We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Carson Christ. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Carson below.
Hi Carson, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
I always like to remind myself of a quote from J.R.R Tolkien which states“ All you have to decide is what to do with the time that is given.” – The Lord of the Rings. I interpret the quote as when you are faced with challenges in your life, you have to decide how you are going to use those challenges or obstacles to grow from them. Being performers in this industry takes a lot of resilience. It can be mentally and physically challenging if you are not taking care of yourself. I like to think that having resilience is like growing calluses. When you go to the gym for the first time, you will go through aches and pains after a few days. You begin to feel like you just want to give up. But it’s important to remember that you have a goal you want to achieve, and you remind yourself that you want change in your life. Going through the ups and downs is necessary to get there. When you push yourself you will experience moments of rejection or hard times, but you get back up with the scars and calluses you received from all that hard work. It took me a while to develop resilience and the discipline needed for me to get through my days as an actor. I’ve gone through low times in my life and self reflection to be aware that I need to be more strong minded and to keep a positive mindset. I’ve struggled with weight loss and, as an actor, I’ve struggled with confidence. Some of those days I felt like I wasn’t good enough to achieve my goals and I didn’t feel like I could achieve them. Since then, I feel like my resilience to challenges has gotten stronger and some of the goals I’ve made have been accomplished.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I’ve been performing and singing since elementary school, doing church choir and musicals. As a kid I would always perform for family parties whenever the opportunity presented itself and some part of me knew that this was something that made me feel good. It wasn’t till high school that, after doing our spring musical of Les Misérables and hearing Patti LuPone speak to our cast, that performing on stage was something I wanted to pursue as a career. I began to sink into a black hole of watching YouTube videos of musicals and famous Broadway stars that my passion for performing grew bigger each day. Not only did my love for theater grow, but also my love of film and the process of film making. As I reflected on my passion for the arts, I realized the reason I like the story telling aspect of it was because the art form was a gateway or microscope to the human condition. It allows audiences to connect and feel something that makes people yearn for change or makes people aware of certain events. My favorite aspect of the process has always been the deep dive and the analysis of the character. I learn so much about the character and, but also sometimes about myself. The same thing can be applied to singing any genre of music. Finding that emotional connection to the piece that will hopefully bring more out of the song. Any time I post a singing video on YouTube or social media, I always try to sing a song that connects with me during that time. One example would be when I sang No One is Alone from Into the Woods. It was during the pandemic and I always felt like there was no hope and felt isolated from friends and certain family members. At the moment it felt right to do but also I knew I wanted to start showing my talent to the world, which is always what I have wanted to do since my passion for performing began.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
One thing I’m sure some actors fall into is the comparison of people’s successes and journeys. When this happens, we fall into a rabbit hole of self-doubt, and it can be hard to get out of that hole. But you’ve always got to remember that everyone else’s journey is different and that you can’t compare yourself to others, even when it comes to your talent. Everyone has their own special quality to them that makes them unique, and it’s important to find that in yourself. Ways of finding that special quality is putting yourself out there and to keep performing. Learning from those experiences and developing the resilience to keep pushing yourself and challenging yourself to become a better artist.
What’s been one of your main areas of growth this year?
I never really enjoyed doing auditions before just because I’m too much of a perfectionist or I self-doubt myself too much about what I did or what I wanted to do. But the more auditions I’ve done, I’ve learned to just have fun with them and use the moment to just have fun and to perform. As actors, it’s hard to find performance opportunities and auditions are a great way to show your talent to casting directors but to also show them who you are as a person. Now I always come out of an audition feeling good knowing that I did my best.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cchrist_929_/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@CarChrist99
- Other: IMBD- https://www.imdb.com/name/nm12053097/
Image Credits
Dune Alford, J & E Film Productions
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