We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Katie Wieland a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Katie, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

Thank goodness for my parents. I’m so lucky to have a family who never once questioned my choice to be an artist. Never have they asked me for my back up plan, or what I have to fall back on. When they first put me in dance class, I loved it. I went from taking a couple classes a week to wanting to take 20 hours a week of dance and private voice lessons. My mother was a piano and special education teacher and my father was a UPS driver. They told me that if I could pay for half of it, they could make the other half. I got a job and started paying for lessons. It was exciting to be making money and spending it the way I wanted to. They taught me that I can fix a financial problem. I moved to NYC with no real plan, no job, and enough money for two months rent. It was all very “three bucks, two bags, one me.” But I knew that it was always possible for me to make money in some way. The times I have depleted my savings account while working on an artistically fulfilling job, I’ve been confident I can wait tables or pick up a side hustle to replenish what I need to in order to do it all again if need be. I’m not afraid of going broke and I know when it’s time to pull over for a bit and make some money.

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’m a New York-based actor and acting coach. I grew up in Colorado (Lucky me!) and am one of those “always knew what I wanted to do” types who started singing, dancing, and acting at a young age and stuck with it. I began as a tiny thing in show choirs, then started taking voice and dance lessons. I took a gap year after high school and jumped into the business with an energy only a teenager has. It was one of the best decisions I’ve made, a real“golden year” in my memory where I got to do a million things at once – all of which I loved. I got cast in my first professional shows. At one point, I was playing Liesl in the Sound of Music at a dinner theatre while wearing my costume for Columbia in the Rocky Horror Picture Show underneath so that I could zip downtown immediately after the Sound of Music to make the midnight curtain of Rocky. I was also in a dance company, choreographing musicals for theatre camps and taking theatre classes at the State College. What a great year! Then, I moved to Pittsburgh to study at Carnegie Mellon University. Conservatory theatre programs are intense and unyielding and exactly what I was looking for. I graduated with a BFA in Acting and moved to NYC straight after. I was grateful for the previous lessons in hustle. I stood in line for auditions during the day and waited tables and bartended at night. I quit jobs for regional theatre and begged for them back when I returned to the city.

Along the way, I began coaching teenagers mainly in preparation for their college auditions and eventually, that took over as my steady form of income to complement the unpredictability of acting jobs. This has been extremely rewarding both in being able to help a new generation of artists find and express their artistic voice and keeping mine alive and kicking as well.

For those of you who aren’t intimately aware of the current state of auditioning for theatre schools, it is wild. The students have applications and essay supplements, like any other school. They then have pre-screen auditions which are songs, monologues, and dances that are taped and sent to the programs that require them (most, now). If they pass their pre-screen audition, they are invited to an in person or virtual audition. Some schools, after that, then hold callback auditions. And because of the extreme competitive nature of these programs, many students have upwards of 20 colleges on their list. 20 applications, supplements, and auditions with multiple rounds. For most of my students, it’s their first big taste of rejection and it can be brutal.

They get so many opinions on the material they should present, what they should wear, how they should answer questions, pulling them in so many different directions and making them really question who they are and what kind of art they want to do. The truth is, they will only attend one program. They only need one “yes”. It feels good to have more, but ultimately, you want to end up with the program that wants to help you become the artist you want to be, not the artist they want you to be. The promotion of this idea is I love being an acting coach and what I try to remind myself about my own career. Don’t try and change yourself into who you think the business wants you to be. Don’t take that note you got on your piece in your last audition and apply it to yourself. You are enough. And you contain multitudes!

So, while the world sees me as a lady from a bygone time, a noble with a sense of humor, or Alison Brie’s sister – that’s just scratching the surface. I love performing these types of roles in theatre, film, and tv, but where it gets really exciting is when the surprises come!

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Oooh, the very best thing for me is surprising myself in a role that I have no idea how to approach. This is always when I do my best work. When I’m cast in a role so unlike me that I have to find new way into it. None of my old tricks can save me. I did this wild show a couple years back called the 1599 Project. It was a five hour marathon of a cut down version of all the plays that Shakespeare wrote in the year 1599: Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet, with a cast of six actors. An absolute dream for a Shakespeare nerd like me. I got to play Catherine in Henry V, Rosalind in As You Like It, Julius Caesar himself, and both Ophelia and Gertrude in Hamlet. All wonderful roles that come with their own challenges, but all accessible to me in one way or another except for Caesar. I couldn’t be farther from him. He is a war hero ruling Rome and striking fear into those around him. I’m a funny gal who hates confrontation and loves a cuddle. But because I had no idea how to proceed, I had to jump in in a way that was total and follow any instincts I had. I never questioned it because I didn’t know how. I couldn’t analyze what I was doing because it didn’t seem to make any sense. My brain had to shut off and I just had to dive in. And it was so so fun. And shockingly, successful! Similarly, the last film I did, (Stag, directed by Alex Spieth – check it out!) I was cast as the self proclaimed slut, party girl. Hi! Raised Catholic and two is my limit, thank you. But something about the foreign nature of the role just frees me up to make bigger choices than I normally would and I don’t have time to over analyze them.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

To be a successful actor, you have to be resilient. The bulk of your day to day is rejection and it’s not always polite. You never get the full story of why you didn’t get the role, so it’s hard to get the full picture. In fact, you rarely get any feedback at all, so your brain is often left on it’s own to tell yourself a story of failure that is almost certainly not true. And rejection isn’t always just you didn’t get the job you auditioned for. Sometimes it’s you are requested to come in for an audition that you prepare for and walk in the door only to be told that you are too tall or too brunette or they are actually too busy today to appraise you at all. It’s not personal. But some of them stick with you.

One of these was an audition I had for a prestigious NYC theatre that I was dying to go in for. The role was for an actor who would perform two different characters in the play, a defense attorney in a courtroom scene, and a grieving wife who was trying to have a baby but who’s pregnancies kept resulting in miscarriages. It was heavy subject matter that required a great deal of emotional investment. I had over a week with the audition material, which is rarely the case, so I could really give it the attention it deserved. When the audition day came, I arrived at the studio that the theatre had rented. I was the last audition of the day and they were running very late. I watched as the ballet company, who had clearly rented the studio after them, gathered in the lobby. When I was called in, it was at the exact time their studio rental was up. They asked me to start the lawyer scene and when I got three lines in, they thanked me for coming and said that was all they needed. All that emotional prep for naught for a role I thought I could really give a great interpretation of. It wasn’t about me, they simply had no time. But it felt dreadful and was a hard one to let go.

A great one though, was a role that I was told by the playwright had been written with me in mind. I did the readings and the workshops in the role but knew my chances of getting cast were slim as it was Broadway bound and I didn’t yet have the credits to attract the producers. When I was called in for the understudy I knew I had a shot. I went in and it was the best audition I’ve ever given to date. Hold for laughs! Applause! Showers of compliments! Wow, I’m good! I always knew it! But when the cast was revealed, they decided to go with someone who had understudied on Broadway three times before. Again, not personal. Understudying is an extremely tough and thankless job that is not in everyone’s skill set. From a producing point of view, if you can hire someone who you already know has this skill at the highest level, why would hire anyone else? Even if the playwright did have them in mind? And certainly, she was fabulous. Luckily, this one makes me feel great. I remember the feeling I had leaving the room knowing I nailed this audition and that the reason I wasn’t hired had nothing to do with my talent. It is a business after all!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.KatieWieland.com
• Instagram: @KatieWie
• Facebook: Katie.Wieland.90
• Other: Musical Theatre College Auditions www.mtcollegeauditions.com

Image Credits
Gingerb3ard Men Rivka Rivera