We recently connected with Jon Molerio and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Jon , 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?
In this business, resilience is crucial. You get rejected as an actor 90% of the time. Same goes for writing. Nothing personal. It’s just the nature of the business. You have to learn to move on and concentrate on what’s next. I think I learned to be resilient from my immigrant parents who came to this country, without speaking the language, in their thirties with 2 small kids. They never gave up. They worked hard to make it. And thanks to them I lived a great childhood and learned amazing lessons on how to persevere through adversity and challenges.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I have been working in the entertainment industry in Hollywood as both a writer and actor for over 25 years. I am bilingual and have been lucky to work in both Spanish and English markets. I started out exclusively as an actor. Actually as a struggling actor by day, and funny waiter by night. After being told a dozen times by customers: “you should do stand-up,” I finally listened and tried it out. It was amazing and got me started on the path to writing. Next came sketch comedy where I also wrote. It was. then that my very good friend Joe Menendez (successful director/writer) came to see my show and said: “Dude, you wrote these? They’re good. Why don’t you try writing a feature or a pilot.” Once again, I listened. and since then, I’ve sold a few pilots, had 4 movies produced, became the head writer of a late night comedy show for 3 seasons, and currently I’m in the process of developing, along with Joe Menendez (who became my writing partner on most projects), what could be our biggest and most exciting movie to date (*Can’t wait to share details when it’s official. Fingers crossed). I’m glad I was open to trying new things and diversifying. I never thought I could be a writer until I tried it. And it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
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?
Personal drive/motivation, positivity, and being thick skinned are (in my opinion) the most important skills that you must develop in order to make it in the entertainment field. There are many things I would tell someone starting out in the business like: don’t wait for people to discover you, create opportunities for yourself, don’t just be an actor, diversify your skills, collaborate with others, never burn bridges, always be awesome to work with, be nice to everyone (not just because it’s the decent thing to do but) because that rookie P.A. might be a top producer some day that you’ll be pitching a script to (happened to me recently and he signed on), don’t take things personally, move on to the next thing, SAVE YOUR MONEY when you book a big job, you will have bad years but you never know what’s around the corner, and most importantly: DON’T MAKE THE BUSINESS YOUR ENTIRE LIFE. This business can be amazingly wonderful and it can be heartlessly cruel. And because luck has so much to do with it, there’s no telling what will happen. So my advice is: have something else that means more to you. Something outside of the business. For me, it was my beautiful caring wife of 20 years, and my two awesome kids. Coming home to them reminds me of what’s really most important in life. Good luck!
How can folks who want to work with you connect?
I am always looking for new and exciting projects to work on. Part of the beauty of my business is that I get to collaborate with new teams of people all the time. As a writer, my expertise has always been comedy. I have written dozens of comedy scripts for film and TV. But I have also been lucky enough to work on horror films, action films, rom-coms, and I’m currently working (alongside my writing partner Joe) on developing an emotional bio pic about a real life hero that few people have ever heard about. It’s in the early stages now, but we hope you will be able to see it on the big screen in the near future. — If you have an interesting project and would like to hire a professional writer with a strong comedy background, let’s chat about it, I may be a good option for you. You can reach me at: [email protected]. Oh and one other thing, when a project isn’t “up my alley” or in my wheelhouse, I always say so. I don’t believe in wasting anyone’s time, including my own. My artistic goal is always: ‘Let’s collaborate to make the best product possible and have a great time doing it.’ I’ve turned down paying gigs when I don’t think I’m the best writer for it. But when a project is a good fit for everyone involved, it’s always an amazing journey. There are few things more satisfying than seeing a fictional world that you helped create on paper, literally come to life on a film or TV set. It’s what makes this crazy business so damn worth it, at least for me.
