Today we’d like to introduce you to Brett Maline.
Brett, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Grew up in a small farming town in south-central Nebraska with a population of around 3,000 people. For a town that size and located where it was, the high school had a great art program, and the local theater was very active as well.
Minden was an amazingly supportive place to grow up, with everybody knowing everybody. Being born and living with a rare form of scoliosis, I definitely benefitted and continue to benefit from having so much support from so many amazing people back home.
When I was a senior in high school, The Young Americans, a world-renowned performing group based out of Southern California, toured through Minden and I got the chance to audition for them. The next fall, I flew out to join the performing group and would go on to do two national tours, along with tours to the UK, Germany, and Japan with them.
After touring with the performing group, I moved on to co-found an alternative pop-rock band that did five national tours and a would-be short tour to England (we had the wrong paperwork and got sent back to America as soon as we got there (INSERT CRY EMOJI FACE), also we recorded two full albums.
While I loved playing and writing music, comedy had always been my #1 goal. It was one of the hardest decisions of my life, but I left the band, moved back to Nebraska to live in my parent’s basement for eight months, working two serving jobs every day to get out of some debt and figure out my life.
The plan was to move to Chicago but on a whim, my buddy that I had lived without in Long Beach, CA while I was in the band and had been back in Nebraska, hit me up and said he was moving back out to LA and so I came with him.
Once I got to LA, coming up through the Groundlings program, I started an indie sketch group called Genuine Jerks, whose videos have been featured on The Today Show, Good Morning America, and on the front pages of Reddit and Funny or Die, www.youtube.com/genuinejerks.
Getting amazing opportunities to perform in the 2016 CBS Diversity Showcase and on the UCB House Sketch Maude Team The New Deal for three years, I am now performing on the Groundlings Sunday Company every Sunday.
With a few TV and movie appearances along the way, I’d say the thing I’m most proud of so far is getting WORK BUDS, our pilot we shot, into The New York TV Festival this past year and getting to develop it with a production company out there.
I love acting, but I’m most passionate about making my own content. There’s something about creating that I think I fell in love with when I started writing songs with the band.
Has it been a smooth road?
Oh whoops… I think I touched on a lot of this in the other one but yeah absolutely. I’ll be the first one to say it, I look different. I have a super short neck, I have an odd stature because of severe scoliosis, and in small-town Nebraska, when I would go to other towns, there were times I got made fun of because they’d never seen anyone who liked me. I had to learn at a pretty early age to shut those things out.
But that’s helped me out here. I’m tougher for it and have come a long way to get here.
Being an actor living with a physical condition is definitely an uphill battle in casting rooms. I think a lot of times, like other diversities, actors with disabilities/physical conditions get limited to the roles they can play. But I do think I’m able to bring something no one else could do a role because of my specific POV from living with a physical condition.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.brettmaline.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: breezy__f__baby
- Facebook: /brettmaline
- Twitter: breezy__f__baby
- Other: www.youtube.com/genuinejerks
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