Meet Cruz Castillo

Today we’d like to introduce you to Cruz Castillo.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Cruz. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
My origin story began when I was five-years-old and I was bitten by a radioactive acting spider. That spider was the season 4 episode of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air when Will’s father comes back into his life to make one final excuse. For a little brown kid raised by a single mother growing up in different places around Los Angeles, that episode triggered something inside me. It was at that moment when Will asked, “How come he don’t want me, man?” that the tears came streaming down and I realized that whatever Will Smith was doing to me I wanted to do to others. I yelled for my mom and when she finally ran over, I pointed to the TV and declared I wanted to be in there. Luckily, she got the reference and began to put me in community theatre and the rest is history. I can go on about how Marlon Brando and Paul Newman influenced me, “Cool Hand Luke” is one of my all-time favorites, but it’s really the people in my life that told me that “I could” that are the real beginnings to my story.

I’m grateful for these people who saw potential in a kid. Wanting to be an actor is a really hard pill to swallow especially when you come from a family of survivors like most Latinos and Indigenous people do. My family was made up of practical thinkers that rooted for a career that would guarantee job security. I can’t knock them for that belief because it’s that same survivalist spirit that’s allowed me to be relentless in this industry. If it wasn’t for my mom, Michael Eiden, my first director at the age of five, and my summer camp counselor, Tom Beecher, who gave me my first platform to improv, I wouldn’t have had much faith in myself. The journey’s been rough but if it wasn’t for the faith of others, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

Has it been a smooth road?
The road has definitely been interesting. You face a lot of rejection and discrimination in the industry. You have a lot of people, with very strong opinions about you without knowing you, who tell you that you can’t do this or that. There’s a lot of “no’s”. It’s especially difficult when you’re a brown kid with a Spanish name. A lot of people like to label you as “mixed” and “ethnically ambiguous” as a way of trying to market you and that normally limits what jobs you can go out for. There have been many times where I’ve noticed my Anglo friends get four to five auditions in one day and I was barely getting four in two months. It also hits when you don’t have enough money. It’s a Catch-22 situation to be an actor in Hollywood. In the pecking order, actors are usually the lowest of the low right next to writers; we’re seen as expendable but also critical to bringing stories to life. To get seen is pretty expensive from all the acting sites you sign up for, to paying for acting classes, resumes, headshots, and so on. It’s a paradox for actors: commonly being the poorest whilst having to pay the most to get opportunities and resources. It’s about finding balance.

Especially when you get opportunities. You usually get the audition, and all the info that comes with it, half a day before you go in for it. You read it, dissect it, find your value and place in it, all while working your two to three part-time jobs, and try to bring your version of this character up to play. Once you go through all the nerve-wracking work, you finally arrive at the audition to bust into a room and see about five to ten guys that look like carbon copy clones of you. You start to size them up in your head, it’s a natural self-sabotage for actors, and you begin to think of how much more these better-looking look-alikes are most likely going to get this part (that guy’s done this project, that guy’s better dressed, that guy’s built like a god). It really is the most mundane features you’ll try to find and compare to yourself and it really sucks. Yet it’s the truth. The hardest roadblock in the industry is yourself.

On a good note though, the game is changing. It’s a great time to be an actor of color. Representation matters and the industry is really starting to catch on. People of different backgrounds are joining forces and White allies are coming out and supporting those that need access. The internet has created so many more acting opportunities and the quality is only getting better. I’m truly blessed to be alive during this time.

We’d love to hear more about your work.
I specialize in telling stories. I’m Indigenous so it’s built into my DNA. But often times, when you’re a person of color, your stories aren’t often given resources or opportunities. So I believe in creating my own. I’ve grown up auditioning for a lot of projects that I felt never fully fit me. So along the way, I started to work with my friends, other artists trying to make it, and we began to create our own content that told stories we cared about. In college, I made one of my first projects titled “The Will.” It followed a young man as he tried to save the person he loved amidst the zombie outbreak. After college, I worked at NBCUniversal where I met my good friend Keenan Duke. We started working on a lot of story ideas and finally came up with our first short called “The Road Not Taken”, which was based on a real-life senseless murder that occurred in the summer of 2015. Since it’s completion we’ve formed our own collective called Castle Duke Productions and we’re now working on our second project “Brother’s Keeper,” a story delves into fighting for someone lost in sex trafficking, which will be coming out in 2020.

Around the fall of 2017, I started working on a project with some of my close friends about what it’s like to be Latinx in Hollywood. It eventually grew into telling the story of Aiden Alvarez as he tries to navigate an industry that doesn’t seem to want him. Does art mirror life or life mirror art? Along the journey is his eccentric best friend, Bernie Alba, the lost prophet, Maya Baez, and Aiden’s on-and-off again wife, Rita Montes. Somewhere along the way, we titled the project Ellay, pronounced the way a person would say LA, and we’re basing the series on how expensive it is to be poor. We wanted to tell the story of people of color surviving in a city so overpriced and overpopulated it could only be Los Angeles.

It was my uncle, Phillip Sanchez, that taught me to surround myself with people that are better at other things than I am and that’s exactly what I strive for. As I’ve gotten older growing up in the industry, I’ve begun to form a collective of really talented artists who are constantly challenging me. I think that’s what sets me apart. I’m unlike anyone else who’s ever existed and that’s exactly what makes me like everyone else who has existed. It’s the one commonality I search for in my friends and projects. When I create a story, through writing and acting, I want people to find that human condition. That point where they realize, “Damn, that’s me.” Witnessing stories about other people is all about finding the similarities in the differences.

I know it’s cheesy to end with a quote but that’s how stories work. This one comes from James Baldwin, the patron saint of exiles, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was book that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

How do you think the industry will change over the next decade?
I really think we’re living in the second civil rights movement in this country. The negative energy that Trump and his administration have spewed on everyone is the last tears of an old generation. It’s a paradigm shift that representation in the media is definitely helping with. How a people, or person, is represented on TV and in film has a correlation with how they’re perceived and treated in real life. Perception is everything; that’s where the real change is happening. It’s a really great time to be a “marginalized minority” in the industry that’s gunning for it. There are more opportunities now than ever. Now, I’m not saying they’re great nor are they where they should be, but progress is progress. I’m glad to be living in a time of shows like Atlanta, Ramy, and Dear White People. I intend to be a part of the narrative change.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/cruzwcastillo
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/cruzwcastillo
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/CruzWCastillo

Image Credit:
Brenda Castillo. Daniel Corona. Aaron Mora. Lucas Pitassi. George Starbuck. Kyle Thor.

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