We were lucky to catch up with Megan Ketch recently and have shared our conversation below.
Megan, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?
My parents secured my life such that I felt free to be creative. The habit of my creativity I owe to the life they provided me and to their example as creatives. Both my mother and father worked outside of the home – mainly teaching – but also performing, band-landing, running a small business and a non-profit, writing books and community leading. Given the demands of their professional and artistic lives and a devoted older sister who was in charge when we were alone, I had time to entertain myself and safe spaces to exist imaginatively. Being inside my own world cultivated familiarity with – a kind of trust – in my big ideas, impressions and thoughts. Make believe is how I met myself. Katie, my sister and I were expected to be in community with different kinds of people at the university where my dad worked, in our neighborhood, at church, while volunteering or traveling. When I was very young, I was shy but that never stopped my parents from introducing me to new rooms. Most significantly, my parents valued learning and curiosity. At every turn, they advocated for my style of learning, my passions and interests. Being teachers themselves, they acknowledged my progress or its lack – ingraining in me an attunement and responsibility for my own growth that has made me – I hope – a capable observer and participant in my happiness.
Megan, 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?
For folks who may not have read about you before, can you please tell our readers about yourself.
A few words about my person – then my work. I am loyal, decisive and compassionate. I let people – including myself – change. Passion for what I do makes me an able leader. Vulnerability is accessible to me and I admit to my loneliness, fear and uncertainty often. Still, I am readily disappointed by what I can’t control. Accepting that control is illusional is work for me. I meet joy with readiness. I laugh with my whole self and loudly. I am silly. I open myself to moments of invention, honesty and depth. In success and failure, I know who I am. I am harder on myself than anyone else in my life. Thanks to privilege, a degree of tenacity and love, I have spent most of the hours of my life being creative.
As an actor, I received my Masters in Fine Arts at New York University’s Graduate Acting Program. Upon graduation, I led the ABC pilot, Gotham, directed by Francis Lawrence and made my feature debut in the comedy, The Big Wedding. I have played recurring roles on CW’s hit dramedy, Jane the Virgin, The Affair, Reckless, Blue Bloods, The Good Wife and Under the Dome and appeared on Evil and Netflix’s Glow. I played Mindy in the Syfy pilot of Tremors opposite Kevin Bacon and starred in the West Coast Premiere of Cry It Out by Molly Smith Metzler at the Echo Theatre Company. I starred in the world premiere of Bess Wohl’s Continuity at Manhattan Theatre Club and led the CBS summer series American Gothic. I wrote and produced a short film, Remind Me, directed by Rachel Chavkin, that premiered at Venice Film Festival. My other film credits include The Incredible Jessica James and Joachim Trier’s Louder than Bombs. In 2019, I founded Studio, a professional community for actors in Los Angeles to hone their craft through classes, retreats and production. I write a blog – luckisapenny.com – a parking lot for a forthcoming book of essays on sustaining a creative life.
how you got into your industry / business / discipline / craft:
My best friend calls me the limpet which is a mollusk with a shallow shell and broad muscular foot – anatomically designed to cling. My limpet nature is how I entered and how I stay in this tidal business. With suction cup feet, I moved to NY at twenty years old and interned as a casting associate at New York Theatre Workshop, then as a teaching artist for the Women’s Project and finally as a literary associate for Underwood Theatre housed at Ars Nova. With my expired student ID, I saw four to six plays, concerts, dance performances or musicals a week. I worked every odd job to pay rent. I walked the city and I people-watched.
I pined for Graduate school because I went to a liberal arts university that lacked formal actor training. I auditioned twice (two different years) before I got accepted to my dream school, NYU Graduate Acting Program. I signed with my first agents and manager before showcase my third year. Those three transformative years of intensive training opened the door to acting professionally for me, though all the living and trying that proceeded school set the stage too.
what type of products/services/creative works you provide:
I offer actors a sane and safe place to observe themselves in process. I begin my workshops with with questions that actors contemplate and respond to in writing. The questions I ask rarely address acting directly; they are typically about the artists’ relationships to other people, experience and the world. A good ‘actor question’ as I call them, requires an artist’s practical and spiritual attention. With the literature I assign as scene work, every actor receives a challenging and inspiring acting task. I facilitate a group warm-up, thematic readings and rigorous side-coaching through rehearsal. Every actor works their scene every class. Acknowledgement, intuition, and trust are the essential qualities of my direction. Studio is inclusive; newcomers encounter seasoned actors and vice versa. That range of experience and skill is unanimously regarded as a strength. At my best, actors feel at the center of their experience and valued for their wholeness.
what problems you solve for your clients and/or what you think sets you apart from others:
I think the problem of scarcity and loneliness actors encounter in our industry is something I address in Studio. This experience is not one I can solve, but one I acknowledge and relate to and try to reframe for actors. My aim is re-attach actors to their love of acting.
I recently spoke with a writer / producer who is preparing to direct his first feature. He shared that there are names of actors he admires on his list for roles in his film that his Executive Producers (EPs) claim “add no value”. Those EPs are referring to name recognition, box office appeal and celebrity – not the merits of the actors’ talent or ability. Being commodified disadvantages actors to feel insecure about what they bring to the table. Too often, actors supply their talents, ideas, time and resources to an audition and receive no feedback from casting or the project makers. That experience of trying to get an acting can feel transactional and demeaning; cold. Conditioned by that status quo, it’s easy for the working actor to put hers sense of value in the hands of others; to require external validation to know your worth.
I’ve watched actors – for five years now in Studio – get busy loving acting again. Though I have little faith capitalism and its structures are ever going away, I see a growing number of empowered artists as the way to take expression back. A related paradox: we need other people to mirror – not define- our worth back to us. Actors need an audience. Being received is intrinsic to acting. Studio provides an actor a community of passionate and skilled peers who are there to receive and encourage them. I am not the only discerning voice in the room and certainly not the most important. An actor in Studio is met with a room of peers in shared pursuit and given the dignity of their experience in process; this is where loneliness dissipates and honest self-estimation becomes possible.
What are you most proud of:
My family. My husband, Max Deacon, who is a brilliant actor and who I met at a screen test for a CBS pilot ten years ago and our 19 month old son, Leon. My family strengthens my commitment to my dreams. I want Leon and Max to see me reach my potential and to feel proud of my trying. My parents and other adults who modeled risk, investment, commitment and courage towards their creative goals permitted me to do the same with my life. First, I hope Leon discovers something he loves to do and secondly, I hope he thinks, my parents did what they love so I can too.
what are the main things you want potential clients/followers/fans to know about you/your brand/your work/ etc:
I am learning. Studio is a much a laboratory for me as it is for the actors who attend it. I aspire to direct television and film in addition to continuing my career as an actor. When in process with actors, I am in constant observation. If an actor breaks through their perceived limitations, I think about the conditions that made that expansion possible. I am reading constantly – poetry, essays, articles, screenplays, plays (novels when the baby is sleeping well). I draw inspiration from many corners of my life to freshen and challenge how actors think about acting and how they talk to themselves and others about acting. I like to not know. I like to ask questions, to feel innocent to the years I’ve invested in studying and having an acting career. It is a great rehearsal when an actors surprises themselves or when I see an artist do something I’ve never seen them do before.
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
Acting for me – my love of it – arrived early in my life. I think it gave me a way out of feeling self-conscious about the size of my feelings or the power of my intuition and a way into a community of people that felt similarly confined in regular life. My theatre classes were such a balloon over the battlefield of middle and high school. Within character, I could be wise, I could be deceitful, hysterical or shy. I could speak from the heart – sing and dance – I could try on any state of the human condition. And I was safe to try something new and fail. My drive now as an adult – in the 13th mile of her career – is to meet my work with the sense of relief, joy and possibility that I did when I started. I to always see acting (my creativity at large) as a homecoming.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
From acting, I’ve learned how to let my curiosity be bigger than my heartbreak. To embrace uncertainty – even loss and disappointment – is rewarding. I think acting has taught me to enter the rooms of the heart that scare me, to turn the lights on in them and feel my aliveness.
Contact Info:
- Website: meganketchstudio.com
- Instagram: meganketch
Image Credits
Ashley Randall Photography Logan Fahey, Fahey Foto