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The Lady Geeks start a new segment to celebrate the Fast and the Furious movie franchise. Don’t judge us. Also, this episode is full of lies. Fanfic Theatre: Lord of the Rings.
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For those of you looking forward to Guillermo del Toro’s show The Strain, you are in for a real treat. Recently I had the pleasure of interviewing actor, writer, and director Drew Nelson who plays Matt Sayles in the upcoming horror thriller. On top of telling us about The Strain and his character Matt, Drew also talks about what inspired him to become an actor, his dream role, and even tells us which superpower he’d pick and his favorite comic book movie!
Drew was a lot of fun to chat with, so make sure to check out this interview to learn more about this up and coming talent!
What inspired you to become an actor?
I guess my parents always kind of had an inkling that I was more of an artist type. They’d always get me to do voices for my aunts and uncles at family gatherings and stuff like that. Further into high school I was always the kid in English class reading the Shakespeare text but always putting a character voice on so every time we would be reading plays and stuff in English class they’d always say, “Get Drew! Get Drew to read Friar Laurence.” It kind of stemmed from there.
It’s also kind of a crazy serendipitous thing. Our regular drama teacher went off on maternity leave and they called in this supply teacher from New York City and she had just graduated from Circle in the Square school. She came to our class on a temporary basis and she taught us real scene study stuff that she had learned in New York and I just instantly loved it. Lo and behold she thought that I had a knack for it and asked me to be a lead in a play. She was doing a play that year and cast me as a lead. The play was called Detective Story and it’s all history from there pretty much. She was the main reason why I got into it.
In honor of the premiere of its seventh season this Friday, Gypsy joins the Space Pirate Queen and Gizzy to discuss all things Supernatural! The Lady Defectivegeeks reveal our obsessive ways– we mean, how much we love the show. Find out how the ladies all started watching the show and their thoughts on the last season. Overall, we just hope for more shirtless Sam in the future. Warning: Fanfic Theatre proves to be most disturbing in this episode.
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Just dialing it back a little and wrapping up more San Diego Comic Con 2011 blogs here. I guess I didn’t write about attending the Supernatural room for the LA Weekly website. By whatever miracle I managed to drag myself out of bed early that Sunday morning and made it in time to the press room at 9:30am.
In case you guys didn’t realize this yet– I’m a big ol’ Supernatural fangirl. Not in the scary way (I don’t think) but in the I LOVE THIS SHOW SO F***ING MUCH IT’S THE MOST AMAZING THING EVER IN MY LIFE kind of way. Well. I suppose that could be the ‘scary way’ too. Uh… yeah. Moving on.
My point is it was kind of a blessing that I was too exhausted by Sunday to freak out because normal me would have been crying in a corner from nervousness. Which almost happened the last two times we went to the Salute to Supernatural conventions. (See Supernatural Vancouver Con and Supernatural in LA, Day 2 posts).
A few weeks before San Diego Comic Con, I started to notice more and more people using the hashtag ‘#NerdHQ’— a mystery event. After investigating, I traced it back to The Nerd Machine, a site founded by Chuck’s Zachary Levi. Naturally, I was giddily curious. A NERD headquarter?! I was picturing a giant tree house for nerds. With geek tech blinking and making noises inside, comic books, toys and all that cool shit.
Turned out, Levi’s vision was almost as good as mine and within less than a month he organized an off-shoot Comic Con event. The headquarters established itself and set up its shop a block away from the convention at Jolt n’ Joe bar and restaurant.
You do not need to have a Comic Con badge to enter Nerd HQ but they did sell tickets to the individual “Conversations” events throughout the weekend. The money went to charity, Operation Smile, and the event raised $40k (SDCCblog.org). Pretty amazing but not surprising! Each “Conversation” panel that Nerd HQ offered was only $20 a pop but you spend an hour with the guests and then most of them had a free autograph session afterwards. Kevin Smith, Jason Mewes, Felicia Day, Nathan Fillion and Adam Baldwin were among some of the stars that participated in these panels.
Who did Gizzy and I went to see?
This was our first time at the Paley Festival, although I’ve always wanted to attend one of their panels in the past. When I found out that Supernatural was coming back to the festival (and on a weekend!), I rounded up fellow Supernatural fan (and Defective Geeker), Gizzy– no way, we were going to miss out on this one. Erik Kripke, Sera Gamble, Ben Edlund, Jared Padalecki, Jensen Ackles, Jim Beaver and Misha Collins were all in attendance.
We arrived at the theater a little before 2pm and the line already wrapped around the block. I felt pretty bad for the neighborhood who had to deal with the fangirl horde, littered infront of their lawn.
Compared to when we went to the  convention in Vancouver, Los Angeles has proven itself to be a little bit crazier and somewhat more stressful. I missed the laid back atmosphere of Vancouver con! I forgot to mention that on our first day, two of the women that were running the registration/ticket table were incredibly rude and… well, quite bitchy. Their attitude pretty much told us that they may have been taking advantage of the situation to try and make other people feel bad by talking down on them (aka, as we call it, “power trippin'”). Luckily, the woman who I ended up purchasing my tickets from was much nicer than those first two.
Otherwise, the rest of the CreationEnt staff and volunteers we talked to for the rest of the weekend were much nicer, though somewhat more overwhelmed and stressed out by the bigger LA audience. Though I will have to conclude that I had a much better experience at Vancouver Con.
Sunday was the biggest day, much like Vancouver, because it is the day of everything Jared and Jensen related.
The first thing we did in the morning was our “J2 Sandwich” photo op. I admit, much like my first experience, I was extremely  nervous and quietly freaking out while we waited in line. Although, I did manage to look at Jensen directly (I know, it’s pathetic… I’m such a fangirl) and gave him instructions on how we wanted everyone to pose for the photo: FIERCE and FABULOUS! (like Zoolander!). The two actors were in a very playful and good mood that morning. They played along with our request very eagerly. The only unfortunate part of the experience was that by the time they got to us, CreationEnt had decided they needed to start rushing people and “banned” hugs. Which we felt was very much unfair, especially since we had to watch the people in front of us take their time with Jensen and Jared… and everyone paid the same price for this photo op. I understand the actors are on a tight schedule, but they can’t expect attendees to cough up all that money only to have their experience jilted just because they allowed a few people to linger longer than most. It is our money and time too.
Regardless, I got a little brave and gave Jensen a one arm squeeze around his waist before we had to walk away. I even heard Jared delcare, “I was the most fierce!” as I went pass him. I am quite happy with how the photo turned out too!
I have to give props to Chris, the photographer. Although he was much more accommodating when we were in Vancouver, I understood why he seemed less laid back at this convention. He does make sure that the photos are worth it for us paying customers though, which we very much appreciate.
By noon, Jared and Jensen were on stage at the main theatre, followed by a surprise panel with Jim Beaver, and then Brock Kelly at the end.