Actor Interviews

Interview with Gregory Michael from “Greek”

Gregory Michael plays Grant on the ABC Family series Greek. The actor discovered his love of acting at a very young age. When he was a teen, he got involved in community theatre and then he landed a role on the soap opera As the World Turns.

Grant wasn’t the first and only role on Greek he auditioned for.

IESB: When and how did you get into acting?

Gregory: Honest to God, I was about two or three when I told my mom, “I want to do that.” We were at a little concert and this group was singing “La Bamba,” and I remember yelling, “I want to do that!” I wanted to be up on stage with those people. It was one of my first memories, but I remember being at that show and getting up on stage and they handed me the microphone. We have it on video. And, I sang the song and loved that feeling of being in front of all the people and getting the acclaim and adoration.

Even though it was very primitive, I remember that feeling. As I grew up, I loved singing and doing shows. I put on a show for every day. There were so many shows that I did for my family that they must have been driven crazy, but I wanted to do it. When I got a little older, I wanted to be in the Mickey Mouse Club. I wanted to be in a kids’ group so that I could sing. It was always something like that. I remember having that acclaim with that first performance. I bit the forbidden fruit.

IESB: Was anyone in your family in the business?

Gregory: My mother was a professional singer, but I never knew her as a professional singer. She gave it all up, before I was born. She was in the business and the business burned her really bad. Being a woman in the business, back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, was not a good thing. It was always a man’s business. So, she got burned really bad. She had a manager who was giving jobs for my mother to his other clients that were men.

My mother sang with Frank Sinatra and opened up for The Monkees. My mother is this woman that I never really knew. She’s been a different woman, my entire life. But, after being burned, she said, “You’re never doing it. You’re never getting into singing. You’re never getting into acting. You’re just not doing it, period.” And, the more she said, “Don’t do it,” the more I wanted to do it. The good thing was that my mother, even though she didn’t want me to do it as a child, was very supportive of me doing it on a community level with community theater and being active in school.

She wanted me to have a childhood and a real life. She was very young. She started when she was 8 or 9, so she did it for her childhood and she just wanted me to have a childhood and grow up and be somewhat normal. When I hit 18, I went to Penn State University for about a year and a half, and then I said, “You know what? I really want to do what I’ve always wanted to do.” So, I left school for a bit and went to start auditioning in New York City.

IESB: Did you get hired right away?

Gregory: One of my first auditions was for the Walt Disney Company and I booked a role working at Walt Disney World in Florida, where I did theme park shows. I did singing and dancing. I played Prince Charming. I did the castle show in front of Cinderella’s Castle. I absolutely loved that kind of stuff, but I didn’t really know what kind of jump I could make from that into what I really wanted to do, which was film, television and Broadway musicals. I knew that it was a start, so I did that for a year. It was amazing.

And then, I got recruited from that job at Disney to work at Universal doing the same thing. I had a contract there. At that point, my manager, who’s my manager now, told me to go to New York City. I was like, “You’re crazy! I’m going to leave just to go to New York?” And he said, “You should totally do it. I’ll get you set up and I’ll have you meet agents.” So, that’s what I did. I had my sister, who was living in Manhattan at the same, say that I could stay with her, so I ended up sleeping on her couch in her studio apartment and I started auditioning.

Read the rest of the interview here.