Born and raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan, lifelong actor James Leo Ryan (whom I know as Jimmy) is energetic, charismatic, and always excited for what’s next. He’s talking to me remotely from his Los Angeles home, which he shares with Rodney, his partner of 13 years.
“I started when I was six,” he tells me. “I saw a school play and knew immediately that I wanted to do it. I took an acting class at this theater in Kalamazoo called the Kalamazoo Civic—this little theater in Kalamazoo where Jerry Mitchell and Jerry Dixon and Marin Mazzie, all of these Broadway people, all kind of trained there.”
Having received some training at the Kalamazoo Civic, Jimmy went on to Denison University, a liberal arts college in Ohio, originally intending to be a theatre major. His plans changed, but his passion remained.
“I decided to be an English literature major,” he says, “but I took all the acting classes and did as many shows as I could. The first show I did there was Butley, with Steve Carell—Steve Carell went to Denison, as well. I was trained there primarily all in plays; I never, ever considered myself a musical theatre person, although I liked it.
“And when I first moved to New York, because I was an English literature major at Denison, I also got certified to teach, knowing I came to New York to be an actor. I taught at a prep school for three years, and I was doing theater at night and during the summer, and then it was my third year teaching, my dad calls me and he’s like, ‘Jimmy…why’d you go to New York?’ and I’m like, ‘I’d like to be an actor, Dad,’ and he’s like, ‘yeah, you’re doing it at night and during the summers…but you’re in New York—do it!’”
I ask him a little about his family—many young performers are dissuaded from pursuing their goals by family members who don’t see value in the arts. Jimmy, however, was fortunate.
“My parents were married and had kids very young, so they really didn’t know anything about the business. But no one ever said, ‘you need to have a back-up.’ They didn’t ever say that; they were just like, ‘you’re gonna be an actor!’”
Reassured that he had support in wholeheartedly following his dream, Jimmy quit his job at the prep school and focused on auditioning—but he still had to pay the bills in the meanwhile.
“I had little jobs: I worked at a mannequin showroom for a bit, and that was kind of fun; I was a janitor for a while, and I was cleaning this really high-end gynecologist’s office—I would come in just as the doctors were all leaving. I was all by myself, so I would listen to music and do monologues while I was cleaning. I did it for a couple of months.
“And I was auditioning for all these shows. All my life, my goal was to be on Broadway—I kept thinking, ‘I just wanna be on Broadway.’ I was second-acting into a lot of shows, you know, when we could do that.”
‘Second-acting’ is the way that many aspiring actors used to see Broadway shows; they would show up to the theater toward the end of intermission and file in with patrons who had gone outside for a cigarette. It’s practically impossible these days, but you can always give it a shot…although there’s a good chance that you’ll draw the ire of an uncompromising usher and get thrown into the street whence you came.
“I paid money to see a show in ’94…and I can’t say what show it was. I always watched the ensemble, and I was watching these people in the crowd scenes, like, looking into the audience! And you know what, something shifted, something changed—like, if they could be on Broadway doing that, I could be on Broadway. And the next audition was for Joseph [and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat], and I said, ‘it’s my turn now—the arrows are pointing at me today.’
“And I got it. It was a national tour. And then, you know, once you get a good job, they kinda treat you a little differently in the [audition] room, they just do. And so it started happening for me.”
It really did. One gig led to another; Joseph led to the national tour of Showboat, which led to Annie, Jimmy’s Broadway debut. He played Rooster, the charmingly villainous brother of Miss Hannigan, the show’s antagonist.
“I had a great time doing it; it was fun. Nell Carter [played] Miss Hannigan, and I became really great friends with Nell—Nell was so fun onstage, and listened, and was so free, which allowed me to be free She was wonderful to me—a great, great person. And she’s passed away now, but she was so nice to me and so giving and gracious, and made my experience fantastic.
“And it just became easier then, when I was in the room, because again, I gotta say: I’m not really a singer, just this character actor who tries to fake his way through.”
Jimmy may call it faking his way through, but whatever he’s done seems to have worked for him.
“After [Annie] I got Les Mis—and that was my dream show. I would do anything to be in it, and meanwhile, here I am, not really much of a singer. When I went in, they were looking for someone to cover Thenardier in the national tour, so I sang my song and I didn’t feel a lot of pressure ‘cause [casting] just knew what I did and what I didn’t do—it always makes me feel less pressure when someone knows me—and I got it. And I was, like, the worst singer in the ensemble, but I was happy to be doing it.”
Jimmy toured with Les Miserables until 2000, when he left the show and moved to L.A. to pursue television work.
“I was doing theatre as well—L.A. theatre primarily and some regional theatre—but I really wanted to do TV, and so that’s really what my focus was for a long time. It wasn’t until I did Peter Pan in 2011 that I thought: ‘I miss it, I feel like I’m kind of getting out of the circle a bit, I haven’t been in New York. And there’s turnover—younger people that are now in casting, and they don’t remember Annie from ten years ago.’ Then I went out with Peter Pan, and I had such a great time being back out on tour again.”
In Peter Pan, Jimmy played Smee, Captain Hook’s sycophantic sidekick—being a grown man in a show about Lost Boys, Jimmy felt like one of the old folks on the road.
“The cast was very young, and here I was, Grandpa Jones, out on tour. So that was kind of a weird thing for me, to be one of the older people on tour. Thank God, all the young people really embraced me, so I had a really fun time. I did that for two years.”
Having been re-bitten by the theatre bug, Jimmy went back to New York. He hadn’t been getting a lot of TV work and felt like a change might do him some good, and he was right—he’d find the TV work he was looking for by letting his passion guide him back to where he’d started.
“I’ll tell you something. As I’ve gotten older, I love it as much as I loved it when I was six. I love auditioning—I get those amazing butterflies. I’m so happy when I see other people in it, and that’s why I’ve taught for years and years and years—I love it when I hear high school kids say how much they love it. ‘Cause I loved it so much in high school and college—no one ever said I couldn’t.
“I didn’t have anybody who was like, ‘no, this is hard. What are you doing?’ No one ever said that to me—it was all, ‘yes, you can. Keep going. Do it.’ And that’s how I feel: I do it. When I went back to New York, I didn’t think, ‘oh, I’m a certain age, I’m not on anybody’s list,’ I always think, ‘why not?’
“The first thing I went in for was Law and Order: SVU. They’d been doing it for twenty years, but I hadn’t been in New York, I wasn’t on their list, they didn’t know me—and then I got it. And then I got two episodes of The Blacklist, and I hope they ask me back for more. My last episode was right before the pandemic hit.”
Jimmy had been in Manhattan for two years prior, apart from trips to L.A. to visit Rodney. Once the pandemic hit, he quarantined until he felt it was safe to travel, and then returned to L.A. for the long term in mid-May.
Since then, he’s been remotely working part-time—teaching through an acting school in New York and coaching privately—while collecting supplemental unemployment benefits that help make ends meet in between educational work. He’s also found some performance opportunities that have kept him active.
“In March, I got a call from a professor of mine from Denison, who said, ‘Jimmy, I’m gonna start a theatre company online and we’re gonna do readings once a week—it’s almost entirely Chicago-based actors. Do you want to be a part of this?’ And I was like, ‘yes.’
“The Ubiquitous Players is what we’re called. We do a new play every week, and it’s grown to now…probably 40 of us. It has been amazing. All things Zoom I know from doing this, tricks of doing Zoom theatre, and it’s really kept me feeling so creative and so proactive. And these people are great—I feel like I’ve gained a whole new community. There’s no pay in that, but man, do I love it so much.”
While love for what we do is standard for most theatre professionals, passion doesn’t pay the bills—so Jimmy’s been lucky to have unemployment to supplement his part-time teaching work.
Extended unemployment benefits provided in March by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act are set to expire before the end of this month, and congressional negotiations on an additional stimulus package are moving very slowly—much to the frustration of struggling citizens. If the government is not able to agree on a deal in time, Jimmy will be one of millions of Americans kicked off unemployment.
While the future is unclear, Jimmy’s maintaining an optimistic outlook.
“I think we’re gonna learn a lot from what we’re doing here,” he says. “I understand that people don’t like [Zoom], but I started embracing it very quickly. It’s not the same as being live, but I embrace the convention. With Zoom theatre, if I were to watch you do a monologue, if there was no screen here, you’d be spitting on me. There’s a certain intimacy—I feel so connected.
“So I feel like we’re learning, those people who have stuck with it. I’d like to show—like, do you have a bottle of water with you right now?” he asks me.
I don’t, but I do have a can of seltzer.
“Hand it to me on the left of your screen.”
I take the seltzer in my hand and pretend to pass it to Jimmy, who reaches past his webcam, grabs a bottle of water from offscreen and takes a sip. The miracle of turning seltzer into water aside, his point is well taken: Zoom (or, in this case, FaceTime) makes long-distance movie magic possible.
“I think that it’s helping people—it’s good practice for people who wanna do TV work: knowing their frame, knowing their background, getting their lighting right, knowing what their angles are. The kids that are younger, who have been doing TikTok, they’ve known for years what their angles are and they’re not self-conscious in front of the camera. When I first started doing TV and they’d film me, I was very self-conscious.
“The pandemic itself is just horrible. It sucks. I don’t wanna downplay the seriousness of the deaths and the illness. But just talking only about the business, I’ve personally found comfort in it being a challenge. I’ve found comfort in: ‘what is this new thing that we’re doing?’ There’s an adventure to this.”
While Jimmy finds a sense of adventure in the current atmosphere of online-only theatre, he acknowledges how difficult this situation is for people who have spent their lives in the entertainment industry.
“I can’t do really anything else—except pack a mannequin for somebody, you know what I mean? Or maybe show somebody to a banquette, dust some light fixtures. But other than that, I’m lucky in the fact that I’m able to teach. People are out of jobs because this is all they know. If I couldn’t teach…honestly, I don’t know what else I would do.
“My unemployment would run out, like many people that I know: young people that had just come to New York, have been there for a year or two, and they leave ‘cause they can’t bartend anymore, they can’t be a waiter, they can’t work at the GAP, they can’t do these beautiful things that gave them the freedom to do what we love to do. Once their money runs out, people don’t have many options.
“I’m doing my Christmas cards now, and the number of people that I’ve lost this year…people that have suffered a lot of loss, and people that I’ve lost to COVID…it’s horrible. My last time on the subway was on March first; last person I actually hugged was on March 8th, until I came back to L.A. and saw Rodney. Didn’t see anybody, except this way,” he indicates our FaceTime call. “I don’t know why I didn’t get crazy depressed.”
I ask the actor if he has any words of comfort to share with people who are struggling, and I get a response from the teacher in him:
“First of all, people should give themselves a break. If you are someone who needs to sit and watch The Crown, and that’s what’s gonna make you happy, then do that. Give yourself a break. People put so much pressure on themselves. If you feel like you want to, keep on learning, keep on reading, go to webinars—have it in the background if you want. When we come back, I don’t want anyone to think: ‘a year of my life is gone.’ I don’t want to feel that. There’re still things that we can learn. And if you don’t, it’s okay too. Even if you’ve done absolutely nothing but breathe. That’s okay. You know what I mean? That’s what got you through it.” ↓
James Leo Ryan is an actor and teacher. If you’d like to learn from him, be sure to check out A Class Act NY, the New York-based acting school where he teaches.
If you’d prefer to look into private coaching, send me a message and I’ll put you two in touch.
Visit the websites for Be An Arts Hero and Save Our Stages to learn more about how the pandemic is affecting the lives and livelihoods of theatre professionals.
And if you’re relying on government assistance to get through the pandemic, I’d encourage you to visit www.extendpua.org to have your voice heard.
Thanks for reading. See you next time.