Brandon Sean Pearson is an incredibly talented actor on the rise that I recently had the exciting opportunity to chat with. He is endearing, kind and intensely dedicated to his craft. Brandon Sean Pearson recently wrapped “The Mason Brothers,” the crime drama directed by Keith Sutliff. I had the opportunity to attend the premiere of “The Mason Brothers,” where Pearson played Jesse Mason, the hot-tempered and wired Mason brother. The entire cast was fantastic and I thought they played off of each other brilliantly. However, there was something about Jesse Mason. Complicated and hard to figure out. I genuinely enjoyed watching Brandon Sean Pearson light up the screen and steal quite a few scenes (as Jesse Mason) and was curious about his story.
Brandon Sean Pearson was raised in Utah and struggled early on with various cultural and religious values. However, he is what I consider to be “one of the fortunate souls” because Pearson knew what he wanted to do since he was a six-year-old child. Brandon Sean Pearson started filling up notebooks at a very early age with story ideas and rough concept sketches and even posters with his name above the title. Hundreds and hundreds of his ideas have been scattered across those lined pages over the years. Many have turned into full blown outlines and even partially scribed scripts. There are several Brandon Sean Pearson has written with colleagues and a few of those have even been optioned and made.
For Pearson, it was never an issue of arrogance or fame or even necessarily wanting to be looked at. It originated from a deep desire to be a part of this world of story-tellers. At times Brandon Sean Pearson feels it’s surreal to look back on all he has accomplished as an actor and realize he is following the course set by a six-year-old. Yet, it also makes perfect sense. Brandon Sean Pearson simply listened to his inner child and knew the course to take. He feels that he is still very much that kid, albeit somewhat older and a bit more creatively twisted. Did living in Utah (even at highly frustrating times) play an integral role in this path? Absolutely! Brandon Sean Pearson represents the creative process, trusting the journey and always being open to learning, but mostly; the brave choice of vulnerability.
How did you like living in Utah? You moved there when you were 12 which is a very impressionable time.
I think growing up in Utah is very similar to growing up anywhere inland. The place that we come from we don’t necessarily want to remain, there is so much to see outside of our immediate environment, that the question arises “Why root into a soil you already know?” “Why remain where you come from?” However, there are certain aspects about Utah that are very “specifically Utah.” First off, you are surrounded by some of the most amazing vistas and country side one could hope for. The National Parks are rich and diverse. There is so much to see and I’d recommend a trip to Utah solely to visit the landscapes. The closer you are to Salt Lake City the better as you get to experience a certain sense diversity. For me personally, Utah was a struggle largely because of the dominant religion in Utah and that would be the “M word.” Mormonism. Similar to Aaron Eckhart, I did the whole Mormon thing. I served a mission and thought I was doing the right thing until at a certain point it just hit me while I was knocking doors in the projects of Harlem in New York City that I was more of a hindrance to the good of mankind than I was an aid. I was twenty-two years old and at that point I had given Mormonism a very fair shot as I saw it, having practiced it for a total of three years when I decided to leave. Sure, my family is Mormon, but we originally we’re coming out of the Bay area, and we were at best Cafeteria Jack Mormons by the time we got to Utah. To tell you the truth, I don’t even know why I went on the missions, yet I’m grateful I did. I’m grateful that I can say “Yeah, I tried the thing and put it through my own test and then decided “Hell no. Not this. Not anymore.” As a Progressive, I couldn’t stay in that mold and feel healthy. I got angry a lot over the six years I remained in Utah after deciding I wanted no part of its own State/Church induced Nationalism.
I know that you started in theatre and have performed in numerous stage productions. What was your first stage production like and how did you feel? Excited? Terrifying?
The very first time I got on stage was in Middle School. My teacher Mrs. McDougal, one of the greatest women I have ever known. She cast me in the talent show play as ‘The Phantom’ of “Gilligan’s Island.” Well, things went wrong, as they always do in anything Live and I was left on stage waiting for a cue. I stayed in character, and at that time it meant I continued shaking my finger at the lighting board for a good ninety seconds. It felt like an eternity, of course. I was beyond embarrassed but I carried on. The show must go on. Suck it up and be there for all those depending on you to move the story along whether the lights or sound cues are working or not and I could feel that within the safety of the theater kids. It was an error. No big thing and it could happen to any of us. I endured walking around those middle school halls for a few days and I could hear the insults and the mock laughter and thank God for that. It broke my heart at that moment and set me off on an interesting few years as an adolescent, but it was a blessing in disguise as my skin started to toughen up then. Despite the mishap, I loved the rush of being under the lights in a dark room and having to do something and to be something. To embody the character that eyes and ears fell on for the purpose of entertainment and ridicule. Yeah, I loved it. Bring it on. Hate me or love me — I don’t care. I will be me, and shaking my finger for ninety seconds helped forge that.
Tell me about your decision to come out to LA and pursue a film career?
It took years to get to LA and it was a scary move. I knew it was necessary but I love my family. Despite our religious and political differences, they have encouraged me and loved me through this journey that they may not even understand. Yet, they’ve always come to the shows, they seek out the movies and they show up. Therefore, to leave my family and source of comfort was frightening as hell. I knew I was going to miss particular personal things. Whether it was weddings and babies being born or military farewells, I would miss the life of my people. Yet I had to go. I knew the chances were worse if I didn’t make the move than knowing I was being beaten by fear. I had already tried being other things. I was a Mormon missionary. I had worked for the USFS as a wildland firefighter, telemarketing, Restaurant Manager, I’d even worked on an oil rig as a roughneck for three months and none of those jobs made sense to me. I could feel myself falling into the pattern of accepting my lot in life and abiding the status quo by simply settling into a life I never wanted. So I packed up my car and left. I cried hard in that car ride. Even now, when I see my family and then leave I get that very tense throat thing, where it’s like the tears are going to leap out of my mouth if I don’t let them stream through my eyes. This is part of the journey that comes from making a solid choice to follow my dream. LA is tough though. It’s a maze that doesn’t care if you’re there or not, and it takes a bit to figure out how to survive and prosper in a world that is very indifferent to your existence. Yet you learn to cope. The weather is fantastic, the Pacific is a calming agent, and honestly; here is where your dream grows, so you stay. I stay.
I also know that you have continued to be actively involved in plays such as the ‘Laramie Project’ (and Matthew Sheppard’s story) — an extremely poignant one. What was that experience like?
We did the whole “Laramie Cycle.” Two plays in repetition. That’s five hours of text and about a hundred characters shared between the eight actors who were on that stage at The Chance Theater down in Anaheim. I think we had six weeks to pull this thing off and every piece of it was very specifically blocked. That’s not an easy piece, neither of the two shows are easy and to repeat them was insanity. We were all nuts for doing it yet that caused us to let go. You must embrace the text, trust the direction, and even more importantly than that was trusting your fellow warriors on that stage. You have to be there for each other. We were connected on a very personal and intimate level on that stage doing that show. I’ve done probably forty plays and that is the one where we all try to hold reunions to see each other. The connection is genuine and it gets stronger with the passing years.
Since you have so much experience … can you even say that you prefer one medium over the other (theatre versus film). Or that both bring you different experiences?
I’m grateful to work. Well, film is more lucrative, but theater, 99% of the time, will have the better scripts. Hands down. I have also come to the conclusion that you can really examine a canvas differently with both mediums and both are very important pieces of art. Yeah, I would not be able to walk away from either. I need film and theatre in my life as both require you to do a different kind of work. Film is this magical full escape. It has the ability to fully place you in a world different than the one we know. A play can suggest New York City, but a movie can put you there, right in the thick of it.
You are immensely talented and definitely bring an intensity to the screen. Are you a method actor? Can you tell me a bit about your creative process?
It’s funny that you ask that. I am My Method Actor. I am also My interpretation of Modern Methods, Viewpointing, Stanislavsky, Uta Hagen, Strasberg, Stella, and others. It’s all a very personal thing. I can tell you that I have to prepare differently for each one. Auditions are like cramming for a test, call backs are like playing chess, and every movie is its own fucking season. The one constant thread throughout is reading the script a lot because it’s not just about knowing what you say, it’s knowing what others say. It’s a story, so know the fucking story. Then you have the skeleton, you know the story, you know the relationships, you have the words but that’s just a blue print. That’s not tangible, that’s kind of like an informed theory. You still haven’t acted yet. You don’t do that until the scene is up and you are there with your scene partner. Nothing happens until something is fired off, and then caught, and then volleyed, and then it’s a living thing. Then you’re in a moment. You’re then in action, and that is being an actor.
I loved the Mason Brothers and your character Jesse. How did you like playing Jesse?
I loved playing Jesse. What’s fun about Jesse is how incomplete he is. He’s the Logistics Guy for their bank jobs, but his personal life is in shambles. He’s got some problems. He’s your working class kind of criminal, which makes him almost an anti-hero in today’s climate. He’s very bipolar. And I’m serious about that. The script has him going into these fits and as I read that I thought to myself, “this guy is like text book bipolar disorder.” So navigating through his unpredictable highs and lows was very fun. Jesse is so human that playing him was very cathartic. He’s one of my favorites. He’s not a typical smooth criminal. He doesn’t like guns. I loved all that stuff. You know? Being in a world where you have to rally, but you hate the instruments of your own trade. There are fascinating internal conflicts with Jesse. I want a whole movie just about Jesse because there’s so much to work with there.
Tell me about coming into The Mason Brothers late into the production.
They’d been in pre-production for five months and they had their cast. They were rehearsing, and the guy originally cast as Jesse was simply just not working. Sometimes that happens. We’ve all been miscast and recast at some point in time. It’s not the greatest but again, it happens. So, Keith had to make a tough call. Now, I had worked with Matthew Webb before, even as recent as a few months’ prior on another feature up past the Bay, and Matt had recommended me— God bless that dude. And I was sitting in a coffee shop thinking about steamed milk when my phone rang and it was Keith. He explained the situation to me and I told him “I’ve had this happen before. Three times actually. I’m the guy that makes your life easier.” At that point Keith made the choice to cast me. I then had two weeks to prep for the role. So, everyone else in the movie had several months and I had two weeks. Now, regarding the difficulty of it, in college I remember putting up Adam Rapp’s “Red Light Winter” in about 2 1/2 weeks and that was ALOT of language. Jesse talks a lot, but Matt in “Red Light Winter” does a massive amount of talking, and with a Rapp script he demands syllabic perfection. So, that was where time no longer frightened me. Two weeks? Sure. Let’s do it. Let’s play.
What is your relationship like with Keith Sutliff? Personally, I find him kind, considerate and professional.
You’re right. He is. He is driven, ambitious and he knows what he likes and he’s going for that. He’s a nut for these kind of films. The nineties are Keith. “Reservoir Dogs,” “Heat,” and all the others. Crime movies are his thing. You won’t see Keith doing a Romantic Comedy or a Charlie Kaufman kind of thing and he knows it. Keith is a really good guy and he let me fly off the page with Jesse. He let me turn that character into something that was only a suggestion on the page. I had total creative freedom with Jesse while Keith stepped back and let me do my thing.
Was “The Mason Brothers” a taxing shoot. You have a lot of dialogue and interactive scenes.
Any chance you get to do a movie, whether you have a role like Jesse or not, you do it. Yes, it was taxing, but what else was I going to be doing? Sleeping? Working? Bartending? No. Out of all those things, you get a movie and no matter the intensity or the amount of night shoots… It’s always good news. It’s always a good thing.
When you come off of a film (like The Mason Brothers), which is intense, is it hard to unwind or you move straight to your next project?
I vegged out and watched “Game of Thrones” for like two days after we finished “The Mason Brothers.” I just mainlined that totally different world. I went to the beach, re-read a few scripts, and then life goes on. You know, you read a few books, go on some hikes, follow up with your network, try to see other people’s work, and then roll on. This whole acting world has two guarantees: Peaks and Valleys. I try to enjoy both of those things.
What are you currently working on?
Luckily, there’s a lot coming down the pipeline. One of them would allow me to fulfill a childhood dream of playing a werewolf and the approach with the werewolf on that one is very different from what I’ve seen before. There’s also Keith’s next film, which would reunite some of the cast from “The Mason Brothers.” However, the one that I am most excited about is a script that I’m working on the second draft right now. I am disturbed by where our country is going and it will be a gut punch of a film. It’s going to hurt, but it also has the power to help us heal and get back to going forward instead of going thirty years backwards. It’s a world where the baton has unfortunately not passed and we are several years past the normal eight. The seven leads are female because the future is female. It’s a socio-horror film. The actresses that are already attached are some of the best working ladies I know. Phenomenal talents. It’s called “Closure.” And it’s going to be something that kicks the hornet’s nest. It’s something people are going to talk about.
We are going through such high emotions (politically and culturally), did this influence your choice to take on “Closure”
One of the many reasons to do “Closure,” and to do it now rather than later is because we need to flood the world with these stories. We’ve been “awoken” and we need to stay awake and we need to nourish ourselves and challenge each other. I believe that these stories need to be made here, on American soil. We need to show the world where the majority of us stand and we have to be brave enough to go into the areas that went red and always go red and to start the conversations there. We have to stand up, push back and go high when they go low. Our examples are still Michelle and Barack, Bernie Sanders, MLK and JFK and Rosa and Lydia. The youth gets it. They’re where my hope begins. “Closure” will be for that sixteen- year-old girl watching the sky fall and realizing that she has the power to stand in resistance to it. She can still fight. Like we all can.
Lastly tell me a bit about “Artifice” which is coming to Amazon soon. I cannot imagine writing, producing and acting in it. How does that come together? Also, did being involved in some many creative elements enhance your acting?
I’d been working with several different creative people to make a feature film that could make it into Film Festivals. Money always became a thing. Our ideas were too expensive for the available world we had around us to make a movie. So I had written a few scripts with Steven Doxey and I knew his ambitions were to be a director. So it seemed perfect… we would limit the amount of sets and make the whole story revolve around my character’s journey. It was a true labor of heart and hard work. Everyone involved contributed from their passion to be involved.
Steve and I wrote it and rewrote it and then I had a few people that I’d worked with in Film and Theater and cast them in particular roles. Steve had two people he wanted to use and that’s how we got our cast. We then rewrote it with them in mind and before we could do another several passes to make sure it was water tight, we were flung right into production. It was a very small window of like seventeen days to shoot this whole thing and the cast and crew were a dream. They were very eager and excited about what we were aiming to do. As an end result, we made a weird art house movie. We did. It’s weird, but it does go to some fascinating places. The work behind the camera and it front of it was top notch. The damn thing looks like a million dollars thanks to the skill of our DP Seth Johnson. He saved our lives on a lot of days.
Now, acting in this film and being in almost every single scene, while also being a Producer and filling in small little gaps for jobs that we just didn’t have the funds for was a non-stop multi-hat wearing Olympics triathlon. My acting prep work had to be done well before shooting because I was also securing locations up until the very last minute. Needless to say, when you’re wearing that many hats, you are frazzled. Yet it worked. I wouldn’t do that again unless it was something I was directing, but I’m glad it gave Steve an opportunity to direct and it got myself and a lot of other actors some stuff to play with. In fact, all of the chaos inadvertently helped get me to a place of madness because making it was madness. Writing it was madness. Being involved in the post production process was madness. So, because the character does go “mad,” it helped get me there. “Artifice” was a nice one to step away from after all of that. I gave everything I could with it and the performance works. Of course I look at it now, like I do with everything, and I think “Well, damn, I should have played with it like this instead, or done this instead of that,” but hey, that’s the process. Yes, it’s very exciting that it’s getting to Amazon. Streaming is huge now and the audience it could reach is pretty wide. That’s exciting. Four years ago when we first started talking about it we never thought it would take this long to get there. In retrospect, I don’t know how the hell it could have gotten there any sooner. It’s not a race. I guess that’s the lesson. You don’t have to be in a big hurry, in fact, if you are it can hurt your project. The tortoise beats the hare.
It was such a pleasure to speak with Brandon Sean Pearson. He has so many exciting projects stirring at the moment and even more to come. I look forward to seeing them unfold. He is an artist that makes you feel and keeps you thinking. Most important of all, Pearson loves his work and is constantly developing his craft. True inspiration!
Connect with Brandon Sean Pearson:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/brandonspearson
Instagram: http://www.instagram.com/brandonseanoearson
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brandon.s.pearson
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2268457/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
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