Meet Simon Gissler

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Simon Gissler a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Simon, so happy to have you with us today and there is so much we want to ask you about. So many of us go through similar pain points throughout our journeys and so hearing about how others developed certain skills or qualities that we are struggling with can be helpful. Along those lines, we’d love to hear from you about how you developed your ability to take risk?

Well, like any skill it gets easier with practice. I definitely haven’t always been as bold as I’d like, and it’s something that some days I’m still working on. I look back on parts of my life so far and have moments where I think “Oh, I wish I’d stepped out of my shell and shared my truer self with the people around me” or “I wish I’d just jumped right in and started making more art earlier.” I think having periods where I realize I’m not living as fully or honestly as I artistically could be make me hungry enough to make more drastic moves.

My move to Los Angeles came in 2019 after I’d graduated from college with a theatre degree, but spent eight months sitting around rotting in my small hometown in Nebraska. A couple years later, when the world opened up after covid, me getting back into live theatre post-lockdown meant that I told myself to not be picky about the shows I submitted to be a part of, because I’d just gotten through a period of having no shows at all. And after that, eventually making the choice *to* be pickier about the shows I was putting my time into meant jumping away from other people’s theatre troupes that were already well established and making a team of my own with my friends that we’d have to develop ourselves.

In all of these situations, realizing I was stuck in stretches of not making art that I felt was fulfilling and really true to myself (or in some cases any art at all) provoked the question “Is this dream of yours something you’re really serious about?” and if the answer was a confident “yes” then I figured I owed it to myself to make a change. Sometimes it was scary, and sometimes it was only a little change, but even when I was having trouble following my own advice I reminded myself that as far as I know for sure, I just have this one life here on earth to become the truest version of myself, so I better get on it.

Oh, and improv classes were great too. When I got to town a friend suggested I give them a shot, and whether you’re a performer or not I really think they’re great at helping you practice “being comfortable with being uncomfortable” in a low stakes environment.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I’m an actor and writer, but I end up producing quite a bit too because I’ve learned that sometimes if you want to make art, you can’t just wait for someone else to give you permission to. I moved to LA wanting to be involved in film (and I do act in a handful of little indie films) but so much of the work I’ve ended up doing here has ended up being in live theatre, particularly comedy. While for years I’d gone in and out of the traditional process of submitting online auditions into a void and just hoping someone will notice and pick me for their project, I kind of became disillusioned with that route. So instead a couple friends of mine and I got together when we realized that with a little more elbow grease we could just make our own shows, pick ourselves to be in them, and have complete control over the quality and subject matter of the writing. At least this is about where my head was when my good friends Hudson Long, Molly Sharpe, StaggerLee Cole and I met doing live theatre in Burbank and decided to split off to form our sketch team Fish Licks.

I’ve got my fingers in a few different pies, but Fish Licks (@fishlicks; leave this article and follow us now!) is probably the most special to me right now. We mostly do absurdist live sketch comedy shows where all the individual skits are united by some common theme or shared world. For example, one of my favorites that we just got done bringing to the Hollywood Fringe Festival this past summer was set in a very dairy Mad Maxian post-apocalypse where each sketch was framed as a legend from back when the world still had milk in it. Our last show was about a church service for a dirt themed religion where sketches serve as re-enactments of parables from our dirt bible and audience members are instructed to stand and sing dirt hymns. And yet another that you can find on YouTube was a show where we were all turn of the century sailors and each sketch was just about the high jinx the crew would get up to around the various decks of their DIY cruise ship and its passing islands. It sometimes feels a little pretentious to say it, but I’m never satisfied with “just” doing a sketch comedy show. I always want to take our audiences into a unique world that feels really special and weird.

Thanks to a lot of dedication from the team, we’re typically able to do new full length shows around Hollywood several times a year (life depending; sometimes we get distracted), and it’s always a blast showing off a few pieces for indie comedy and theatre fests where we get to meet other people doing similar work. LA’s got a really strong indie comedy community, and I’m so grateful for the friends I’ve made and adventures I’ve gone on rolling around in it with Fish Licks.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I think finding a community’s really valuable. It’s absolutely possible to do creative work on your own, but I feel like staying active or getting started on projects is easier if you’re surrounded with other people who’re excited to make stuff too. Sometimes I get in my head about asking people to collaborate on things with me, feeling like I might be imposing, but in my experience often there’s a good chance they’re thinking the same thing, just waiting for someone else to be the one to be brave and pop the question. For me I found some of these connections taking comedy classes through Second City Hollywood (R.I.P.), rekindling relationships with people from school who were loose acquaintances in college but also moved to LA, and meeting folks doing local indie theatre shows. You invite some of these people to a board game night or something and they could turn into friends that might show up to lend a hand when you want to shoot something or collaborate on writing a script. Pay it forward and return the favor when someone else needs help making their own passion project come to life and suddenly you have a community. Then things that seemed daunting on your own might not look so impossible.

I also think you’d be surprised how much you get by just saying yes to things and then reliably showing up when it’s time to do them. Yes, there’s nuance there (sometimes politely declining a project you don’t connect with really is the right move), but overall I believe doing good work and doing it consistently can carry you far in a way where people around you will notice your work ethic. Heck, just this summer an old director that I knew from back home was in town and hit me up asking if I wouldn’t mind being one of many nameless monsters wearing a mask in the background of his short horror film and I said I was happy to help. It wasn’t going to pay anything and the shoot was going to be hours away, but when the lead actor ended up having to pull out of the project at the last second guess who got tapped to replace them? I’m really proud of how that shoot turned out and now that footage is probably going to end up being one of the most valuable parts of my reel. I’m not saying you can always count on getting lucky like that, but you never know what something that feels like grunt work could lead to and people remember who said yes when they asked for help. None of that happens if you turn down every opportunity that doesn’t sound glamorous.

And lastly- being willing to embrace uncertainty. There’s always a reason not to do something, and if you hold off on guaranteed success to make risky jumps, there’s no guarantee it’ll ever come. I remember when I was getting ready to move to LA, since I didn’t really have a lot of savings, it seemed important to have a day job lined up before I committed to moving. I had a background in scouting, so I applied to work at summer camp. We had an online interview where they offered me the job and were even going to provide housing, but it was going to be a couple hours’ drive from LA itself. I was so hungry to get to Southern California, I told myself I’d be willing take an non-ideal situation like that and drive into the city to pursue acting on weekends or something if it got me even an inch closer to the world I wanted to be a part of. I was getting ready to accept when I saw an old college acquaintance posted on Facebook that they were living near downtown LA and needed a roommate at their place by the end of the month. Doing some rough math, I figured I could pay for maybe a month and a half of rent with no job before I ran out of money, so I politely thanked the camp and turned them down so I could move into the place that took me physically closer to my dream.

After that I told myself that a month and a half was my deadline to have a day job or else this whole crazy move was going to have been for nothing. I literally knocked on doors asking for work and ended up at the concession stand of a movie theater. It was greasy and low paying, but paired up with a couple other side hustles it gave me just enough gas in the tank to pay rent and start pursuing acting after shifts. It’s been five and a half years and I’m still here. I feel like I still have a long ways to go, but it would have been so easy to find a reason to stay in Nebraska and wait for a more ideal circumstance to move. Covid came not long after and now (at the time of writing) our city’s literally on fire, so who knows? I might’ve still been there now.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

I’m tempted to be professional and recommend a really good self help book or acting manual, but honestly The Lord of the Rings is probably hands down the most important book in my life. I think of it as one of the greatest gifts that my dad gave to my siblings and I. His parents gave him a copy of Lord of the Rings when he was a teenager back in the sixties, and it had such an impact on him that when he heard they were making movies of it, he wanted to make sure his kids got in on the action even though I was like five when they were coming out. When he read to us, he’d do the voices and sing the songs and my siblings and I’d be re-enacting them later when we played in the backyard.

Yeah, they’re fantasy, but the themes in those books helped shape so much of the foundation of who I am and what I believe. They’re stories about little people leaving the comfort of home to travel far and do the right thing in the face of overwhelming odds- refusing to give up long after things seem hopeless. They’re stories about diverse peoples having to set aside their differences because they realize there’re bigger problems than their old grudges. Even now, the character Aragorn is like my patron saint for what I think a good man should strive to be- brave and determined, but also humble and a servant to those around him. I came to see so much of my dad in characters like the wise old wizard Gandalf, sharing these books in a way that would inspire in me a love of the outdoors and an interest in telling my own stories. Now I go out to the woods and read one chapter three times a year: on his birthday, on Father’s Day, and on the anniversary of his passing.

Contact Info:

• Website: @fishlicks ( https://www.instagram.com/fishlicks/?hl=en )
• Instagram: @simongissler ( https://www.instagram.com/simongissler/?hl=en )
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fishlickscomedy
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FishLicks
• Other: Fish Licks TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@fish_licks
  Simon Gissler TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@simongissler

Image Credits

Chris Jon
Michaela Wadzinski
Amethyst Schmitz
Joshua Contreras
Levi Orion
Otto Gaiser
David Haverty
Ben Hoekstra