We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Luca Fontaine. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Luca below.

Hi Luca, thanks for joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

I was born in Paris from a French father and an Italian mother. They have always been supportive of anything my brother and I wanted to realise and achieve. I started taking acting classes when I was in high school even if I had secretly always been drawn to stories and make belief. I remember since an early age being amazed by movies and the way stories were told. The one thing that always amazed me was how I would forget evertyhing else everytime I’d step in front of a movie screen and mainly how believable were these people who were ‘actors’. My brother had started doing some theatre with school and I had secretly always wanted to do some. One day my mom put me in an acting class and it all started from there. Here I am today having graduated from Juilliard.
I don’t think I could have done anything different. I just needed time to realise certain things. All the time lost and the “failures” and successes were necessary to achieve anything. They are part of a learning process, of life.
The main and essential thing to me is always being curious. Always asking why. With this comes resilience. Resilience comes with strength which is built with support from loved ones but also character and adversity. It’s all necessary.
A big amount of people will always try to discourage you from doing things that you love because they don’t see it possible but in the end I’ve received much more love throughout my life then the opposite. I got lucky. And you need luck in this business and in life.

Luca, 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?

I grew up in a bicultural family (french/italian) where music, movies and books were an essential part of our everyday life. We were always encouraged to be curious, ask why and question things. That to me is the greatest gift anyone could receive. I also remember growing up that my grandmother would tell me stories about her childhood and how she wanted to become a singer but, being from portuguese immigrants in France, she was never allowed to. That pushed her to show me movies and talked to me about music. At home we would play guitar with my dad, watch movies and talk about everything with my mum. They always pushed me and my brothe to do what we wanted but do it well. My brother is a great musician, band manager, dj and producer and I chose the acting path. I started with acting classes in my neighborhood as a teenager. I had always loved acting and more specifically the cinema. My parents took me nearly every weekend to the DVD rental kiosk which was only a few minutes away from our house. It was paradise. We would go on a Friday afternoon and pick 2/3 dvd’s for the weekend and when we would do that I knew it was going to be a good one. There was something so holistic and nearly spiritual going through those hallways looking for the right movie to watch. That is a feeling I would have and still have whenever I go to a movie theatre. Sitting next to other strangers, in the dark to share a piece of art.
My mom was the one who put me into an acting class first. She is also the one that convinced me to audition for Juilliard. I was watching a documentary about the school and I had heard countless times about it before but I had always seen it as something unachievable. I had parents who believed in me more than I believed in myself at the time. I ended up auditioning the first time, I made it to the last 50 but didn’t get in the final class. It was a tough moment but again, my parents pushed me from Paris to move to London to live abroad, practice my english and get life experience. I lived for nearly 3 years in London where I did a movie in Budapest (Hungary) and a play before auditioning again. This time it worked out. And here I am more than 4 years later having graduated from Juilliard, having already had a job on Off Broadway one week before graduation.
I’d say for me blissfull happiness is to see the pride in the eyes of the people I care about, in that case my parents whom I would have never done all this without. And this is only the start.
The fact that I grew up in a bicultural family with already two languages from a young age, always pushed me to be curious about others. My greatest strength is my curiousness. I think we get to really know a culture by their language, their food and their music. Over time I learnt English and Spanish. I got all that by traveling and taking risks by just going out there. That’s what is exciting in this acting life, you always have to ask why, be curious and discover new things. You cannot settle down and wait. You have to know the world and its people.

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

I auditionned for Juilliard in 2015 I believe. I was coming from the countryside to the big apple. A dream come true. I managed to get into the last 50 people callback after multiple auditions over months and out thousands of applicants. In the end it didn’t work out. To get so close to a goal that you thought was not possible years before was so hard to accept. After that and with my family pushing me to do so, I moved from France to London. It was a new country, a big city, a new language with a new culture and I didn’t know much. I stayed on a friend’s couch for a few weeks while looking for a place. I had a job but I didn’t have an apartment yet or bank account. I had to start from scratch. The first year was maybe the hardest year of my life. Everyone in the city has their own business to focus on. You feel like you are surrounded by people but the loneliest you can be. I wasn’t in a good headspace to be creative. I was taking acting classes in various studio and could have met many more people but I think I needed that year to learn and grow. Eventually my mentality changed and instead of looking of what I didn’t have I started to look around and opportunities that were there that I couldn’t see. From then on it was a game changer and I started to appreciate the city and its life way more. Also funnily enough work opportunities came along. I think people feel energies and you want to be around a creative positive energy. A year later I got accepted into Juilliard. In the meantime I had had many experiences and met wonderful people that helped me to get where I am today. Everything is a learning experience and you never waist any time even when everything seems to go the wrong way. It is just how you look at it and in the end it builds up your strength as a person and as an actor in my case. As my Italian grandmother would say “Be patient, opportunities will come.”

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

We should be more helpful, considerate and understanding of artists and creatives. Especially when it comes to administrative and day to day things like renting a place, opening a bank account, insurance, paperwork etc. It is such a beautiful but complicated busines to explain to non artists because we only consider success by prices and hours done. People forget that behind that there are countless hours of trials and error, research, epxeriences etc. A life of an artist is 24/7 when he/she/they work and all the rest too. I know that growing up in France, in the minds of people, acting is not considered as a ‘real’ tangible thing to do. Once you start to succeed and result come then people realise that it can be. I wish we would support artists from the beginning and give them the necessary tools for succes whatever that means to them, like I have been given. A lot of artists are doing things on their own and it would be great to see more coalitions even organised by theatres, production comapanies, anything to get people together and give them that first little push they need to start working with other people. During my time in London, many theatres were organising workshops, meetings, gatherings during the day in order to give tools to artists but also to get them to meet like minded people. Theatre is also much more affordable there and you’d always meet fellow actors and artists when you’d go there before or after a play or a movie because they had the stuctures for it. I would love to see more of that. There is so much talent and creativity around and some people just need a little push/help in order to start things going and thrive.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.lucafontaine.com
• Instagram: lucafontaine
• Other: https://www.juilliard.edu/drama/4yr/group-51/luca-fontaine https://www.imdb.com/name/nm8026686/

Image Credits
T Charles Erikson Donatella Basso