Written By: Jayme Face
You’ve seen Joshua Schubart on The Tick and now you can see him on his latest show After on IFT!
upfrontNY: Can you tell us about your show After and your character?
Joshua Schubart: Sure, After is a TV show about a guy who loses his wife pretty young and he’s depressed. He has to move back in with his parents out on Long Island, New York. Through the help from his parents and his best friend, they try to get him back out into the world and meeting people. My character is Jeremy Hurns. I made After because I wanted to show a person who has issues with mental health, is in the process of wanting to harm themselves, and hits bottom work their way out of it in a positive way. So, it’s not perfect, but it’s better and that’s kind of what he’s all about. Jeremy is a guy who is trying to cope with not having his wife anymore. It’s been about a year since she passed so every new event we watch him relive a moment with his wife that is pretty similar and how it both haunts him and helps him.
upfrontNY: Since After came from your own production company are there any pressures or freedoms that come with that as an actor?
Joshua Schubart: It was really cool because I am able to have total creative carte blanche over the whole thing which was cool. Me and my two producing partners just kind of hashed it out and then just made the show. If I didn’t make it myself I don’t know if I would be playing the main character. I made this show also to highlight the fact that I’m a very large man. I’m 6’2 and over 220 lbs. For most of my career I have played bad guys, people that were really, really funny or bad guys who were also funny. That’s fine and I love that, but I want to show that larger people are complete human beings. We can live through life in a really complete, beautiful, and messy way which is why this is an amazing project for me because that’s what I got to do.
upfrontNY: Speaking of that where do you think the industry is at right now, has it improved, and where does it need to go?
Joshua Schubart: I think we’re improving more and more with each passing month and each passing year. We have longer to go and we will end up to where we need to be. I am super pleased with representation with all kinds of people happening more and more. That makes me so freaking happy! Some of the people that inspired me like Chris Farley, John Candy, and Jack Black were people that were bigger and oafish, but they hit you in your heart and your soul. It was those quiet moments that they were allowed to have and those people that inspired me and made me feel normal. I want to see more of that, less people being oafish, more people being human so that people can really see themselves on screen.
upfrontNY: You have also come from a tough childhood growing up, how did that lead you to be the successful actor you are today?
Joshua Schubart: I came from a weird childhood, bouncing around from family members and friends houses then I ended up homeless. I eventually ended up in foster care and that’s actually where I discovered acting. When I got into foster care I was fourteen years old and I was enrolled in Catholic School, which was a crazy change, obviously. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was hanging out with the “wrong crowd”. I don’t know if I necessarily had a choice because I was trying to survive, but I was also doing lots of drugs and things at a very young age. I also had a really debilitating speech impediment. I had a debilitating stutter and I couldn’t speak more than two to three words at a time. Then for whatever reason I heard the announcement for the play and I was like ‘Let me try this.’ I could speak in complete sentences for the first time since I was four, five, or six years old. I knew this is what I needed to do for the rest of my life in that moment. It was so critically changing for me. It was like being hit by lightning. I immediately quit everything that was horrible for me in that week. That’s where it began. I was like how the hell am I going to do this? So I just learned, asked, read and got my undergrad in acting. I got most of my MFA and then left because I wanted to just get out there and work. Then I came back to New York in 2011. There was a lot of TV and film here so I did a lot of background work because I didn’t know I wanted to do TV and film. I was convinced that I was going to be doing regional Shakespeare and that’s it. I was like this is cool; this is interesting. Let’s check this out; let’s see if it’s cool or I hate it. It turns out I loved it! Loved it, loved it, loved it. I did background work, was famous actors stand-ins, a lot of student films and indie shorts, web series until I built up my first resume, reel and could get my first agent and audition for things. That’s just kind of how it went climbing the ladder trying to make it happen.
upfrontNY: Speaking of having a speech impediment, how do you feel about actors who portray someone who has something like a speech impediment, but don’t actually have one?
Joshua Schubart: I think that’s fine. I mean for most cases actors are actors, for most cases, not every case. Obviously, like don’t wear blackface or don’t try and play trans if you’re not trans; that’s crazy. Part of human behavior is people with speech impediments and it’s the actors job to do it justice, but in a positive way and make it like a complete human. So, if an actor can honor it properly and it’s real then I say yes please, but if they can’t then don’t.
upfrontNY: You’ve had stuntman experience, what is one of the coolest scenes you have ever filmed?
Joshua Schubart: One of the coolest scenes I ever filmed was in The Tick season 1. It’s kind of a toss-up between two of these scenes, but I’ll choose the overkill fight. I fought Scott Speiser, who played Overkill in The Tick. We were able to do our own fight scene. It was originally like a two minute, ridiculous, hand to hand, crazy fight scene that they ended cutting down to a 20 second fight scene and that sucked, but it was a really cool experience. It was a lot of fun, but I am very fortunate that I’m able to learn most of that stuff. That is not what I do by trade. I am an actor who can also do that most of the time. I don’t know how to do high falls or cover myself In fire like those professionals. I tip my hat to them; they are incredible and always amaze me every day.
upfrontNY: You’ve also done a lot of audiobooks, how does that differ from other voice over acting or acting in general?
Joshua Schubart: That’s brand new. That came with the pandemic with everything closing down and not being able to perform in any way. It was hard and not only for me, but for my whole artist community. It was devastating. I was trying to figure out a way to not go crazy so I made an audio booth in my office. I thought let me try audiobooks. It scared me because I’m an actor and I’ll do whatever, but the idea of having to be a compelling narrator while also having to play every single person in the book, half of which were women, I didn’t want to do it poorly. I wanted to make sure that the author’s words were done well because that’s how you want to be as an actor. Then I realized if you just treat the book like a script and basically that’s what it is for me because I’m performing it then it became so much easier. If I’m not worrying about playing everybody just have a good time and make it honest that’s how I do audiobooks. It’s a lot of fun. I guess because of my voice my niche is romance novels so that’s what I have been primarily doing. That’s a fun new world that I never thought I’d be a part of.
upfrontNY: It is your dream to be in Marvel movie, what would be your dream role?
Joshua Schubart: Honestly, I want to be Ben Grimm, in the new Fantastic Four, aka The Thing. He’s like the dude that’s made of rocks. I really like him. He’s a great character because he’s one of those roles that you don’t see for larger guys. He’s big, but he’s very, very emotionally aware and I am too. I would love to do that character justice because it’s very easy to play him as this bruiser, punch you in the face kind of character, but he’s extremely nuanced and extremely layered. I love that character. I originally wanted to play venom, but that’s Tom Hardy and I can’t compete with Tom Hardy.
upfrontNY: As a local New Yorker what is something you love about New York?
Joshua Schubart: I love New York for so many reasons, but I love New York for the community. The amount of people and the types of people, everybody from everywhere that I’ve met. I’m so fortunate that my career and working at the Metropolitan Opera constantly I get to meet people from everywhere, all over the world, so many cultures and backgrounds. I don’t know if there’s any other place like that in the world where you can walk into a place and there’s people from everywhere and they all have such cool, interesting stories. You can endlessly meet, talk, and experience things that you never thought you would and that’s why I love New York so much!
upfrontNY: Is there any upcoming projects you want to let our readers know about?
Joshua Schubart: I have a reading for a feature film with some people I pulled in from After and from The Tick. Hopefully that will be made soon, cross those fingers. It’s called We Got What You Need. It’s about a guy who works overnights in a gas station, but he’s also an indie comic book creator. He gets no sleep ever. When he’s really in it or he’s getting creative and he’s getting hyper manic from lack of sleep he hallucinates in animation and comic book panels. So we are constantly moving in and out of this animated world and animated things come into his world in a way where it’s like breaking through into the now. It also deals heavily with homelessness and everyone from millennials down to people being born tomorrow. The American dream we were promised is not a reality anymore and we have to learn a way to make a new one for us. That’s what this is like too and that’s what it talks about. How do we do that? How do we make our way in this new world that wasn’t built for us?
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