This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Leah Walsh: Hi, and welcome to The Compass, the podcast documenting the struggles of life as an artist.

[0:05] Leah Walsh: I'm Leah Walsh.

[0:06] Leah Walsh: My guest today is Nick Westrate.

[0:09] Leah Walsh: Nick is an amazing actor.

[0:10] Leah Walsh: We went to Juilliard together just for a year.

[0:13] Leah Walsh: He was a fourth year when I was a first year, and he was always so welcoming to me.

[0:17] Leah Walsh: He's had an extremely varied career since he left.

[0:20] Leah Walsh: He's done such wonderful theater work and is now working more in TV and film.

[0:25] Leah Walsh: And he's also become very active in working with our union, Actors Equity.

[0:30] Leah Walsh: He's been very involved in the Fair Wage Onstage movement, which we'll talk all about in this conversation.

[0:36] Leah Walsh: I just want to say thank you to Nick.

[0:38] Leah Walsh: Frankie and I are about to move, and I was a little bit scattered the night of this interview.

[0:42] Leah Walsh: So thank you for putting up with me.

[0:44] Leah Walsh: And also we recorded this at Nick's apartment with his lovely cat, so you might hear a cameo from her.

[0:50] Leah Walsh: Have a great week, everybody, and I hope you enjoy the 114th episode of The Compass.

[1:06] Leah Walsh: But you know, I always start by asking, what do you do to try to keep from going to the dark side as an artist?

[1:13] Nick Westrate: Yeah, um, I mean, I think that that question, as I've listened to the podcast, is um I'm a fan of it.

[1:21] Nick Westrate: Um I think that that question uh is either how do you keep from going to the dark side when you're not working, or how do you keep from going to the dark side when you are working?

[1:30] Leah Walsh: Yeah, whatever it brings to mind first and like what the dark side is for you most often.

[1:36] Nick Westrate: Um the dark side for me usually has to do with uh when I'm not working.

[1:42] Nick Westrate: Yeah.

[1:42] Nick Westrate: And I'm pretty um unhappy about that and that dark place you get to where you think that oh, this was all a big joke.

[1:49] Nick Westrate: Like I pulled a fast one over on a lot of people for 10 years.

[1:53] Nick Westrate: And now they've all come to realize that when you're full of shit and you're never working again.

[1:57] Leah Walsh: Right.

[1:58] Nick Westrate: So, um it for the first, I mean, I would say for the first seven or eight years of my career, it was easy to get away from the dark side because it was only about survival.

[2:10] Nick Westrate: I was just trying to survive.

[2:12] Nick Westrate: I had so many jobs, I worked so many hours in restaurants and did so many plays for very little money that it was just a it was just keeping up, just being able to go to sleep, wake up and hit all the marks.

[2:26] Nick Westrate: Was I was so it was so crazy to do that because I don't come from money, um my parents you know don't help me financially, and so uh it was just tough.

[2:37] Nick Westrate: And then when I got out of that, I had to find how do I stay creatively inspired while I'm not working, and that I've I found two things that have helped with that.

[2:49] Nick Westrate: One is um to support my friends and my peers and my colleagues to kind of like champion them when I'm not working.

[2:56] Nick Westrate: I actually find helps me a lot, you know, to get out of myself and to celebrate other people.

[3:02] Nick Westrate: But the other thing I've done for a long time is work on um union activism for the past couple years with uh an organization called Fair Wage Onstage, and that is an amazing I'm finding that union involvement, and I'm on a bunch of committees at equity.

[3:18] Nick Westrate: It's a really great way to spend my downtime where I feel like I'm investing in my future and investing in other actors, and it's kind of my political action by being super local.

[3:30] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[3:31] Nick Westrate: You know, and progressive politics always started in the union hall, and so I just work on that stuff, and that keeps me very busy, and most of the time keeps me away from the dark blacks.

[3:43] Nick Westrate: I'm still within the community, yeah.

[3:45] Nick Westrate: And still within the community.

[3:47] Nick Westrate: And you meet loads of other actors with who are from different places who didn't go to Juilliard like us who don't just do plays like we or you know, straight acting like we do, you know, who sing, who are in choruses, who are stage managers of Broadway musicals.

[3:59] Nick Westrate: You know, it's really interesting to hear what their lives are like.

[4:02] Leah Walsh: What first got you involved with that?

[4:05] Nick Westrate: Um, I was at um an equity meeting actually giving uh I was presenting an award to my friend Tina Banco, and um uh it was at around the time the touring the touring contracts were really fucked up, and there were all these young performers who were had basically stormed this meeting to be like, why the fuck are our contracts so bad?

[4:29] Nick Westrate: And it was really overwhelming.

[4:30] Nick Westrate: And I ran into this guy, Carson Elrod, who's an actor, and he we got in the elevator at equity together afterwards, and he was like, What if we did that with like the off-Broadway people?

[4:40] Nick Westrate: What if we just all got together and and yelled at the union a bunch?

[4:43] Nick Westrate: Do you think we could get more money?

[4:44] Leah Walsh: And I was like, maybe.

[4:46] Nick Westrate: And so then we just started calling people and inviting them over to Carson's living room, just anyone we knew who worked off Broadway a lot, and we all sat around and just like wrote down a list of all the fucked up things that were going on, and then we did that a couple times, and then we went into equity and we're like, hey, this is all the stuff that was going on, and they didn't know because there were two problems.

[5:05] Nick Westrate: There was like um people who worked off Broadway were too poor, too grateful, and too afraid to complain.

[5:13] Nick Westrate: And the people at equity weren't asking if everyone was okay.

[5:17] Nick Westrate: They just kind of assumed, oh, we just thought you guys liked working for $464 dollars a week.

[5:22] Nick Westrate: But because the has some problems with it already.

[5:25] Leah Walsh: Sure, sure.

[5:26] Nick Westrate: But people weren't speaking up about it.

[5:28] Nick Westrate: Yeah, and I think that there's a lot of mentality about being grateful for the work.

[5:28] Nick Westrate: There's a lot of mentality about being paid in exposure, which turns out you can't pay your rent and exposure.

[5:41] Leah Walsh: That's true.

[5:41] Nick Westrate: Um there's a lot of, you know, and you think that at first, and then you do it long enough and you realize that there are people who've been making careers out of this, and you're like, How the fuck did it happen?

[5:53] Nick Westrate: Yeah, because there's no guarantee.

[5:54] Nick Westrate: Like they you say it's exposure, but there's no guarantee that oh, if three off Broadway plays equals one Broadway play, and then that equals another Broadway play, and like it just doesn't work that way.

[6:04] Nick Westrate: And my own story was I did four broad off Broadway plays consecutively, and in that year I won a drama desk award for it.

[6:11] Leah Walsh: Right.

[6:11] Nick Westrate: And I declared bankruptcy a few days after the drama desks.

[6:14] Nick Westrate: Which and I've been really open about that.

[6:16] Nick Westrate: But I think what happened with that Fair Wage On Stage movement was a lot of us finally talked about it, and we all just opened up our bank accounts to each other and we're like, they're all empty.

[6:25] Nick Westrate: And that kind of erasing of financial shame helped us solve the problem because we sometimes as actors like to jockey and pretend um everything's great.

[6:36] Nick Westrate: Yeah, and we're doing really well, and we present that as armor, and we think that that makes us more appealing.

[6:43] Nick Westrate: And I've actually found it just makes you less honest.

[6:46] Nick Westrate: Yeah, and doing that all the time actually is like hurting my work and being honest about it.

[6:51] Nick Westrate: It's exhausting to pretend you're doing well.

[6:53] Leah Walsh: Yeah, that's partly why I started this podcast.

[6:56] Nick Westrate: Really?

[6:56] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[6:57] Leah Walsh: Wow.

[6:57] Leah Walsh: Because I felt like people were just walking around saying, like, oh, I'm great, auditioning, everything's great.

[7:03] Leah Walsh: You're like, this is fucking hard.

[7:06] Leah Walsh: Why are you all faking it?

[7:09] Nick Westrate: Yeah.

[7:09] Nick Westrate: And we talk really.

[7:10] Nick Westrate: It's really fucking hard.

[7:12] Leah Walsh: Yeah, and we but a lot of a lot of people in a in lots of professions have that kind of secrecy and like shame about money, and you're not supposed to talk about it.

[7:19] Nick Westrate: And what's happening now that we're seeing in the news currently with the teachers in West Virginia and Oklahoma and Kentucky is that because of social media, when people are talking about it more, and that was true with us with Fair Wage, because the social media we're talking about it, and it's not you we can affect change in our unions uh in a much different way than we used to be able to, you know, and that's really exciting.

[7:44] Nick Westrate: And these teachers on these wildcat strikes are proving that.

[7:46] Nick Westrate: I mean, their union leaders told them to go back to work, and they said, No, that raise isn't good enough.

[7:52] Nick Westrate: And we need supplies for our schools.

[7:54] Leah Walsh: Well, and the fact that uh we across the country know about it and we're talking about it.

[7:59] Leah Walsh: Yeah, we know all about it.

[8:00] Leah Walsh: We know uh within an instant, and we can support them, we can donate, we can give five bucks, we can give two bucks, you know.

[8:08] Nick Westrate: Um, it's extraordinary.

[8:10] Leah Walsh: So what are you guys what is it what are your efforts looking like now?

[8:13] Nick Westrate: Because I know some things have already been implemented.

[8:16] Nick Westrate: Yeah.

[8:18] Nick Westrate: We got a huge, huge raise um in off-Broadway salaries.

[8:22] Nick Westrate: I mean, up to eighty-three percent and the largest space at the public theater, which is really exciting.

[8:28] Nick Westrate: And a lot and I have to say, like a lot of artistic leaders really, even though we're negotiating across the table and so on, a lot of them really showed up and heard us when we said there was a problem and responded in a really great way.

[8:43] Nick Westrate: Um, so you know, we got a bunch of people elected to the equity council, and we're doing that again right now.

[8:48] Nick Westrate: There's another election right now, everyone should vote.

[8:51] Nick Westrate: And um, so that's a huge part of it.

[8:54] Nick Westrate: It's a representative democracy, it's super accessible um to run for something, and we also just sit on a lot of committees, and in the committee room, you can affect change really, really quickly.

[9:05] Nick Westrate: You know, that's where you decide a theater will come to the union and say, Oh, we don't want to do this, this, and this that's part of the contract.

[9:12] Nick Westrate: And in the committee room, we look at that theater and see if they have a legitimate reason to ask for that concession, or if we think, no, we would like our members to have that money, or we would like them to have that extra ten minutes on a break or something, you know.

[9:26] Nick Westrate: And it's it's long work that's unpaid, but you actually feel like you're making a difference during this downtime when you're not working.

[9:34] Leah Walsh: Right.

[9:35] Nick Westrate: Yeah.

[9:35] Nick Westrate: And I was out of work for six months this year, and then you know, I'm out of work all the time.

[9:40] Leah Walsh: Yeah, everybody is.

[9:41] Nick Westrate: Yeah, constantly.

[9:42] Nick Westrate: Um yeah, that's really exciting because I I'm looking forward to it all coming to fruition.

[9:47] Nick Westrate: Because I have to like recently I've had I had conversations with two friends who just are finishing or finished amazing shows off Broadway, and both of them made the comment of like, God, I'm fucking broke.

[10:01] Leah Walsh: Yeah, yeah.

[10:02] Nick Westrate: And they were like finishing up a contract of something that was an amazing piece of art at a really well-respected theater.

[10:07] Nick Westrate: I'm just like, probably with a really nice lobby.

[10:10] Leah Walsh: Wrong.

[10:11] Nick Westrate: Yeah.

[10:12] Nick Westrate: We have to change the conversation.

[10:14] Nick Westrate: Um and the the people when people are raising money and uh they need to make workers a part of that conversation, and not just buildings, and we need to make stage managers and actors part of that conversation because we have a lot of grants for playwrights, we have a lot of grants for directors.

[10:31] Nick Westrate: But that's for me, it's a greater question of uh the structure, the power structure of the theater in general, or the film and TV world where the performers are put in last and we have to adapt to everything else that's happening, and we're the last thought of.

[10:47] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[10:47] Nick Westrate: And that's gotta change, you know, and that and that's an economic thing and it's an artistic thing.

[10:55] Leah Walsh: Do you have any other creative outlets that you tap into when you're between jobs?

[11:00] Nick Westrate: Are you a writer or I'm I'm not really a writer.

[11:03] Nick Westrate: I started write writing something with a friend this year, and I find it to be incredibly difficult.

[11:07] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[11:07] Nick Westrate: But we're having fun.

[11:08] Nick Westrate: Um I have I'm working on the second piece that I'm kind of directing, putting together.

[11:14] Nick Westrate: I did one with a friend of mine, Dane Laffrey, who's a set and costume designer.

[11:19] Nick Westrate: He and I directed this Three Sisters over the course of many years um with a group of amazing actors, and we ended up just doing it in a house in New Jersey for maybe 25 people.

[11:32] Leah Walsh: I wish I could have seen one time.

[11:34] Nick Westrate: It was really it was really sp it was I always say it was like the best day of my life.

[11:38] Nick Westrate: Um but we had i it's that thing that very actor cliche thing about Chekhov when you work on it that long and you know each other this well and you know the characters that well, like how deep you can go.

[11:50] Nick Westrate: And then I'm starting to work now with my friend Aishaan Chellick on this Orpheus descending piece.

[11:56] Nick Westrate: That's um, you know, we're we just start working on it and then we put it together and uh it's uh actor focused and it's a lateral rehearsal process that is mainly that is mainly just it's focused on the actors, and then we're going to go back and have designers come and watch and have a couple theaters who we're interested in working on it with come and watch the work of these incredible actors who've been working on it now.

[12:23] Nick Westrate: I think we we're gonna go into our third workshop in May, and uh yeah, so I do that and I read a lot of uh fiction.

[12:32] Leah Walsh: Yeah, what kind of fiction do you like?

[12:34] Nick Westrate: Or do you read all sorts of things?

[12:36] Nick Westrate: Oh yeah, I read a lot of things.

[12:37] Nick Westrate: I really love David Mitchell, who's an author who wrote Cloud Atlas and um A Thousand Autumns of Jacob Dezute.

[12:44] Nick Westrate: Um I've really fallen in love with a short story writer named Lucia Berlin.

[12:48] Nick Westrate: Um I just I'm really um oh, who is that?

[12:52] Nick Westrate: Um, who wrote Olive Kitteridge, Elizabeth Stroud.

[12:55] Nick Westrate: I really love.

[12:56] Nick Westrate: Yeah, I'm reading a great book right now called The Essex Serpent.

[12:59] Nick Westrate: I have a couple little book clubs with different groups of friends.

[13:02] Nick Westrate: I have a book club with a friend that's just about true crime.

[13:05] Nick Westrate: We just finished Anne Rule's The Stranger Beside Me and Michelle McNamara's um book about the Golden State Killer, which is called I'll Be Gone in the Dark, which is amazing.

[13:15] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[13:16] Leah Walsh: Do you feel like you're in New York for the long haul at this point?

[13:21] Nick Westrate: Yeah, yeah.

[13:22] Nick Westrate: I love New York.

[13:23] Nick Westrate: Yeah.

[13:23] Nick Westrate: I love being in New York and I love living here.

[13:26] Nick Westrate: I I don't think I don't think I could exist without being around theater and being around people who see plays and read plays and not being able to see plays would make me crazy.

[13:38] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[13:39] Leah Walsh: Because you grew up in Minnesota.

[13:41] Nick Westrate: Michigan.

[13:41] Leah Walsh: Michigan.

[13:42] Nick Westrate: I knew that.

[13:43] Nick Westrate: Michigan.

[13:43] Nick Westrate: I don't know why I decided myself.

[13:45] Nick Westrate: Um yeah, I grew up on a Christmas tree farm in southwestern Lower Michigan.

[13:49] Nick Westrate: Yeah.

[13:50] Nick Westrate: So it was very different than New York.

[13:52] Nick Westrate: But I moved here when I was 18.

[13:55] Nick Westrate: I went straight to to Juilliard, and um I drove an Oldsmobile Cutlass Sierra into the city and parked in the parking garage under Juilliard.

[14:04] Leah Walsh: Oh my god.

[14:04] Nick Westrate: And like brought up my bags, and they're like, you can't park down there.

[14:08] Nick Westrate: And then did street parking for like the first week, and then I drove it to my aunt's house in Connecticut.

[14:12] Nick Westrate: I can't have this.

[14:13] Nick Westrate: I can't keep moving the car at 10 30.

[14:16] Nick Westrate: I have to be in class.

[14:18] Nick Westrate: So yeah, it's very different.

[14:19] Nick Westrate: But I love New York.

[14:20] Nick Westrate: I love everything about it.

[14:22] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[14:22] Leah Walsh: I like going to California sometimes, but

[14:24] Nick Westrate: Yeah.

[14:24] Nick Westrate: And when you were on on turn, you got to spend quite a bit of time out of the city.

[14:29] Nick Westrate: Yeah, I was in Richmond, Virginia, which is a really cool town, actually.

[14:33] Nick Westrate: It's nice.

[14:34] Nick Westrate: That was so nice because it was close enough that I could come back on a train or would drive sometimes.

[14:40] Nick Westrate: But it was beautiful, beautiful area.

[14:43] Nick Westrate: Yeah, just get some time in nature and somewhere a little smaller.

[14:47] Nick Westrate: Yeah, and like different restaurants. And like, you know, I love going to the movies. I go to the movies all the time. And I love like a big multiplex in a small city. You know, no one's in it. And you can just see your movie at two o'clock in the afternoon and no one's there. It's great.

[15:03] Leah Walsh: Do you enjoy working on camera?

[15:05] Nick Westrate: Um, I'm enjoying it more and more. It's not it's not I don't enjoy it like I do in the theater. But I also don't think I figured it out yet, uh, fully. Uh it's uh it's funny. I was shooting an episode of something the other day, and I thought, God, I wish someone at Juilliard would have just explained to us what all these terms mean because it's another example of actors being I literally like it's taken me ten years of working on screen to actually understand what's going on on the set and to be a good co-worker, you know, to know, you know, and it took, it was actually the I got a lot of confidence from being on Turn because I was a regular and there's some confidence in the contract. Like they have to I have to be in a certain amount of the show, and like they have to pay me a certain amount of money and can't get rid of me, basically.

[15:58] Leah Walsh: Right, you're not wondering each time you're there if you're coming back.

[16:00] Nick Westrate: If I'm gonna be invited back, right, like um which also has a funny way to put it. I know, but it also has so little to do with our behavior, but that's kind of like how our minds work in those situations, or at least my mind works in those situations. Um but it and on that show, I was one of the reasons I'm so grateful to have done it, is because I got to ask so many questions, stupid questions.

[16:22] Leah Walsh: Right.

[16:23] Nick Westrate: You know, our DP on that show is named Marvin Rush, and he is a brilliant man. And he would say something, he would say, you know, we're gonna do this in French reverse, okay? Come on, everyone get ready. I was like, Marvin, hi. I don't know what French reverse is. What does that mean? Because I didn't go to film school. I went to acting school. You know what that means. Tell me. I know. I would love to know. And I actually really wish we would have gotten some film classes like that, you know.

[16:44] Leah Walsh: Yeah, I mean, we got like one.

[16:47] Nick Westrate: Yeah. But I don't mind. I don't even think in my time we even got one. I mean, we would like I feel like it was more about auditioning on camera. It was all about auditioning. Um, and it was always with a casting director, and I mean casting directors are brilliant, but they're not on a film set shooting a scene every day.

[17:04] Leah Walsh: Right.

[17:04] Nick Westrate: So you know, when they talk about like the size of a lens, you know, when they just shout what we're moving down to, you know, I can kind of guess what that means, but actually knowing what that lens looks like and knowing what the shot is gonna be and how to calibrate my performance based on it is a different thing, you know. So yeah, it's it's a fun, crazy world, and I I'm real I but now it's I haven't done a play in two and a half years because I just don't do them anymore because I can't make any money.

[17:35] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[17:35] Nick Westrate: So now I I've been pretty exclusively working on film and TV, which I do enjoy. And I'm like I said, I'm learning a lot about, but uh I want to come back to the theater so much and it breaks my heart that I most of the time can't afford to do it.

[17:48] Leah Walsh: Do you still audition or have you just been kind of telling your agents I will?

[17:48] Nick Westrate: Yeah, like I I'll audition for it. I yeah I do still audition for stuff. If I really love it, if I really love it, I'll audition for it. But it it takes a lot. It would take a you know there are a couple plays I would love to do that I hope to do in the next year but it's really hard.

[18:10] Leah Walsh: It's just I when you walk away at the end of a run having made three thousand dollars for twelve weeks of work.

[18:16] Nick Westrate: Oh it's harsh it's a harsh reality.

[18:18] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[18:19] Nick Westrate: Um is there anything else that you learned through that process of having to declare bankruptcy that year after doing all of that work that you want to share with people that you learned about that process or um do it early. Don't wait like the longer you wait, the stupider it is to get done. It was really freeing. I mean I also at the time didn't own any property. I was like 26 years old. Right. I didn't own a car. I didn't own an apartment so it was super easy to get done to get all that discharged.

[18:54] Leah Walsh: Um I put a whole lot of undue stress on myself and a lot of angst. I was also doing a really long run of a play at the time so it was like which which was also a really emotional play and it was just like a very it was just super stressful period of my life but made it through and it was fine.

[19:14] Nick Westrate: I but you know, like uh in your mind when you don't know what's gonna happen with those kind of things, my mind goes to like, oh my god, someone's gonna come and arrest me. I remember like being in a rehearsal room at New 40 shows, like the cops are gonna come, they're gonna come and get me, I'm gonna be something you wouldn't know how to handle.

[19:27] Leah Walsh: Like were there any resources that you ended up using to ask for help that you?

[19:27] Nick Westrate: I ended up just calling my dad and he ended up helping?

[19:34] Leah Walsh: Yeah, my dad.

[19:37] Nick Westrate: He just ended up helping me out. Yeah, and it was great. Um and I'm a lot more financially healthy now, and uh, I'm really not into these things. I read a lot of Susie Orman. Um I follow her on Twitter. No, it's money is so weird and hard, and especially in this business, it's so inconsistent that uh the more we talk about it with each other and the more we're open about it, you know.

[20:00] Leah Walsh: No, it's super hard.

[20:01] Nick Westrate: And I feel like everybody goes through that period where you need to have something kind of strike where you get from that place of like, oh, I'm just paying my bills every month to oh, I have a little bit in my savings.

[20:14] Leah Walsh: Right.

[20:14] Nick Westrate: Yeah. I'm a little bit more comfortable, whereas it's not draining completely every month.

[20:19] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[20:20] Nick Westrate: And then that makes a huge difference, like whatever that is. It makes a huge difference. And that's I mean, back to the whole fair wage thing, even though I'm like a broken record with it. We have to um get to a place, especially in New York City, but around the o all over the country where theaters, these multi-million dollar institutions start taking responsibility for the artists that um keep them alive and make them successful.

[20:45] Leah Walsh: Like we not only have to be able to pay our bills while we're working, we need to be able to save and invest in our futures.

[20:53] Nick Westrate: And it's uh I remember someone telling me from a long time ago that in um some negotiation, a producer was overheard saying, Well, you heard about these actors, they're buying houses now. What? As if that was like the most absurd thing in ever. And she'd like, yes, we're humans, we need shelter.

[21:10] Leah Walsh: Oh my god.

[21:11] Nick Westrate: Yeah, it's crazy. But that's that's the perception. And so we just have to keep repeating like, we're human beings. Artists aren't actually supposed to be starving.

[21:21] Leah Walsh: No, it's not. There won't be any left.

[21:24] Nick Westrate: Right. It's not romantic, and it doesn't help you be an artist. You know, I it took me a little while to come out of that mentality that suffering was helpful. That uh being poor was helpful, that any of the that sweet were the uses of adversity. Bullshit. Like you can't rehearse when you're hungry because you literally can't concentrate.

[21:47] Leah Walsh: You know, you'll fall down.

[21:49] Nick Westrate: And that's not fun. You know. I remember I was doing the first big movie I ever did. I was still so broke waiting for this paycheck. And I was waiting for the van, one of those vans we were shooting uh, you know, a little upstate.

[22:04] Leah Walsh: And uh was this the one you did with Gabe?

[22:07] Nick Westrate: Yeah, with Meryl Streep and Gabe. And Meryl Streep. And Meryl Streep and Gaby here. And yeah, and Gabe and lovely Lisa Joyce, and um anyway, my there were holes in my boots, and my feet were wet. And I was like, oh, I'm gonna have these wet feet when I get to work. Okay, I'm gonna put the socks on the radiator in the trailer. And I was like, okay, when you get paid, you're gonna get a really nice pair of boots.

[22:32] Nick Westrate: And I did. I did. But it was just one of those things you're like, even in these moments where you think it's so you're so fabulous and everything should be fine. You're like, you're still catching up. That when Frankie first got looking, he did the pilot, and then we had all summer, and we got married, and like that money kind of like went away.

[22:51] Leah Walsh: And then when we I went out to San Francisco with him in the fall for season one, and he'd ended up not getting paid for like he didn't get his first check for like two months or something.

[23:01] Nick Westrate: And I so I was temping full time, like and luckily because we had to pay rent and like buy food.

[23:08] Leah Walsh: Yeah for those first like month and a half, two months when he's shooting this HBO show and not getting a check yet.

[23:16] Nick Westrate: It was insane. So crazy I it's I mean, and even that's the other thing too. Like when I was doing Turn, people are like, Oh, well, you know, you can do this, you can do that. It's like, no, I make a it's also like my first show. Like I make a middle class living doing that show.

[23:30] Leah Walsh: And this is I'm not deeply involved in sag politics, but you know, even on that, like I was guaranteed seven out of ten episodes and then I was held for an entire year and couldn't do regular work on any other show.

[23:43] Nick Westrate: That's the whole year. And they really do take it up. And that's something that uh in the writer's strike they were addressing very fully was like how do we how do we shorten these holds and stuff like that?

[23:55] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[23:55] Nick Westrate: And that's something, you know, and I don't mean to like, oh, cry poor me. I w you know, I'm on a television program 'cause it's not that at all. It's just like it's never it's not the fantasy that people make it up to be. It's never as easy as you think it's gonna be.

[24:06] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[24:10] Nick Westrate: Do you have any artistic mentors who found along the way in your career?

[24:14] Leah Walsh: Oh, that's such a good question.

[24:15] Nick Westrate: Yeah. Um I've had different artistic mentors at different times. Um the first and kind of most important oh I don't know, most important, but very important was Daniel Fish, who gave me my first job out of Juilliard, and we've done two full plays together and messed around creating lots of other weird work. He really taught me how to speak verse.

[24:41] Leah Walsh: What was that play?

[24:43] Nick Westrate: Uh the first play was Merchant of Venice at the California Shakespeare Theater in Berkeley.

[24:48] Leah Walsh: What a beautiful I've been there.

[24:49] Nick Westrate: It's so gorgeous. And there were so many brilliant actors in that, like Jenny Bacon and David Chandler and Andrew Weems, who have remained my friends. And Sam Gold, who I went to Juilliard with, was a kind of mentor to me in school and would take me to see lots of avant-garde work.

[25:07] Leah Walsh: Like he introduced me to the work of the Wooster Group and Eva Van Hova and Richard Foreman.

[25:12] Nick Westrate: And I would I would really bucked at it a lot and thought it would I didn't, I was made me really angry and upset. And he would always like really talk me through it and make me go see it again with him. And uh now that's like my favorite kind of work, and it's all I ever want to do. And I got to go on to work with Evo, which was a really important um which is the greatest play I've ever done in my life, was uh The Little Foxes that he directed.

[25:36] Leah Walsh: Yeah, I remember.

[25:37] Nick Westrate: Yeah, it was great. And uh carpet that purple carpeted box I would be I'll show you this beautiful photo I have of it later. His partner Jan Weyersfeld, who does those sets and clothes. It's so amazing. He I just emailed him a little while ago. I was like, Do you have any prints of those photos? He was like, Oh Nikki, I'll send them right away. And he's like he sends me all these gorgeous five by sevens of this.

[26:00] Leah Walsh: Well, he takes he's a photographer too, and during tech, he's always on stage, like taking these incredible shots of the show from every angle.

[26:09] Nick Westrate: Yeah, they're really cool. And who are some of the artistic mentors? I mean, it's so many, you learn so much. I've learned so much out of school from people I got to work with who were who had been doing it longer than me. Like in that show, Beth Marvel and Thomas J. Ryan and Tina Banco, um, who have all remained friends and whose work who I've just I worship their work, you know.

[26:33] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[26:33] Nick Westrate: And working next to them. Um I've done three things with Mare Winningham, who's one of the we did Mildred Pierce together on HBO, and we did Tribes Together at the Barrow Street, and we did Casa Valentina together, and she's I wouldn't say she's a mentor in the sense that she I ask her questions, but acting next to her is like singing next to someone with perfect pitch.

[26:58] Leah Walsh: It's like you can't be untruthful next to Mare.

[27:02] Nick Westrate: It's just impossible. And because you can hear you can almost hear yourself being false. Um and Reed Bernie is the same way in um doing Casa Valentina with Reed was uh just a dream. It was a complete dream. I know we all have those people that you're just like, oh, if I could be in every play with you, I would.

[27:17] Leah Walsh: My god, I know.

[27:18] Nick Westrate: Yeah, I I'm so lucky. And I've luckily got to work with Aishaan Shalak a lot, who's one of my favorite actors on the planet, and we're still making stuff together. And um, like again, peer mentors too, you know, who you learn so much from, and um I just love other actors. I love being I love working with weird different actors, and yeah, they're my favorite people.

[27:45] Leah Walsh: Are there any lessons you've learned over the last couple years that you're really proud of that you want to tell me about?

[27:51] Nick Westrate: Oh god. Be a little thing. Hmm. I mean, I guess I'm I'm becoming a little bit better at forgiving myself. You know? Um, I don't know, maybe like yeah. Maybe like I don't remember how long out of school it was that I realized what like Alexander technique was about.

[28:19] Leah Walsh: Like that is about forgiveness.

[28:21] Nick Westrate: You know, that like that idea that you could always renew the thought. Yeah. And you couldn't fix something, you could only do something else. You know, you can't undo you you can only that idea of releasing too. Yeah, just release and and that you oh you did that this time, you're not doesn't mean you're gonna do it next time.

[28:40] Leah Walsh: Yeah, it's fine.

[28:41] Nick Westrate: You're not always that person for the rest of your life. I've learned that about myself. Or I've started to try to practice forgiveness.

[28:50] Leah Walsh: That's a great lesson.

[28:52] Nick Westrate: Yeah. It's hard, but it's good, especially in live theater. It's really important. You have to forgive yourself like three thousand times a night. You know.

[29:01] Leah Walsh: I'm bad at least three thousand times a performance and I have to forgive myself for that and try to do something good.

[29:05] Nick Westrate: Yeah, I've tried to get better about that because I am definitely somebody who will like think over, like reanalyze that moment a million times and like just give myself anxiety about it.

[29:15] Leah Walsh: It's like it already happened. And maybe other people didn't even notice it.

[29:20] Nick Westrate: Yeah. Because they were probably thinking about themselves.

[29:24] Leah Walsh: And I'm torturing myself about it.

[29:32] Leah Walsh: Well, this all makes sense leading up to I wanted to ask you about when you were doing that process and performance series at New York Theatre Workshop because everything we just talked about with mentors and you loving other habitats and stuff, I feel like it all makes sense. It's so it's so and it's also such a cousin to what you're doing here. I mean, that was kind of pre-podcast days, and we would I only got to come to one or two of them, but—

[29:47] Nick Westrate: Oh, thank you for coming. It was so um I assumed people so hard about trying to get people there.

[29:59] Leah Walsh: I yeah, that was I loved that. I um that was what, 2012, maybe?

[30:05] Nick Westrate: No, earlier than that, 2000, maybe 2011.

[30:08] Leah Walsh: Okay.

[30:08] Nick Westrate: Eleven and twelve, maybe eleven and twelve. We did two seasons of it at New York Theatre Workshop, and it was a conversation series called Process and Performance that I developed with Jim and Linda who run that theater, and Rachel Silverman, who is the artistic administrator at that theater. And Rachel and I really did most of it um together with Jim and Linda's guidance. Um, and it I would interview performers who I uh thought and consider and most people consider like the kind of masters of the downtown avant-garde theater. So we interviewed I interviewed Alan Lauren, David Greenspan, Elizabeth Marvel, Kate Volk, uh Taylor Mack, Ruth Malichek, um Thomas J. Ryan, Henry Stram, Bill Camp, Lola Pashalinski, um oh gosh, I'm gonna forget people.

I'm I'm forgetting people already. Um all of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, who I love them, those people. They're so crazy. Um Pig Iron, Dito van Rygersberg, uh Juliana Francis Kelly and David Patrick Kelly, who are so great, who did so much work with Richard Foreman. Um and they were and I think I I have a bit of an obsession with people I think who are undervalued or not known or understood. And I also am obsessed with, like I was talking about earlier, how people don't take our contribution to a work as seriously, you know. Like you usually, if you're talking about um Ivo van Hove's work, because we did like a night of Ivo van Hove performers, uh, you think it's all Ivo and Jan, and that's like just their thing.

But what the performers do in those shows and what all those and I know what those performers have in common because I've been with them and I've been one of them, is very specific. And it's a very specific set of skills that you use to do that work. And I'm interested in actors understanding what that is in the same way that like Ruth Malachek talking about um working with Samuel Beckett in Paris. It's like that's a particular skill set, and she unfortunately has passed away, but she was the only person we had in New York who could talk to us about working with Samuel Beckett, you know, and she's so brilliant and directed and created so much of her own work as well that it was just really valuable to me to share that with other actors, you know.

I mean, Kate Vaughn, who is uh my favorite actor alive from the Wooster Group, it was she was so was so interesting and and thought of it in such a different way than the rest of us do. She has a completely different process. She's been at the Wooster Group for 40 years and not worked anywhere else.

[32:54] Leah Walsh: Right.

[32:54] Nick Westrate: You know, she'll occasionally do a part in a film made by a friend. It's crazy. Yeah, I know. It's it's a totally to create your own artistic home and then just never leave.

[33:04] Leah Walsh: I know that's my fantasy world.

[33:06] Nick Westrate: I mean, in my it's the same way like the Nature Theater of Oklahoma folks for a very long time were only doing Nature Theater, and they all you know resigned from the union because it was easier for them to tour without the restrictions, you know, of a union contract, and they're so brilliant, and they got to do that for a really long time and make incredible work. I mean, they're not making loads of m it's also incredibly difficult way to survive.

[33:31] Leah Walsh: Well that well that's the thing when you say like undervalued. But these are all people who like have known names and I I guess to a certain crowd, they're extremely well known and revered.

[33:44] Nick Westrate: Yeah.

[33:45] Leah Walsh: And but then if you think of like depends on what you're looking at as like the community if you're looking at Hollywood if you're looking at Broadway.

[33:53] Nick Westrate: I don't know about Broadway. Maybe they haven't, you know?

[33:55] Leah Walsh: Yeah, and it's also like goes to what our value m system is. Is your value in this business fame or is it artistic um achievement or is it both? What do people define entertainment as? Or like as like do they want to just be entertained or do they want to be challenged?

[34:15] Nick Westrate: Yeah and like what do you define as success? And that varies and it's varied for me in my life as I get older.

[34:17] Leah Walsh: Where are you with that now?

[34:24] Nick Westrate: I mean right now I just I just a troublesome word. I know I just want to I just wanna I just need to do good work that also pays me enough to live um and I'm figuring out that balance. I'm I'm still figuring out that balance and trying to still make my own work and hopefully do some uh work that I find really exciting balanced with work that is lucrative because I I don't have a a a company that I can go and work for and live with you know I would love to I would love to like learn Dutch and go and work for Ivo van Hove for a job at Toneelgroep Amsterdam and just stay there forever. It'd be amazing. It'd be the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

[35:10] Leah Walsh: What does your family make of your choice to be an artist through your career?

[35:13] Nick Westrate: Um they're they're pretty cool with it. They were pretty supportive and um are any of them creatively inclined?

[35:20] Nick Westrate: My sister and I both played the piano and did community theater growing up. So it was a little bit of a competition, and she kept playing the piano until college, and she doesn't play professionally, but she still plays, you know. And my mother is an amazing craftsperson. She's like weaves baskets and she makes clothes and she's an amazing she can sew anything in the universe. She paints, you know, she does she's very, very artistic person, and my father is an intellectual, my father's a historian and an author. So yeah, so they were all I mean, they were all leery about it, but then you know, in terms of uh value judgments or validation, like I went to a high school called Interlochen Arts Academy, which is pretty well respected.

Very well respected, and like you have to audition to get in. So when that happened, they were supportive and they s they paid for me to go there, and then when you get into Juilliard, you know, you think, oh, you know, everything's gonna be fine. And they're actually getting a lot better with knowing not to ask about certain things.

[36:22] Leah Walsh: Yeah, did you have any auditions this week or how do they go?

[36:25] Nick Westrate: And you're just like, please don't write. Like, I will tell you. I will help you for I will call you up. I'll call you on the telephone.

[36:32] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[36:32] Nick Westrate: But doing turn was a real because my dad's a historian. It was like uh I mean, like the he was.

[36:37] Leah Walsh: Did that like give you guys something you could kind of share?

[36:39] Nick Westrate: Yeah, you could always I whenever I had an interview for that show, I would just call my dad first and be like, Can you talk me through the Battle of Yorktown, please?

[36:46] Leah Walsh: That's so fun.

[36:47] Nick Westrate: Yeah, it was like preparing for a like an history exam in high school. Just go talk to my dad about it for 10 minutes.

[36:53] Leah Walsh: Oh my god, he must have been so thrilled.

[36:55] Nick Westrate: Like, not only are you on a TV show that he can watch at home, like it's something that's in his own.

[37:01] Leah Walsh: Oh my gosh, it's totally in his wheelhouse.

[37:03] Nick Westrate: Yeah. It was great. It was great. And then there's some, you know, some tougher times. Like um, I think Casa Valentina was a little hard on them. And I love that play.

[37:11] Leah Walsh: I love that play too.

[37:12] Nick Westrate: I think it's great. Um, but yeah, you know, no, they're very supportive and nice people.

[37:17] Leah Walsh: Follow up on processing performance.

[37:19] Nick Westrate: Yeah. I s I was Google searching and saw that your blog might still be up from it. Or are there any like—

[37:25] Nick Westrate: It's all still up on YouTube. You can see any of those interviews on YouTube except for Elizabeth Marvel's, unfortunately, which lost some uh something, I think we I think there was an intern who didn't press record on that video. And Ruth Malachek's you can't see because Ruth expressly requested not to be taped.

[37:47] Leah Walsh: Okay.

[37:47] Nick Westrate: And she was very specific about it. And then after it, after the evening, I took her for a glass of wine across the street and then helped her into a cab, and she said, Thank you for respecting my wishes. Those who were with us tonight were with us, and those who were not were not. I mean, and she took and that was the last time I ever spoke to her, but it was such a beautiful idea that she believed in the live event.

[38:13] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[38:13] Nick Westrate: Well, and that's so uh there's so much, you know, oral history of what we do. Yeah, and and the idea of someone having worked with someone else who you'll never get to work with, or that's how I always felt about um Moni at school. You have to work with Moni, yes, but like just the people he got to work with. This is our one of our movement teachers at school who was a mime in Paris and like Marcel Marceau started Juilliard, and you just has worked with all these amazing people, and you just feel like, oh I'm somehow through osmosis learning.

[38:45] Nick Westrate: That's how I feel about John Styx.

[38:47] Leah Walsh: Yeah, who I never heard.

[38:48] Nick Westrate: Oh, yeah, you didn't have John. He passed away the year before I started, sadly. He was the the funny thing, talking about um changing habits. John, I was a real student when I showed up at school. I was gonna get it all right the first try.

[39:01] Leah Walsh: Yes.

[39:01] Nick Westrate: I was gonna get A's and everything. And I was writing, writing, writing furiously in my notebook in John Styx's first year acting class. And he was a very small man and uh a short, and by the time he taught me he was 81. I picture him like Yoda.

[39:21] Leah Walsh: He was very much like Yoda. You never really knew if he was awake or not, but he always was. His eye you just saw through his eyelids. Um and I was like furiously writing down something he was saying, and he kept looking over at me annoyed, and then finally he walks over to me, grabs my pen and notebook, crosses all of 304, and throws it in the trash. And he comes back and goes, You don't write for four years. And in class, like teachers would unless we're doing like IPA or something, like they would ask they would he instructed them.

[39:56] Leah Walsh: Oh my god.

[39:57] Nick Westrate: So I would never write anything down, and I do now I write notes down, like especially during tech, if it's you know, but I don't write down during rehearsal anything. He changed my entire process. He really I had to practice being present, and um I did, and now I'm a f fucking disaster. I don't write anything down. I'm getting better now with a computer and eye calendar. Like you, I have so many notebooks from Juilliard that oh yeah. I have part of me wants to get rid of them because I have so much stuff that I'm sure I'll never touch again. But some of them I'm like, I'm who knows what random things I wrote in those notebooks that one day I'm gonna want to look back at.

[40:36] Leah Walsh: That's true.

[40:36] Nick Westrate: No, if you have them you should keep them. I mean, how big can notebooks be? Right? I'll just get rid of all the speech like worksheets and stuff. Some of them I slowly I go through all the time and like weed stuff out.

[40:48] Leah Walsh: That's so crazy.

[40:49] Nick Westrate: But the notebooks I'm keeping. Um really think I have anything else. I was trying to remember if there's yeah, if there's something that um I love that you wanted to talk about it.

[41:01] Leah Walsh: What else did I want to talk about?

[41:03] Nick Westrate: What are your favorite podcasts that you're listening to right now?

[41:06] Leah Walsh: I listen to so many.

[41:08] Nick Westrate: Do you listen to so many podcasts? Who are your podcast idols?

[41:12] Leah Walsh: I mean Terry Gross.

[41:15] Nick Westrate: Fuck yeah, Terry Gross.

[41:17] Leah Walsh: If you need to pass down fresh air to somebody, please call me.

[41:20] Nick Westrate: Oh my god, you would be so good at fresh air.

[41:22] Leah Walsh: Dan Savage.

[41:24] Nick Westrate: Oh yeah.

[41:25] Leah Walsh: Savage love.

[41:27] Nick Westrate: Remember reading I just remember being so excited to read it in the voice every week.

[41:30] Leah Walsh: Oh yeah.

[41:45] Nick Westrate: Yeah. You just make so much sense.

[41:47] Leah Walsh: You make so much sense.

[41:48] Nick Westrate: I mean, I listened I I listen to all the political podcasts, the slate and the NPR. All of those. Um there's a like a parenting podcast called The Longest Shortest Time.

[41:59] Leah Walsh: Yeah, from WNYC.

[42:00] Nick Westrate: Yeah. Yeah, it's great. It's like kind of like this American life, but without parenting. And you don't have to be a parent to enjoy it, and I've listened to it for like a couple years, and it's I really love that one. Like that kind of storytelling that like I'm obsessed with my favorite murder.

[42:14] Leah Walsh: I know a lot of people are.

[42:16] Nick Westrate: I've listened to a few episodes, or sometimes they love crossover episodes with other things I listen to. Um I haven't gotten super into it, but I'm a big true crime person. It's like my favorite thing on earth.

[42:25] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[42:26] Nick Westrate: Yeah. I love true crime. It's not really my favorite thing on earth. Um what else should I talk about?

[42:31] Leah Walsh: Oh, I know what else I want to talk about.

[42:33] Nick Westrate: What?

[42:33] Leah Walsh: Being gay.

[42:34] Nick Westrate: Yeah.

[42:35] Leah Walsh: Yeah.

[42:36] Nick Westrate: Um, sure.

[42:38] Leah Walsh: Yeah, I like talking about being a gay person all the time.

[42:42] Nick Westrate: Um, no, I just think how it factors into your artistic life.

[42:45] Leah Walsh: Yeah, I think it factors into my artistic life hugely. I think it because it makes me smarter and better than all the rest of you.

[42:51] Nick Westrate: No.

[42:52] Leah Walsh: No, it's just it's it's such um I've I'm having so many really cool conversations with gay artist friends of mine lately about what we need to have happen to move everything forward and what's still really backwards, you know, that isn't happening. And it's I think it I think that we're at like a point where I think we're almost at a breaking point. Like I did the last revival of The Boys in the Band, which was in 2009. And to see a cast of The Boys in the Band now that is all gay men. I can't even tell you. It's so it's so exciting. Like, no matter what your feelings are on that play, it's an old play, which I happen to really love because I've had a really good time doing it, but I know that lots of people have problematic feelings about the play.

It's just so exciting what Joe decided to do with the casting. And that's it's a really big fucking deal, you know. And um one day we're gonna have though it's not the same thing, and like racism and homophobia are not the same things, but like that Halle Berry moment when she won the Oscar for Monster's Ball, like one day an openly gay person is going to win an Oscar for acting, and uh it's gonna be a big fucking deal. Yeah, it's gonna be a big fucking deal. Because we've had gay people win, but they were all in a closet when they won, like Jodie Foster and Kevin Spacey and—

[44:09] Nick Westrate: Or it's interesting when you have a lot of straight actors win for playing gay roles.

[44:21] Nick Westrate: Oh, all the time. There are only two gay people in the movie Milk, and they both play straight people. So every gay person in Milk is played by a straight person. And I get in this argument sometimes with actors and they're like, but it's acting. And you go, yeah, but none of our community has gotten the chance to represent our culture. Right. So every time like the movie Milk happens, you have Dustin Lance Black and Gus Van Sant explaining to a room of straight people, they everyone's doing research on how to sissy that walk, you know, and you're like or you could just hire at least 50/50, right? Have some experts in the room. I know it's like it's crazy how it feels like I don't like I mean the internet and technology feels so bad in so many ways, but in other ways it feels like it's opened all of our eyes and it's just taking us a few seconds to adjust to the light, and now we're all talking to each other about this stuff we always should have been like gender parity.

Oh my god. And and pay and and equal pay. I hope that action and change is actually coming. I think it is. I think it's already happening. Part of me is like these things blow up and there's a huge uprising, and then the news cycle moves so quickly that it's like, oh, nobody's talking about it anymore. Right. The Golden Globes happen, and then by the time the Oscars get around, it's just not as exciting. Me too, it's not as exciting. Well, at least Casey Affleck wasn't there though. And that was good. Yeah. Being very political, we're being very topical. So topical, so political. I'm gonna talk about gay shit. Do you feel like I know what I want to talk about? Do you feel like you've been run into any pigeonholing and auditioning, either like not being taken seriously for straight roles or not being considered for?

I luckily get to play a lot of straight roles, and I've had several agents tell me that they're glad that I'm able to pass, you know, which is like a word that's still used. Really? Yeah, which I'm not super interested in, but I don't know, I yeah, I would think of it as acting. Yeah, I also think like aggressive energy is seen as male, which is why someone like Hillary Clinton has always been maligned as like a power hungry lesbian, you know, and I happen to be a fairly aggressive person, and so therefore male. But um I actually had a really interesting audition the other day for something that will remain nameless for a gay character, and I the casting director called me to tell me um look, we don't want it to be too gay.

Okay, we we just have had a lot of great actors come in and really queen the house down, and we re and I was like, oh, okay, yeah, no, totally just really real. I got it. I walked into the room, and that casting director wasn't there. Um, and the entire room was all straight people, including the readers. Were I knew the readers, they were both straight. The director was straight, the writer is straight, and the producer from the theater was straight, and I all of a sudden had that moment where it's like I don't know what your experience of queerness is or what level of gayness you think is I'm now just guessing. Yeah, you know, I'm like, who do you who do you know? What's your cousin? Like, I don't I've been given this thing that I can't, which actually I know all about.

But now I'm like doubting my choices because I don't know what you want me to do. Even though I'm the only gay person in the room. How bizarre. It's really weird. But it's like, you know, and I've talked to, and again, not to compare things, so I'm comparing things, like I've talked to like black female friends of mine or black male friends of mine who are told by like all white rooms, like, okay, we want a little more urban. And you're like, but what is your experience of urbanity? If something is a major part of the story or a major theme, I don't understand when people don't choose to have their artistic team be more diverse and more inclusive of people who might know about those storylines.

Yeah. It's completely bizarre. Because it just it just ends up being inauthentic. Yeah, it's completely bizarre. It's like we're gonna do a play about um pianists and then have no musician, like no one has any musical knowledge or ability in the room, and you're like, why would why would why would we do that? Because we're so good at acting. Acting is it's like acting, also isn't like this magical thing that every straight white male has that they can become. That's the other thing too, right? Because that's considered tabula rasa, and so from there, like all the great method actors are born. That's Dustin Hoffman, that's you know, Lawrence Olivier, they can be anything. Right. But the rest of us have to just do, you know, stay on our line.

Do where you are. Yeah. There's my bitch about that. Thank you. Um when you are feeling like you're in the dark place or you're uninspired or something like that. Are there any concrete things that you turn to again and again, like a certain book that you read or music that you listen to or a place you go or something like that? Working out helps a lot. It does. Like forcing yourself to work out. Like it just releases endorphins, and you'll feel better and you'll feel like you can do something. That always helps. I luckily live right by the Hudson River, so I go down to the Hudson River a lot. Um, and reading fiction helps me a lot. I know I already said that, but mainly because A, I think it's meditative.

I find it to be meditative because you are outward, you're um imagining uh experience as someone else, which immediately gets you out of yourself and gets you out of. I try to do, especially when I'm not working, I try to do one to two hours in the afternoon of just reading with all devices turned off. So we like fully power down all electronic devices, we have a cup of tea, and we read for at least one hour, you know, which I'm lucky enough to afford to be able to do. Yeah. Which is nice. But if I don't, I'll go a little nutty. I missed that from my childhood. I read so much when I was a kid, and I feel like now part of it is technology. Yeah. I you know, I will waste time on my phone when I could have been reading for a half hour.

I mean, I waste so much time on my phone. I'm not saying I'm immune to that, but I've like I've had to build fences around it. Also I do you know, a lot of the work I do with Fair Wage Onstage is online. Right. And so I spend a lot of time doing that. And then my, you know, eyes cross, I'm like, I wanna I feel anxious. I like I check my Twitter feed in my sleep, you know? Yeah. Um and it's also weird because it's becoming like um it w when I was on the show and you have to tweet for the show or do things for the show. Is that in your contract? No. They just ask you to. Not everyone did. There are plenty of people who didn't, but you know, I was on the show, and yeah, I want the Twitter followers and I want the fucking, you know, whatever.

I want the attention, you know, because we all like attention, which is I think what all those platforms are about. But it becomes a you we have all it's part of the gig economy now, right? As an actor, we've all become our own publicists. You know, and we have to curate this image all the time, which everyone in society is doing, and it's almost that line like who's a public figure anymore? Like at what point are you a public figure? There's also so much TV out there that you're like, oh, you you're one of the stars of a TV show? Okay. You and who else, you know? It's so it's a it's just a really strange time. You know, you don't know it's like my babysitter is a public figure. She was on she's on Facebook all the time.

She posts a lot. I love her, like we're in contact. She's really fabulous with social media. But you know, it's like everybody. Yeah, like people are public figures just for being popular on their social media. Yes. Influencers. Influencers. Can you imagine? Sounds terrible. It's so bizarre. It sounds terrible. And then they like, yeah, I have to endorse a product. I have a friend who um was on. We know people who are who are who are influencers or who are actors who have like turned that into their side gig. Yeah. We know we know a lot of people who have that. It's crazy. It's their full-time job, too. It's really weird. I don't ever want that to be my full-time job. I like saying angry things about Trump, but other than that, I don't want to like sell face cream.

Nor do I think anyone would buy my face cream. Um, and then is there anything that you've seen recently that you want to recommend? Oh, yes. So much I've seen a bunch of really good stuff. Um, hold on. The Death of Stalin, the film. So funny. Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale. Is that Jeffrey Tambor? It's new. It's uh made by the um guy who made Veep. Okay. It's so funny, and it does this thing, which I always wanted a movie to do. Like they're in Russia, and they're all these, you know, Russian leaders around Stalin when he dies. None of them uses a Russian dialect, like Michael Palin's in it. He talks English, Steve Buscemi talks like Steve Buscemi because they're supposed to, you know, like why do we always do Russian dialects when you're speaking in English?

Right. Just talk like you're we know it's a movie. It's so funny. Okay. It's so good. Um, what else did I see that was great? Um gotta see it with my movie pass. I love movie pass. Oh my god. I could I I could be a social influencer for movie pass. That's the fucking truth. I saw Fantastic Woman, which is the Chilean film. I want to see that. Oh, it's at the LNR Bunan, the one with the wine at Lincoln Center. Okay. You know? Uh there's one where you can get wine, and there's one with no wine. Um, that movie was so good. I think I saw some. Oh, I love Once on This Island on Broadway. I still haven't seen that yet either. I really want to see that. Great. I finally I got my tickets for um Three Tall Women.

Okay. Which I'm really excited about 'cause Glenda Jackson is a personal hero of mine. Um I saw Harry Potter. How was that? It's really fun. Good. Um it's really fun. I'm excited 'cause there's several older actors that I know that are in it. And it makes me really happy that there's like fun roles for them. Yeah, and they're also like when we're gonna be doing w uh people we know are gonna be in that play for like ten years. It's crazy. It's gonna run forever. It's like it's like it's like the Lion King. Yeah, but for non-singers. Like you don't have to sing to be in it. Yeah, exactly. Um that was fun. What else? Have you seen Angels in America yet? I ha I haven't. No. I haven't either. Um I don't it's really hard for it's it's hard for me to go if I don't have a free ticket.

Yeah. I'm going to see Iceman Cometh though, which I'm excited about because my friend Calm is in that and I'm really excited to see him in that. Um I think what else could I saw? That's really one of the O'Neill plays that I don't know as well. It's tough, man. It's long. It's like a three hour, four hour tour. Four hour. It's a good four. It's a solid four hours of drunk people. Um I just love I'm so excited about Handmaid's Tale coming back. Uh I love that show so much. Even though we have some dear friends on it, it took us so long to get through the series because it was so depressing. It was so frightening, not depressing. So scary. And so we would watch one episode and then we wouldn't watch another one for like a month.

Yeah, it's tough. It's a tough one. 'Cause I can just see the parallels and like the the short lines that would have to be drawn from where we are to where that is, and it terrifies me. I'm so like turned on, or not sexually turned on, but like artistically turned on by Elizabeth Moss's work. She's amazing. She's incredible. I just can't. I can't I loved her on Mad Men. She's always been amazing. The wife swing even because she was really young. I got to do a reading with her once and she was amaz like just one of the most present people I've ever worked with in my life. She was so good. So honest. I just love her. I just I think she's a re and I think that she understands acting for the camera like no one.

She was like she's been doing it since she was a baby. You know, she's so fucking good. Everyone on that show is great, though. Ann Dowd is great, Samira's great. I'm gonna be better about watching it this time. I understand though. I understand the the fear on watching it. Oh, and I saw Miles for Mary, which is I saw I saw it three times. I saw it three times at playwrights and twice at Bushwick Star, because that's my favorite company in New York is the mad ones. And they they are creating for themselves similar to what we were talking about with Nature Theater of Oklahoma and stuff. Like they're creating their own environment. It's a very lateral process over there, which I really think is exciting. I'm so excited for them. I'm really, really excited for them.

[57:34] Leah Walsh: Wonderful. Well, Nick, thank you so much.

[57:35] Nick Westrate: Thank you. This was a long time coming, and I'm so glad we got it too.

[57:39] Nick Westrate: I'm so glad I got to be on the Compass Podcast.

[57:51] Leah Walsh: Thank you for listening to the Compass Podcast. If you find these conversations valuable to your life as an artist and would like to support the ongoing production of the Compass, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash The Compass Podcast. Pledges start at as little as one dollar a month. You'll get access to bonus content, and anything you can give would be greatly appreciated. Also, if you have a moment, please rate or review in iTunes. Every little bit helps other listeners to find the podcast.

[58:33] Leah Walsh: See you next time.