davidson drilled the importance of physicality into me. I’ve gotten where I am in large part because of people who saw my potential. We should all be so fortunate. Because of this, I bring a teachable attitude to every project I’m on.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
I think seeing how my work impacts people is always going to be the greatest reward, especially considering how self-conscious we artists can be. The slightest thing going wrong in live performance—a missed sound cue or a jumped line—could send us into a panic. The white hot ingot in the heart that makes you pause just for a second to adjust but it feels like eternity, and you’re just sure everyone noticed! Countless catastrophic calculations happening in your head as you recover and continue the work. Then the lights cut on at the end of the show and the audience is on their feet in applause, and they come up to you saying how you moved them, how you made their stomach hurt with laughter or their eyes raw with tears, you realize that despite whatever hiccups you still did what you were supposed to do: tell a story.
But just as important and rewarding to me is watching fellow skilled professionals at work, particularly on film/TV sets. The organized chaos of so many technicians, tradefolk, and artists working as a unified body to transmit one creative vision…at its best, it’s almost indistinguishable from magic.
Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?
It isn’t so much a direct lesson, but as an actor you’re implicitly taught to view everyone who looks like you as competition—a perspective which can be deeply problematic for people of color. When I was younger, I noticed a nasty emotional block forming within me that wouldn’t allow me to appreciate or enjoy the work of another young black actor because I couldn’t help wondering why it wasn’t me. Teddy Roosevelt told us that comparison is the thief of joy, and perhaps no words should be held closer to heart for a growing actor than those. If you poke holes in someone else’s boat, you risk flooding the raft that could be raising more people up. And it’s just not a healthy perspective to have, given how quickly this business moves and how many people train years for even a glimmer of opportunity to do what they love doing at the highest, most visible levels. So as my understanding of the industry’s patterns developed (and as I increased my efforts to observe the Golden Rule) I began to curb those thoughts and can legitimately say they’re immensely less frequent than they used to be. As a result, I have today a confidence about my talent and my journey that is much more difficult to diminish.
Contact Info:
- Website: justinwinley.com
- Instagram: _winley_
- Other: Harlem’s Very Own Podcast: https://linktr.ee/hvopod The Media Morgue: https://linktr.ee/themediamorgue
Image Credits
Anthony Lewis, Alle Mims, Justin Pagan