Best known for his work opposite Academy Award nominee Colman Domingo in Netflix’s The Madness, Chad Andrews has built a career defined by range and intensity, with credits spanning AMC’s Hell on Wheels, CBS’s Ghosts, Showtime’s Fellow Travelers, Netflix’s Ripple, and the Prime Video feature The Princess and the Bodyguard. With his latest project, The Butchers, Andrews channels more than a decade of acting experience into a venture that feels both deeply personal and wildly unrestrained, a natural evolution of an artist long immersed in storytelling. We caught up with him to discuss his career.
Hi Chad, thanks for taking the time to speak with Occhi. You’ve said you “accidentally” ended up in a middle school drama class — what was it about that first experience that made acting feel less like an activity and more like an art form you could live inside?
Hi, absolutely, thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to answer your questions!
I felt like my thoughts and opinions had purpose, outside of just being in my head. They could be channelled into a character to get a laugh, to get a cry, to make someone think deeply. You’d say something and immediately get a reaction, like an audience treating you as if you’re a mirror to life. It felt like having a superpower, being a hero, and who doesn’t want to be a hero? I could affect how someone felt about life because of my own thoughts, and it was at that point that it became an art.
In those early years, locked away writing scripts and rehearsing characters, what were you actually chasing: escape, control, connection, or something else you didn’t have language for yet?
I think I was chasing all of those things and more. Movies felt like music, like there was a rhythm to the language, a poeticism to the performance; it was all so well-orchestrated to make you feel a certain way, and I was obsessed with understanding how that worked. I wanted to feel what it was like to live as these different characters, to be a person with a different set of circumstances, the imagination of it, to play, to be able to romanticize seeing the world through all these different lenses. It made me feel super connected to the world around me. Most of all, I loved that I could travel to these places in my mind and still be me at the end of the day. I got to have my cake and eat it too.
When you look back at your BFA years at the University of Calgary, what did formal training give you that you couldn’t have learned on set — and what did it fail to prepare you for?
I think the university part of my training gave me a safe space to fully embrace and explore my art, to fall in love with the craft, without any fear of failure. That being said, though, university couldn’t prepare me for the day-to-day life of building an acting career. If I could do it again, I would’ve just jumped into the market and learned as I went. I think it’s better to train and do simultaneously, rather than be on pause. The training I do now and have been doing for the past 10 years is real-world scenarios, it’s boot camp, and it’s the hard work that’s expected of you in your career as an actor. Training has taught me to appreciate life more than just the time we fill with all the tasks we need to accomplish in order to achieve our career goals, to focus on the main goal, which is living your life.
Was there a moment in school where you realised you weren’t just an actor, but someone who needed to direct and write too? What triggered that shift?
In school, it was a way to get my thoughts out. With acting, the thoughts live inside me still, except for the choice words I get to say or actions I get to do. I needed more, though. I’ve always loved movies, and I see so much of life like a movie. I’m constantly seeing scenes in my head, and I just want to capture them before they float away. Writing came naturally because I wanted to bring my thoughts to life. In university, I found directing, because I loved being right there beside the actors, conducting the conflict like a contact sport, giving them a place of support to fully feel a moment. Directing allows me to express the full range of my thoughts out loud, like we’re trying to win the game. It’s all very exciting.
Moving to Toronto is a leap a lot of people talk themselves out of. What did you have to sacrifice to make it real — and what part of you changed in the first year there?
Moving to Toronto was out of necessity; I knew that this was exactly what I wanted, and signed up fully knowing that my life would be unstable and unfair in many ways. I think over the years I’ve had to sacrifice at times relationships with friends, and then my own work/life balance. I’m always wanting more out of myself, and never really feeling like the work is ever done. In the first year, I felt like I started becoming a person who was fully mine. I had finally met the kind of acting coach I’d always dreamed of having, a drill sergeant who doesn’t let you get away with anything. He’s taught me so much, but one thing in particular is to break down all of the conditioning I have as a person, to go on a journey of self and rebuild with the things I truly see myself as, and not just the things I was conditioned to be.
You’ve trained with Earl Nanhu for years. What’s the most uncomfortable truth a mentor has ever told you about your work — and how did it alter the way you approach performance?
Honestly, I will never forget one of my first classes with Earl. I was doing a monologue, and he kept stopping me. I could barely get a quarter of the way through without him stopping and asking me to do it again, over and over and over. He’d give me notes every single time. Finally, I yelled out of frustration, “I’m trying!” He said, “I want you to stop trying.” I was showing that I was acting, that I understood my objective, I was wearing a mask. That was very sobering, because I was a recent graduate of a good university, I had a piece of paper to prove I was a professional actor, but in that moment, I felt like I knew nothing about this craft. It took a lot of building and rebuilding, but I’m so grateful to Earl. That was a life-changing moment, and I think about it every time I approach a role. Acting is about living truthfully, not showing that you are.
Early on, you did independent and student films to build your resume. What did those sets teach you about the industry’s reality — the politics, the power dynamics, the “unspoken rules” — that no one warns you about?
It definitely taught me the language of sets early on, in a more approachable environment. It made me feel so much more comfortable when it came to landing parts on bigger union sets. More than that though, it taught me how far a film relationship can go. When you’re doing independent and student work, you’re not just building your resume; you’re building a network. People intrinsically love to work with people that they know and trust. You’re all growing together, and you’ll eventually work on bigger things together, and you’ll be so grateful that you made connections with a wide range of filmmaking artists. It all comes back around. Get out there and make a film family.
You’ve moved between TV, shorts, and internationally screened films. What have you learned about how the camera “reads” you — and how has that shaped the kinds of roles you now say yes or no to?
I certainly don’t want to pigeonhole myself. At this point in my career, I am definitely saying yes far more than no. That being said, though, I’ve noticed that the camera captures a darkness or a grittiness behind my eyes. I think I lend myself more easily to dramatic roles, criminals and anti-heroes. I can appear like a nice guy on the outside, but easily make someone believe there’s something else going on underneath. I have a face like a chameleon, and it can change like the weather. Those are the roles I love to play, and I think the camera reads that very well.
You’ve worked alongside major talent, including Colman Domingo on The Madness. What did being in that environment reveal about excellence — not just talent, but behaviour, preparation, and presence?
That environment taught me about ‘play’ at a high level. Watching Colman work through the scene, ask questions, try different things, own his character first and foremost, showed me how to really fight to make stronger choices. Working with him taught me to always be actively listening as an actor on set for ways to improve the scene, to not just show up and play your part, to find the best circle of communication between you, your scene partners, and the director.
With The Butchers, you’re blending dark comedy with high-stakes thriller energy. What does the humour do in this story — is it relief, critique, a trap for the audience, or a way to expose something uglier underneath?
It makes my two psychopathic leads likable, which is something that was very important to me. I find it scarier to think how monsters could be so similar to you and I, how they have fears of being inadequate, they make mistakes, they want love, and they also miss the safety and comfort of home. It’s absolutely absurd but relatable, and I wanted to highlight that in a fun light-hearted way. My hope has always been that audiences fall in love with these two characters before realizing they’re rooting for the bad guys.
The Butchers is also about two friends whose “nearly-genius” plan collapses under their own stupidity. Do you see Steve and Morgan as villains, idiots, survivors, or a twisted mirror of ambition in any industry?
I see them as villains, but they’re the heroes of their own story. Outside of all the killings and grotesque ways they go about it, their emotions and personalities are as relatable as you and I. I would say that this is predominantly Steve’s operation and Morgan is the muscle. They found each other in a moment of desperation, which we don’t see, but they absolutely do depend on each other, and one wouldn’t be alive without the other. They happen to be good at what they do and got lucky that it meshed so well with an already thriving butchery business, but where they fail is in adapting to a world outside of their bubble. On paper, they’re criminal masterminds, but in reality, they’re lowlifes that have just gotten lucky up until this point.
For audiences coming into The Butchers cold at a festival, what do you want them to leave with besides entertainment: discomfort, laughter they feel guilty about, a question, a moral hangover?
I hope audiences at the end of the film are able to separate the action, the fun, the entertainment, the humour, and see Steve and Morgan for who they actually are. I want it to be a sobering realization that a life like theirs ends in the gutter, it doesn’t deserve our sympathy, and these two people are actually very broken inside.
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