Story & Lesson Highlights with Henry Thompson of West Hollywood

Henry Thompson shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.

Hi Henry, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to share your story, experiences and insights with our readers. Let’s jump right in with an interesting one: What is a normal day like for you right now?
There isn’t such a thing – I’m working hard to find a routine though. I have a part time “money” job to support me financially while I build my production company and audition for roles.

I like to choose what area I’m going to target the day before I start work, and when I get up and go through the breakfast/coffee ritual I just start at the lowest hanging fruit and work my way up. If I’m looking for acting work, then the low hanging fruit is searching through IMDB Pro at what films are being developed and finding out who is making them – I can just scroll with my coffee. Then, when I’ve made the list, I sit down and write each of the producers or casting directors an email about why I think I’d be a good fit in their films – mostly these emails never do anything, but I do sometimes get a human response, and that always perks me up! This kind of work always piques interest or a rabbit hole of who can I know better, how can I improve whatever I’m doing, and then I just sort of follow my nose. Booking acting classes, promoting films I’m in etc… it’s often just admin for days!

If I’m writing, then I just sit down and start writing. It’s easier, but somehow much harder….!

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I am an actor from the UK – trained in London at East15 Drama School, and in LA at The Lee Strasberg Institute. I spent the early years of my career much as many young actors do – full of hope and frustration, mixed in a heady cocktail of “I don’t know what I’m doing”. I always viewed myself as a theatre person through and through, and was working to try and get involved in the London theatre scene; I had a couple of fun plays like “Anthony and Cleopatra” at the Stockwell Playhouse, and a few new plays at fringe festivals, and I became a (now dormant) member of an incredible theatre company called Degenerate Fox – part of the Neo-Futurist school of theatre, and who are all wonderful people, and insanely creative.

As with most people on the planet, especially creatives, COVID put a real spanner in the works, and I was left wondering how I was going to bring myself out of the mire. Luck struck me, and I was cast as the lead in the feature “The Anarchist’s Dream” that shot in Spain. Apart from an amusing moment where I was put in airport jail for 17 hours on entry into Spain, it was an incredible experience and “TAD” injected me with a passion for film that I hadn’t previously recognised or indulged. I came away from the experience with two major takeaways – I have to learn more acting techniques, and I have to work in film. I then followed advice, and the universe, and ended up at the Lee Strasberg Institute, earned a scholarship, and took classes in acting, film history, and screenwriting.

At the end of my program, I wrote and produced my first short film “Blind Optimism”, and started my production company alongside it – Rising Tide Productions. The mission is to bring in small artists, generate consistent streams of work, and build to the next steps together, accruing new people as we go. Becoming the rising tide that raises all ships. “Blind Optimism” won a few small awards in Europe, and was a wonderful first step into the industry. Since then, I (and Rising Tide) have gone on to produce and co-produce films that have premiered in the TCL Chinese Theatre, the Cannes short film corner, and won awards for Best Original Screenplay, Best Dark Comedy, and I have even won a few Best Actor and Best Acting Duo awards. As for the Rising Tide mission, we have linked up with some incredible artists, and generated three wonderful short films with the same crew, and are currently working on plans to make a feature.

Slowly, but surely, the ships are rising with the tide.

Appreciate your sharing that. Let’s talk about your life, growing up and some of topics and learnings around that. What part of you has served its purpose and must now be released?
I don’t think that I’m alone in this, but I am definitely someone who spent a lot of their lives covering themselves in a vision of what they think others should think of them. Doing, saying, and being things that showed a certain image that I wanted people to see me as. I struggled a lot with bullying when I was younger, and that definitely helped me learn to be somewhat of a chameleon; it was so much easier to pretend to be the kind of person that shouldn’t get bullied – it made sense to young me!

However, as I’ve gone further through my career, I have definitely started to notice (especially in my acting) that that thinking has shrouded me in so much other, that I am really struggling to identify authenticity within myself. It’s a long process, that ultimately just means lots more time in workshops and therapy and acting studios – all of which I love – but it’s necessary to be the artist that I want to be, rather than the artist that I think other people want me to be.

Was there ever a time you almost gave up?
Every second Thursday!

Seriously, though, pretty regularly – it’s very often just a toys-out-of-the-pram scenario, where something changes and I suddenly feel the entire weight of the difficulty on my shoulders. For example, when the world started accepting AI as an acceptable way to generate writing and video production – I had a couple of days of feeling totally defeated. Watching castings on Spotlight and Backstage favour ‘real people’ over actors regularly hammers my morale into the ground. I spent two years sending off endless emails to agents and got nothing, not even an actual rejection email. That nearly topped me off. I never send an email that I haven’t researched heavily, written totally myself, and every email is personalised to the people that I’m reaching out to: it’s a lot of effort to promote yourself and push your career forward. When you get nothing in return, it hurts. I think that the biggest skill that one can learn in these moments is being able to identify “is this just a jerk reaction, or am I really falling out of love with the industry?” Thankfully, I know that if I actually stopped what i was doing and went to something else, I would absolutely hate it. I’ve been pleased to learn that I’m just reactionary and emotional.

So, to genuinely answer your question – not really…though I have asked myself the question often enough!

So a lot of these questions go deep, but if you are open to it, we’ve got a few more questions that we’d love to get your take on. What do you believe is true but cannot prove?
It’s a very topical thing to discuss, but, I really believe that AI can come for everything; but it won’t take human performance. They can fill up the screens with all the soulless nonsense they want, and all the streaming platforms with generated sounds that mimic music, but nothing in the entire universe can ever change the feeling of sitting in a theatre seat and watching someone’s inner life change your world. It doesn’t even have to be a stage. A street, a garden, whatever – there is no comparison for goosebumps and hairs standing on end. And I believe that people will want to feel that again and again. I have no way of proving it, and the AI landscape looks pretty bleak and terrifying right now, but I just think that when the beast starts eating its own tail, and just making its own material for itself, we’ll see a rise in theatre and performance art. No way of proving it though – I’m just a dude at a laptop. What do I know?!

I alway come back to Andrew Garfield in “Angels in America” at the National Theatre – I’d never felt anyone punch me so hard in the soul as he did. And I think that that is the feeling people will be chasing when everything is just slop.

Thank you so much for all of your openness so far. Maybe we can close with a future oriented question. Are you doing what you were born to do—or what you were told to do?
I definitely believe I’m doing what I was born to do. Rather – I know I’m not doing what people told me to do, because most people told me not to do it. Not in a mean way, I just think that a lot of people think that they’re looking out for you when they say “that’s really uncertain, maybe try something else”, “have you thought about being a teacher”etc… (absolutely zero disrespect to the incredible members of the teaching force out there – I just chose a classic example of things people directed at me).

There is literally nothing else that I could be doing with my life – it is everything that people said it would be; overly saturated, competitive, unrewarding etc…but artistic satisfaction is better than any other kind of satisfaction. Pouring your soul into a film, and watching other people believe in it, watching it go from words to pictures, to a story, to a movie is a feeling that I cannot begin to explain. As an actor, that process felt amazing, and one of the biggest reasons that I wanted to start writing and producing work is simply to be a part of that process for longer. It’s amazing, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Anything realistic.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://henrythompson.actor/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/risingtideprod/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henry-thompson-697558100/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@risingtideproductions8210
• Other: https://www.instagram.com/ht_actor/

Image Credits
Chloe Kellaway
Yellow Belly
Paul Perkins
Dan Flinter