Conversations with Christopher Gilstrap

Today we’d like to introduce you to Christopher Gilstrap.

Hi Christopher, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I was born in Elberton, GA, the “Granite Capital of the World.” My father was a Presbyterian minister and my mother was a former TV journalist. When I was four, the family moved to the city of Warner Robins, GA, which was known for its school system. My parents wanted to ensure my baby brother and I were educated in a healthy environment.

Warner Robins is a military town, home of the sprawling Robins Air Force Base, and many of my friends were the children of transplanted military families who would come and go as the years went by, so I had ample exposure to people from all over the country as I grew up.

I had my hand in several different creative pursuits during grade school, like art and marching band. Acting and performance had never crossed my mind as career options, but I was crudely animating feature-length sci-fi/fantasy “cartoons” on Microsoft Office PowerPoint and playing them for my friends while performing the voices of all the characters, prompting many of them to demand, “Why aren’t you in drama club, Christopher!?”

Once I realized I was a storyteller, I decided to go to college to be a film director. My dream school at the time was Savannah College of Art and Design, but I didn’t realize that SCAD was a for-profit private university, so it was ultimately for the better that I decided to go somewhere else to get my degree: Georgia Southwestern State University in Americus, GA, not too far from where President Jimmy Carter grew up in the town of Plains (I even got to meet him one time).

At GSW, theatre and film are lumped together in one major, so by enrolling as a film major, I was also a theatre major, and this is where I fell in love with acting and performance. I was in rehearsals, for some play or another, six hours a day almost every weekday for the entirety of the four years I was in college. GSW would do around four shows a year, and the local community theatre group, Sumter Players, would do four shows a year, and the town was so small that there was a limited pool of actors to choose from for any given production, which all resulted in opportunities galore for dedicated actors to play many fun and challenging roles all year long. I got a lot of experience under my belt. My favorite shows to do were Shakespeare plays, and I made Shakespeare performance the focus of my senior capstone.

This is to say nothing of film! I was working on short film projects all four years of college, and my senior year, the main film professor geared up all the Dramatic Arts majors to produce a feature-length movie: Which Way There, written by Joanna Castle Miller. Joanna works as a professional writer and producer in Los Angeles. When I was in college, the Media Arts department arranged for her to come to Americus to meet us—all the students who would be making this movie—and to see all the old historic locations in town that we planned on featuring in the film. Joanna met us and got to know us by workshopping some of her earlier scripts with us, and in 2015, we shot the film, a supernatural drama penned by her, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video. It’s my first IMDb credit for a feature film.

What happens next changed my life: Joanna was getting busier and busier with her work (part of which was documenting her dad’s 2016 presidential campaign… True story! Check out Joanna’s web series Red, White, and Dad!), and so she reached out to me and ask if I was interested in moving to Los Angeles to be her personal assistant.

When I got Joanna’s email, I was at the end of a gap year. I had graduated GSW with a Bachelor of Arts in Dramatic Arts (Performance emphasis) and a minor in Visual Art (Digital Media emphasis) in May 2015 as a member of Alpha Psi Omega, the national theatre honor society. I was auditioning for theatre grad schools, getting to know the theatre community of my hometown in Warner Robins (which I regret to say I had been previously unaware of, since theatre wasn’t a part of my life before college), and serving as a delegate to the Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly, the governing body of the PC(USA) sect nationwide. I had been planning to make the daunting move to Atlanta to better position myself for all the theatre and film opportunities there. But the minute Joanna told me I had two weeks to move to LA and begin working for her, should I accept the offer, I knew without a second thought that’s what I would do.

So in July of 2016, I moved to LA and began my career in the industry.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Last year I was diagnosed with a unique form of OCD called scrupulosity, where your compulsive rituals take on a religious form. I’ve actually had OCD ever since sixth grade, but it wasn’t until recently that I considered my disorder to even be a disorder because the unfortunate reality is that unhealthy scrupulous behavior is often rewarded in faith communities. I grew up thinking my constant obsessive prayers were all well and good, and no teaching in my faith community contradicted that. The thought never crossed my mind that I was experienced OCD because OCD is so often reduced to cartoonish portrayals of “germophobia” or “being a neat freak” in mainstream art and media. It was only because a progressive Christian podcast I follow did an episode on scrupulosity that I began to realize the nature of what was going on in my brain. So now that I’ve been in therapy and have been making strides to manage my condition, I would like to create art that reflects an accurate and stigma-free portrayal of OCD, and specifically scrupulosity, which we rarely see portrayed for what it is at all.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I worked for Joanna and her production company Wait Don’t Leave for five years. Wait Don’t Leave is “dedicated to art and entertainment that strengthens our culture’s historical memory,” because “how we remember our past affects our power in the present.” Wait Don’t Leave produces theatre, film, and social media content, and it seeks to uplift marginalized artists who are not traditionally represented in the entertainment industry. Apart from Wait Don’t Leave, I’ve also worked on countless of Joanna’s projects both in front of and behind the camera, the most recent being a short Hallmark movie parody called “Christmas in Zoom Village.”

As a film actor, I’ve enjoyed moderate success, but my journey’s far from over. I got a line on season 8 of Showtime’s Shameless, I joined SAG-AFTRA playing the culprit on an episode of the Snapchat interactive murder mystery series Solve, and I booked a national Experian commercial opposite John Cena. I’m awaiting the release of a new sketch comedy web series that I was lucky enough to be a part of called We Are Your Pals. I also got a role in a show coming to Paramount+ sometime soon, and I don’t know if I’m allowed to say much more than that. I am commercially represented by the Daniel Hoff Agency, but I am currently seeking theatrical representation.

As a stage actor, I returned to my Shakespearean roots in 2019 and got my first professional role as Philostrate in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, put on by Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum. This put me on the path to joining AEA, and I was hoping to finish that path by working another season with Theatricum in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench into those plans.

I’m also on the executive board of a “Drunk Shakespeare” troupe called Pints & Players, which performs free shitfaced Shakespeare at Golden Road Brewery on San Fernando Road. We would have a custom drinking game tailored to each show. For example, during Romeo and Juliet, the audience was to take shots every time someone gets stabbed or makes a dirty joke, and every time the title characters kiss, the audience was supposed to chug beer for the duration of the kiss. The actors, meanwhile, were supposed to drink every time they dropped a line, which would invariably make them drop more lines the more inebriated they became. It was a good time all around. Over the course of 2019, our inaugural season consisted of Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, and Macbeth, and I was thrilled to see that we packed out the venue every time. Macbeth, in November 2019, was our most well-attended show yet. I was filled with such excitement and hope for the future of the troupe and what we could do in 2020, but… Drunk Shakespeare just isn’t the same over a Zoom call. I don’t know what the future will hold for Pints & Players as bars and breweries begin to open back up, but I hope we’ll be able to tread the beer-stained boards once again.

I’ve also worked as a stage manager for theatre, notably on the 2017 independent devised theatre production Women in Blue: A Prison Play, written and performed by four women who work with incarcerated people to teach them theatre.

Finally, I’m a YouTuber and a content creator. My YouTube channel is called HarkVlogs, and I make entertaining educational videos about obscure topics like the infamous poop jokes of Protestant reformer Martin Luther, sex-changing clownfish, and the interesting connections between Shakespeare’s Macbeth and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. I go to VidCon in Anaheim every year representing HarkVlogs and volunteering with a non-profit called Uplift: Online Communities Against Sexual Violence. And ever since my sophomore year in college, I’ve been a collaborator of the YouTuber “JelloApocalypse.” In 2018, I was lucky enough to be invited to an anime convention (Animanga 2018 in Pomona) as a featured guest along with JelloApocalypse. We were promoting a parody dating sim video game called Pizza Game, developed by JelloApocalypse’s sister pLasterbrain, featuring exaggerated cartoon versions of ourselves, voice by ourselves, as the datable characters in the game. Pizza Game is currently available to buy on Steam.

That’s where I’m at right now. If I had to summarize my dreams in a paragraph, I’d say that I’ve been a part of nerd culture all my life, and I want to give back to it, and I want to do so in an ethical way that people can look up to, especially those as privileged as I am who don’t always have great role models in fandom. I’ve also noticed that a common theme in my work is the intersection of religion and progressivism. I want to normalize progressive spirituality. Religion is too often the enemy of justice and an ally of oppressive capitalism, but “the religious left” is bigger than you think. I want to join with artists who represent a movement to practice our faith traditions in a way that goes hand-in-hand with caring for the planet, caring for our minds and bodies, and relentlessly seeking justice for all, including reparations for those who deserve it.

Another, more niche goal is I want to make Shakespeare palatable to modern audiences without trying too much to “update” the source material or present it with too much of a twist. Shakespearean text should speak for itself when it’s performed by actors who know what they’re doing. It shouldn’t need too many “modern” bells and whistles to keep the audience engaged, and I would argue this is true of most classical texts. Just do your best to perform the text well, and you’ll have a good show.

Any advice for finding a mentor or networking in general?
You don’t have to say “yes” to everything, and you shouldn’t, but… say “yes” to a lot of opportunities and meet fellow artists like yourself. When you find fellow artists you admire and look up to, say “yes” if they want to connect or collaborate. It’s worked for me to not be too picky about taking opportunities that come my way. Obviously, you want to make sure opportunities align with your vision in the more general sense and don’t cross any boundaries that make you uncomfortable, but beyond that… be open.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: @thegilstrap
• Twitter: @TheGilstrap
• Youtube: https://YouTube.com/HarkVlogs
• Other: https://pizzagame.party/

Image Credits
Christopher Gilstrap (image with spiked hair, image with dagger, image with Christmas tree) Kathy Gilstrap (image where I’m singing, image with curtain call) Jennifer Dorsey (image of the Uplift booth)