Rock-bottom events have helped actor rise
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — These are exciting times for Nick Gehlfuss. The actor is co-starring on NBC’s Chicago Med, the latest spinoff of Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D.
He has already ministered to the wounded on the latter shows, as a way of introducing some characters on the new series.
In fact, Gehlfuss — whose mother and sister are nurses — has been shadowing doctors at a hospital to memorize their body language, bedside manner and gravitas.
“I’m literally able to walk around with these doctors, and I play a med student until I have to tell the patients I’m acting when they ask me to turn down the oxygen and check their pulse or apply the stethoscope.”
Although things are blooming now, it hasn’t always been so. When Gehlfuss left his home in Cleveland for New York, he didn’t know a soul and wasn’t sure he had spent seven years in higher education for the right reason.
“I hit rock bottom and was broke. I didn’t have any money. I’d been there for a year and a half living by myself and had no friends.
“In a city with 8 million people, they say you can feel extremely lonely. No one’s going to make you work on yourself except you. So at one point I said: ‘Should I be doing this? Am I built for this?’ I was feeling pretty down,” he recalled.
“In hindsight, I realize you have to get to that point. You should question everything you’re doing. What’s wrong with questioning it and really almost quitting?”
Two people sustained him: his manager, who stuck by him, and the new woman in his life, Lilian Matsuda. When he made the move to Los Angeles, she accompanied him, and now they’re not only on Chicago Med together, 7but they’re also engaged.
“If you don’t get to those (low) points, you don’t get a view from every angle you possibly can. So the darkness that we experience as an actor — hitting rock bottom and going all around and being thrown around like a rag doll — (it’s) the unpredictability that an actor must embrace. Or it will force you to embrace.”
Gehlfuss, 30 — who has also co-starred on The Newsroom, Shameless and Longmire — corrolates his work to his life.
“My personality is I enjoy constant change and mixing it up. I get bored too easily. With acting, you don’t. The thing I love about it the most is that becoming a better actor really means I’m becoming a better person.
“It broadens you as a human being, makes you more sympathetic and empathetic. You become really at one with your surroundings because this is my classroom,” he said, gesturing around the set. “And so I can go to school every minute every day if I want to.”
But what about the rejection that actors experience?
“If you want to look at it that way, rejection is a very negative word. If you put that in your mind, it doesn’t help you. It’s not helping, because, most of the time, you have no idea why you couldn’t obtain a role,” he said.
“It could be because I have red hair. It could be because I’m 6-2 and not 6 foot. I could have given the best audition of my life; it has nothing to do with talent; it has to do with something (ephemeral). Whatever I had to do — short of selling my soul or doing something immoral — I did. I didn’t analyze it or think about it too much. I just kept digging,” he said.
He comes by that honestly because, when he was a child, he was very outgoing.
“I think I always wanted to be everyone’s friend,” he said.
“I didn’t have a core group of friends. When I was in college, I wasn’t in a fraternity or anything. I always wanted to jump around to all different types of cliques. I wanted to make people laugh, too.
“I’ve done mostly dramatic work, but I’d still love to do comedy at some point. I was not shy. That’s another thing about being an actor — not guaranteed — but for me it forced me to connect. In a world with technology and a lot of stuff going on, it reaffirms the power of connecting with someone.”