After losing his job in the dot.com crash, Guelph grad launches career in Hollywood
BY REBECCA KENDALL
It's been almost 17 years since David Patrick Green graduated from U of G with a degree in consumer studies and a plan to go into advertising. He never imagined that the product he'd be promoting would be himself as a Hollywood actor.
The hardest part is marketing yourself, says Green. I spend about one per cent of my time acting and the other 99 per cent slugging it out trying to get gigs.
Among his most notable performances are a series of commercials for JetBlue Airways, a couple of stints on Jimmy Kimmel Live and roles on Dragnet and ER, where he worked with John Leguizamo.
On March 9, that list will expand further with his most high-profile role to date an episode of the award-winning show CSI in which he plays Richard McQueen, a serial killer with a foot fetish who uses the disguise of a firefighter to gain access to his unsuspecting victims. I saw the role and thought it was worth sticking my neck out for, says Green.
The episode also features Taraji Henson from the movie Hustle and Flow and Graham Beckel, who recently appeared in Brokeback Mountain.
CSI, one of the highest-rated and most popular prime-time shows on TV, airs on CBS Thursdays at 9 p.m.
Green didn't decide to pursue a career in acting until five years ago at age 36.
I'm a really late bloomer, he says. I think I just have really young genes, and it takes me a long time to make my mind up about things. Having said that, I'm proud that I had the confidence to step outside of myself and take on something new and totally different than anything I'd ever done before.
When Green graduated from Guelph in 1989, his first job was selling cellphones, but it lasted only six months. The market was changing, and nobody wanted to buy a $5,000 cellphone anymore, he says.
He then spent a year backpacking through Europe picking up work as a ski instructor and ski shop employee in France to finance his travels. He returned to Canada and worked as a collection agent for three years, then headed back to Europe to become an account manager for an advertising agency in Poland that specialized in sampling programs and promotions.
I eventually did get into advertising, and my degree from Guelph served me well.
Aiming to advance within the agency or possibly start an agency of his own, Green left Europe in 1996 to earn an MBA at the University of Southern California.
I had every intention of returning to Poland, but when I saw the palm trees of southern California, I couldn't really imagine going back to the cinder blocks of Warsaw.
After graduating from USC, he worked as a management consultant in the tech industry. All was going well until the crash of the dot.com boom left him unemployed, he says. But instead of worrying about what he'd lost, he used the situation as an opportunity to forge a new path.
For the first time in my life, I started to really think ahead, and I asked myself what I was going to regret not doing when I looked back. The first thing on my list was acting. I really didn't have anything else I was passionate about. I took my very first acting class at Guelph, so I suppose that's where the seed was sown.
Green says there were many times when he wondered if he would ever get a real acting job, but he's glad he didn't give up.
It's a tough grind, and you can't get too upset over failure. You just shake it off and move on to the next audition, hopefully having learned something along the way. This is a hard business, but I'm having so much fun.
On the day of our interview, he'd been to a morning audition in San Diego for the television show Veronica Mars, driven back to Los Angeles to read for a Saturn car commercial in the early afternoon, then spent the rest of the day working at Ulrich/Dawson/Kritzer Casting, an agency he's been interning at for the past six months. Green's audition for Veronica Mars marked the sixth time he'd read for the show's casting director and the first time he'd been booked for the show. He filmed an episode March 6 in which he plays the role of a biology teacher. It will air April 19 at 9 p.m. on UPN.
