Beau Swartz

by Omar Salas Zamora

November 11th, 2022

Beau Swartz is an actor living in Los Feliz.

For the original Adam In Fragments short film, we had met and kind of came up with the gist of the story together, then I went off and wrote the screenplay. Do you approach that differently as an actor? Something written for you versus something that existed before you?

I don’t think so? I think with that in particular it was way more, like, “Well, what do you think about this? What do you think about this?” It was changing as we were going. I felt like we kind of just let it happen, so by the time we got to filming the character was already there, but we almost did the character work together, you know what I mean?

Sure. I think by the time we did the feature film version, we had so much built-in back story from that experience that we didn’t have to talk about it.

Yeah, it was already there and for me as an actor, it's just great to already have all that, like, stuff just in you and ingrained in you and not only that because we shot the short already.

The short is the most difficult thing I ever wrote. That was an extremely hard script.

Why?

I hadn’t been around that kind of abuse in my life and I felt responsibility that the choices these abuse victims make are justified. That research is just so disheartening, you know? The decisions that Adam makes can’t just be a writers flick of a pen. You can’t disregard character logic for a narrative thrust. It all has to make sense.

And that kind of pain becomes part of their identity. I would think, “Oh I act this way because I am because this happened to me and I make these decisions because this happened to me.” Always trying to justify your faults with these traumas because you have no other way of dealing with life.

In an awful way that becomes your safety net against yourself.

Exactly. That felt like that was extremely important for me to have be conveyed in the script, you know? There's no bad or good person in either situation.

Everything is grey.

That’s the perfect way of saying it. Everything is grey.

That's question one.

Oh really?

Before I knew you as an actor, I knew more as a painter. Can you think of an alternate universe where you could have completely focused on that and been happy?

Yeah, absolutely. I still love painting. That’s a very big passion of mine. I've been doing it my whole life. It's been my therapy. I mean, I had like an awful day today and the only thing I wanted to do was to sit in front of canvas and just paint and like let all that go. I'm just doing it and it's just like happening and then I step back and then I'm like, “Oh my God, there's a beautiful picture here.” That’s kind of the same thing that I want from my acting.

You went to acting school a little later. Did you know that you wanted to eventually pursue acting or was it kind of like a knee-jerk decision.

It felt knee-jerk at the moment but looking back at my life, I can see the moments that brought me here and it makes complete sense. When I was young, my brother and I, we, like, religiously watched movies. We begged for a camera for Christmas and finally gone one, like, three Christmases later. We immediately started making movies, we were, like, 13 so they weren't anything spectacular. But we were trying to tell a story and do all the editing within the camera and, like, do everything DIY.

You told me that you want to play Jeff Buckley in a biopic. Why him?  

There’s just something so fascinating about him. I watched a bunch of interviews with him and he seems like a very shy and quiet person, but then you listen to his voice, when he gets on stage, he’s a completely different person. There’s these rock stars that drove themselves to their own deaths, like overdoses and things like that his death was just a freak accident, you know? It felt like it was his destiny to become a musician because of his dad – a sad, strange destiny. Also, I think his Hallelujah has become the definitive version. Does anyone know that Leonard Cohen wrote it originally?

Cohen’s version is the most boring.

Totally. 100%.

I’ve been interviewed quite a bit over the last few years and it’s usually a little bit boring. It’s usually, “as a queer person,” “as a Latinx person,” blah blah. I think the color of your skin and your sexuality, while I know isn’t, is perceived as very amorphous. What kind of research do you feel is necessary when playing a person different from you?

That’s been a kind of complicated journey for me, like, when I got into acting, I had people telling me what I look like, how I act. To be frank, if the role required something that I’m not, I’m not going to take the role. I did my 23 & Me and I do have Native American in me, but it’s, like, 3% but I never grew up with that culture. I'm more interested getting the opportunity to play a Puerto Rican because I'm Puerto Rican. That’s an opportunity for me to connect back to my heritage. You know, when I started acting, I was getting called in to audition for, like, Telemundo and I don’t speak Spanish. I could learn lines and pretend to speak Spanish, but I feel, like, that role is for someone else, you know?  

So much of the work you’ve done is so intense. Is that something you enjoy doing or do you want to do a romantic comedy soon?

I am drawn to very, like, heavy dramatic things. I want something that allows me to explore these things within myself that maybe I hadn't explored before or that I want to explore. I have done like comedy before, but my character is always a straight man. I think that people innately have an energy, and I don't feel like romantic comedy is my energy. I have more fun bawling my eyes out versus like trying to be charming and like tell a joke.

What is the song that you've listened to more in your life?

I go through phases. When I was young, I had a Queen tape and I was constantly listening to “Bohemian Rhapsody” on repeat. Then it became Broken Social Scene. “Lucky one.” I actually just saw them recently in Portland.

What performance made you want to become an actor?

I love Sam Rockwell, he's like one of my favorite actors. I love um Michael Shannon, he's amazing. Um ... those two guys are great. Alfred Molina's performance in Boogie Nights. That unhinged performance I find so fascinating.

He throws all those rules out the window. That performance is just as frightening as it is funny but it’s never not grounded. It feels like he could kill any of them at any moment.

Also Johnny Depp in Fear & Loathing. It’s another unhinged performance. And that actor, what’s his name? From Back To The Future?

Christopher Lloyd?

He was in that rat movie?

No, he was in Stacked with Pamela Anderson.

Not him. He plays the dad.

Oh, Crispin Glover.

Yes. He was in River’s Edge. Those are the performances I’m super drawn to.

Photography by Omar Salas Zamora

Interview by Omar Salas Zamora