How To Follow Your Heart
Hard Work + Goals + Determination = Success
“Eli [Wallach] taught me, you never, ever, ever phone it in. You set foot on a stage, you set foot on it prepared, and you give your all to the other people that are there.”
American actor, David Alan Basche, was 11 when he played Tom Sawyer at school and got his first audience laugh. It was a moment that would send him down an unexpected path, and one that would require diligence, hard work, and a lot of goal-setting to achieve the success and creative expression he desired. In this episode, Basche discusses his dogged determination to do whatever was required to be successful in the performing arts, and the long and winding path he took to find it.
David Alan Basche is an American actor who was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, and is best known for playing Todd Beamer in the film United 93. He has appeared in regional and professional theater, film and television including guest appearances on numerous television dramas. His first acting role was in a school production of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer when he was in the sixth grade and he was in several more plays through his school years till graduation. But when starting college, he was a communications major, although it didn’t take long before he switched to performing arts. He has appeared in such films as War of the Worlds, Egg, and I’ll Believe You, and he has numerous television credits to his name such as Lipstick Jungle, The Starter Wife, Law & Order, the Exes, Three Sisters, and Oh Grow Up.
What You’ll Learn from This Episode:
- How Basche’s first stage performance at 11 and his father’s death a few years earlier are connected in changing his life
- The shocking advice he received from a sports coach
- Why he balked at majoring in Performing Arts
- How his widowed mother reacted to his decision to pursue acting
- Why he worked three jobs one summer
- Why he “borrowed” a new suit from a department store and took it back the next day
- Why Basche chose hotel restaurant jobs over burger joints
- The chain of synchronous events on one day that led to his first major commercial
- A peculiar use for instant mashed potatoes
- What it was like to be “wildly inexperienced” and work opposite Eli Wallach in a two-man show
- Why one stage production meant using a restaurant bathroom across the street
- How he felt about his time on “The Exes”
- Why Equity is an important film
- His thoughts on the Creative Coalition
- Why he would prefer not to be a producer again
- What makes independent films so challenging
- His powerful motto for actors and why it matters