Y&R’S Nate
After a few detours, Brooks Darnell found his professional path.
Even at a young age, Brooks Darnell, who plays the hunky Dr. Nate Hastings, was attracted to performing. “I was in the first grade and I can remember vividly getting my whole outfit together, a gray suit and a red bowtie, for a talent show,” recalls the actor. “I told my mom, ‘You have to come and watch this talent show I’m in.’ She had no idea that I signed up for it and had been practicing. She came and watched me do Pee-wee Herman.”
Mom was not only duly impressed, but she also tasked her brood with memorizing monologues each year for Black History Month. “She would make my brothers and me pick someone like Jackie Robinson or Martin Luther King Jr., or whoever, and we would have to learn about them and recite their speeches,” Darnell explains. “I hated doing it. I remember I picked Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address because I thought it was short. I had only heard a snippet of it in class and little did I know it was like two pages long. We worked on that and my mom saw a talent, so she would make us and three cousins do a skit. She’d say, ‘Okay, you’re this guy, you’re this person, Brooks, you’re gonna direct and I want you all to interact with the monologues.’ ”
Although he also enjoyed doing dance routines to Michael Jackson, it wasn’t until high school that Darnell took another step toward the spotlight by competing in an IMTA (International Modeling & Talent Association) competition in New York City. “The crazy thing is, I went there for modeling, but my mom, knowing my strength, made me work on a monologue at home with her,” Darnell chuckles. “We actually wrote our own monologue, but before I walked out on stage, I thought, ‘I hate this monologue, I ain’t doing it.’ So, I improv-ed the whole thing and ended up winning.”
Darnell became a teen model, but that soon clashed with high school sports. “I would leave basketball or football practice because I’d have to go to Cleveland [for a job] and I would get made fun of like, ‘Pretty boy,’ or, ‘You’re going to do your modeling?’ ” he sighs. “Even coaches got in on it. People would make fun of me and I got in fights over it.”
But Darnell wasn’t deterred from following his passion. “My mom went back to get a four-year degree and it was at the time when computers were going from floppy discs to what they are now,” he
details. “She had no clue how to operate any of that, so I would go to class with her, learn what she was learning to be able to translate it when she had to do the computer work. One day, we were on the campus at Kent State and she didn’t need me in class, so I started walking around the school and passed by a theater, where I saw people rehearsing a play. I sat and watched it without anyone knowing. That was a defining moment for me.”
Still, Darnell ignored the siren call of acting. “This was around my senior year and I was embarrassed to tell anybody that’s what I wanted to do because it was so taboo,” he admits. “Where I went to school was pretty much like FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS; everybody in the city knows you because of your athleticism. I was like ‘Man, I can’t tell anybody I’m thinking about this.’ ”
When he was awarded a football scholarship to Youngstown State University, Darnell dutifully followed his parents’ wishes of becoming a doctor and enrolled in premed courses. “I did well, but I hated school, I hated staying in class, I hated studying, tutoring … all that stuff,” he relays. “I decided I didn’t even want to be in school anymore, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do.”
His true aspiration would remain on the back burner. “I still didn’t have the courage to go after it,” Darnell explains. “I moved back home and got a government job, but I really wanted to get into modeling again.” He signed with BMG Agency in Chicago but there was a small obstacle. “Since I just came off from playing football, I was too big to model, too many muscles, so I wasn’t going to fit into samples.”
That’s when Darnell not only
decided to pursue acting full bore, but do so in another city, which turned out to be Toronto. “My parents were like, ‘This kid has lost his mind,’ ” he laughs. “I moved to Toronto and luckily, I got to work with Larry Moss, an acting coach who studied under Stella Adler. That’s probably the first time I really realized I could do this.”
Sporadic guest appearances on TV shows followed until Darnell was cast in the movie Total Recall, starring Colin Farrell (“That dude is super-nice”). Although the part of a sentry wasn’t substantial, it was enough to get Darnell noticed and signed on with a “big” management company, which motivated him to move to Los Angeles. “When I first got here, I was living with my brother on a military base in San Pedro because it was free. Nobody knew I was sneaking onto a military base and I did that for about six months until I got my own place in West Hollywood.”
Darnell then started traveling back and forth to Toronto for a recurring role on the series SHADOWHUNTERS: THE MORTAL INSTRUMENTS, while visiting the casting director of y&r (“quite a few times”), until he was hired to play Nate. Since arriving in July, Dr. Hastings has served as attending physician, family mediator and sounding board, but Darnell is looking forward to his story heating up. “I’m very excited because I get to work with someone who I’ve looked up to forever and I’ve had no idea of his history until recently,” he enthuses. “[Executive Producer/head Writer] Mal Young told me what’s going to happen between now and January 1 and I literally cleared my personal calendar so I could work on my character and this storyline.”
In summing up his Y&R experience so far, Darnell marvels, “It’s exciting yet relaxing. Exciting because every time I get a script, I’m like, ‘Okay, what did they cook up today?’ or, ‘Where’s my character going now?’ And the relaxing part is knowing that I have this gig.”