As our esteemed editor Rick Chandler made note of on Friday, there’s been a surprising revelation for fans of NBC’s long-running sitcom The Office: program stalwart & favorite put-down target of the lovably sociopathic Michael Scott, idle-minded Dunder-Mifflin employee Phyllis was once an NFL cheerleader. Well not the character, but the actress who plays her — who is unimaginatively also named Phyllis (Smith) — was once a paid pom-pom waver for the football Cardinals of St. Louis, before her life took her on a decidedly different career path (and workout plan, but hey, that happens to the best of us).
And now, due to the tried-and-true Internet standard of proof — “pics or it didn’t happen” — we can see at the right that it did in fact happen, along with a deliciously old-school hairstyle and a cheerleading uniform much different than the sartorial skimpiness you’d find on today’s sideline mavens in Dallas or Washington or even sensible St. Louis. Time, once again, makes fools of us all.
No word if other walking punch-lines from the work-place satire (looking at you, Kevin and Stanley) are hiding equally scandalous pasts, but if a picture surfaces of either of them in a cheerleading uniform, you can bet your ass we’ll let you know.
Amber Lancaster on transitioning from modeling to acting and her role on MTV’s ‘RJ Berger’ Backstage.com
By Philiana Ng
After spending several years as a model and rolling out prizes and cheering on contestants on “The Price Is Right,” Amber Lancaster was ready to try at acting. Luck was on her side. MTV’s first original scripted series in years, “The Hard Times of RJ Berger,” was the first pilot she auditioned for, and she landed it. Revolving around a teenage boy going through hormonal changes, “Berger” recently returned for its second season.
The fun-loving Lancaster—who didn’t study theater or acting in school—sat down with Back Stage to discuss transitioning from modeling to acting, the audition process for her role on the MTV comedy as Jenny, a high school cheerleader, and what she has learned so far.
Back Stage: Was this a natural transition for you, to go from modeling to acting?
Amber Lancaster: I started realizing all the potential there was in this town for work. I started taking classes. It was fun; I’ve always enjoyed it. I started auditioning. I was still modeling—it’s a lot better to have modeling as a side job than working at a restaurant. When I would audition for TV or film, I was doing it for fun. I think that was really valuable because it took away the need. A lot of actors, they have this “I need to book this” kind of attitude. So that actually worked in my favor.
Back Stage: This was your only pilot that you went in for. How did you get hold of the script?
Lancaster: My agent submitted me for the part, but I actually missed the first audition. [Laughs.] Once I read the part, I thought, “This girl’s 16. I’m never going to get it.” And they always end up going with someone with a bigger name or bigger credits. At that point of my acting career, I was skeptical of it all. It’s relentless. You have to audition, audition, and audition, and there’s hardly any payoff for it. The chances of you getting an audition—it’s a numbers game. The more you go out on, the more chances you’ll get one.
My agent called me and said, “Where are you? They want to see you. Just get there by noon.” So I get there and I read for them, and they called me in immediately to read for the executive producer and director. A couple weeks went by and I didn’t hear anything, but they hadn’t cast the part. They called me in again to read for the producer and director, and then they had me go in to test. They waited another two or three weeks before I finally found out I got it. It was drawn out.
Back Stage: Did they give you any notes in the room on how they wanted your character to be played?
Lancaster: Nope. Every single time I went in, they were like, “That was perfect!” [Laughs.]
Back Stage: Did you take anything that you learned from acting classes and apply it to your audition?
Lancaster: Honestly, I went through quite a few different acting teachers. It would mess me up more than help me. I think that if you have enough life experience and you’re smart enough, you can figure it out. There are all these techniques, which work great for a lot of people, but not for me.
Back Stage: Figuring it out, as in how to approach a certain scene?
Lancaster: When you read a book, you take that journey. I did learn a few things, but it’s all kind of common sense. What worked for me, anyway, [for instance,] is substitution. If you’re having a scene that’s really dramatic, you substitute a time in your life that’s similar to that scene.
Back Stage: What’s the difference between being a series regular and guest starring on a show?
Lancaster: When you’re on a show, you own that character, so I decide how she’s feeling in the moment and how it would make her feel. So you have a lot more artistic freedom to decide. And [as a guest star,] you don’t know the vibe of the rest of the cast or even how the crew works. It’s such a luxury to be on a show, knowing everyone from the craft service guy to the camera guys. You feel so much more comfortable. So going from that and then auditioning—which is such a foreign, weird, uncomfortable thing—it’s night and day.
Back Stage: There are people who love auditioning, and then there are those who despise it. Where do you stand?
Lancaster: It’s so unreal. If you can give a good audition, then you are going to do awesome on set. Auditioning is the hardest part of acting, hands down. When you’re on a set, everything is provided for you. If I have to audition and I have to pretend an alien is eating my leg off, it’s going to be a lot harder than if I’m actually on set where there is a guy dressed as an alien eating my leg off. So much of acting is reacting, and when you’re reading with somebody who has no emotion, who isn’t invested in the scene, it’s hard to play off of them, because it’s not natural.
Back Stage: When the pilot was picked up to series, what was your initial reaction?
Lancaster: I wasn’t even expecting it because there are a million pilots that get made that don’t get picked up. At this point, we had no idea what was going to happen. It was cool that MTV was doing a scripted show, but we didn’t know that we would be the first scripted show that MTV had done in years. I had no expectations, which is pretty much how I’ve operated my entire life. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, I guess.
Back Stage: Your character on the series is a high school cheerleader. Was that close to who you were?
Lancaster: Yeah, I was a cheerleader in high school and then I was a professional cheerleader for the NFL, for the Seattle Seahawks. What’s funny is I didn’t get to do any cheerleading during the show.
Back Stage: How do you approach your character?
Lancaster: I try and apply as much of myself as I can to the character, because I think that’s where a lot of people go wrong. It’s so easy to be yourself. Everybody is so unique that that makes you different enough.
Back Stage: What have you learned from the series that you’d like to take on to future projects?
Lancaster: It’s all a learning experience. Practice makes perfect. Getting to act every day helps you get better at it. Even if you took a professional basketball player, if he didn’t practice basketball every single day, he wouldn’t be as good as he is. He’d have natural talent, but he wouldn’t be as good.
Back Stage: What do you see for yourself in the future?
Lancaster: I love comedy. Drama is fine too, but it’s so serious. Could you imagine being on the “CSI” set all day long dealing with dead bodies? I wouldn’t want that. I want to have fun. I love a challenge and I definitely want to do a thriller
Tanya Fischer plays Zoey Waters, the coquettish secretary on "The Defenders.".
“I love being from Wisconsin,” said Tanya Fischer, 25, from the CBS series “The Defenders.”
Fischer, who grew up in West Bend, spent her youth “daydreaming among the cornfields” about being an actress and was involved in “all sorts of activities” in high school. After graduation, she joined the Milwaukee Bucks’ Energee! Dance Team. She moved to New York in 2004 with “$1,000 and one suitcase,” slept on a friend’s couch and worked odd jobs. She didn’t have money for acting classes but got experience by working for theater companies and performing on stage. Through that, she got an agent and landed a recurring role on the short-lived ABC show “Life on Mars,” which was shot in New York.
“Then the stock market crashed and the industry changed,” she said.
She started losing roles to more established actors looking for work. So when a band she was in visited Los Angeles, she went to a “Defenders” audition, and after several screen tests she got the role. “The Defenders” stars Jim Belushi and Jerry O’Donnell as Las Vegas lawyers. The season finale airs Friday night at 7.
Fischer plays their secretary Zoey, whose competence is camouflaged by her coquettishness.
She said she drew on Judy Holliday in “Born Yesterday” and “Monkey Business,” an early Marilyn Monroe film, in creating the character, whose trademarks are brightly colored Post-it notes and a pink fuzzy-topped pencil, a prop Fischer pocketed when the series finished shooting.
Belushi is the star of the comedy-drama hybrid, but “The Defenders” is also an ensemble show, of which Fischer’s character is “the wild card. The random piece of the puzzle.”
“The Defenders” is produced and written by Whitefish Bay native Niels Mueller, with whom Fischer shared “handshakes and hugs” during the Green Bay Packers’ run to the Super Bowl, albeit behind Chicago native Belushi’s back. She said that Belushi “runs a tight ship” but is “open to improvisation if you come prepared.”
John Candy’s daughter is Fischer’s stand-in, and Belushi’s son Rob has appeared on the show.
Fischer had no such show business connections.
“I’m no producer’s kid,” she said.
Far from it. Her mother, Peggy Fischer, runs Shooting Star Travel in West Bend. Her dad runs a martial arts studio. Her younger sister attends the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and her brother attends her alma mater, West Bend High School.
When we spoke by phone last week, it was the day after she had finished filming her final scene of the season, and she was on a giggly adrenaline high.
“Right now, they’re packing up the stages until we get word” if the show was picked up for a second season, she said.
She is optimistic – “we’ve been pulling in good ratings consistently” – but also philosophical about the show’s future, and her own.
She said that when she interviewed for the commentary track on the DVD boxed set of the first season and was asked what she liked best about the job, “I had to say ‘everything.’ I’m not crashing on friends’ couches or eating food that restaurants throw away anymore. I like knowing my rent’s going to be paid for a while. And I can send my sister some dough for college. Who knows how long anything will last?
“But the work we are doing is something I’m proud of, and the audience seems to like it.”
And renewed or not, her dream is the same as it was in that cornfield: “To be a great actress.”
“I just want to keep at it,” she said. “I can’t wait to see after years of being around, the roles I can play when I’m a crazy old lady.”
Sarah Shahi wearing black peep-toe Louboutin pumps with sky-high heels.
On Thursday, Jan. 20, USA Network premieres “Fairly Legal,” starring former Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader Sarah Shahi as San Francisco mediator Kate Reed. Unlike her dressed-down police-detective character on NBC’s “Life,” Kate is a bit of a fashion plate.
In the “Fairly Legal” pilot, that includes black peep-toe Louboutin pumps with sky-high heels.
Asked how she liked chasing after a cable car in those shoes, Shahi tells Zap2it, “That’s the first question every girl asks. It was very stylish, but it hurt like hell. At one point, I just threw them off, and I yelled at the director, ‘I’m not running around San Francisco looking like this!’
Everything Nikki Grant touches seems to turn to gold for her.
The 21-year-old Ajax dancer and actor says she “begged” her parents as a 10 year old to let her try dancing. After just one year at her studio, she made the competitive dance team. Eight years later Grant auditioned to become a member of the Toronto Raptors Dance Pak and for two seasons, 2007/2008 and 2008/2009, was its youngest member. She was accepted back for a third season but turned the job down as, after less than a year of taking acting lessons and acting, she landed a major role in a feature film.
Grant admits she got into acting to become famous. And while that may happen in the future, she’s had a change of heart.
“It’s definitely for the love of the art because if you don’t have that it’s hard to succeed in this business,” she says.
The aforementioned film is Beat the World, due for release in March. Grant plays Cherry, a dancer who she says doesn’t have a lot of self-esteem and uses arrogance to hide the fact. She was in Berlin this past summer where some of it was shot.
“It’s about three dance crews from across the world that are battling to get to Beat the World, this dance competition,” she says, noting Cherry is “basically the bad girl” who has designs on one of the male dancers, who has a girlfriend.
Just as she was finishing up her work on Beat the World, Grant found herself on another set, dancing in Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam, released in September on the Family Channel and starring the Jonas Brothers. She followed that up with an appearance in an episode of a new TV series, Lost Girl.
If all of this seems like a natural progression, it was: Grant says she got into dancing because a few friends danced. And while she was a member of the Dance Pak, she learned a lot of the other dancers acted as well and she decided to give it a shot.
As you might have guessed, Grant’s extremely outgoing and loves performing in front of a crowd. So, when it came time to be in front of the camera, nerves were not an issue.
“It was so exciting to me,” she says. “It is as if the camera wasn’t there and I was another person.”
She likes acting because it allows her to explore different aspects of her personality.
Grant says the support of her parents is what has carried her though all the rapid changes she’s had in her life in the past few years.
It’s no surprise that the former Ajax High School student has her sights set on her next challenge.
“My next big goal for myself is I’d like to be a series regular on a TV show,” Grant says.
Some hometown heroes are screening an ambitious movie this Sunday afternoon at the new Granite City cinemas. The inspirational drama “I Am” stars Granite City native Amy Holland Pennell, a former captain of the Rams cheerleaders, and was co-produced by former Cardinal Todd Zeile.
I’m guessing it’s no coincidence that the screening is on 10/10/10. The faith-based drama follows ten characters through a day in Los Angeles as they grapple with the consequences of violating the Ten Commandments. The website for the film (www.iamthemovie.com) calls the interconnected storyline “a faith-based ‘Crash’.”
“I Am” screens Sunday afternoon at 12:15 and 2 p.m. at the new Granite City tri-plex at 1243 Niedringhaus Avenue. The 2 p.m. screening is already sold out; but at 3:45, fans can meet some of the stars, including Pennell, who hosted sports shows on local TV before launching an acting career in Hollywood.
“I Am” (which features Katharine McPhee’s new song “Say Goodbye” on the soundtrack) will be screening at churches throughout the Bi-State area later this year.
This classically trained actor finds strength portraying a detective on the new CTV series.
Theresa joy plays Billy, a feisty and tough street cop, who draws more danger and trouble than she deserves.
“I think she’s just totally driven and has a lot of energy, and she just wants to do the job right. Being a girl, you meet a lot of bad guys in your life and you don’t want to be a victim. So I think for her, she’s in a position where she can take them down and she can help other people,” Joy tells CTV.ca.
“Billy has the power to go out there and stop bad things from happening instead of waiting for them to happen to her. When she reads the newspaper, it doesn’t have to brew inside of her; she goes to work the next day and tries to stop it from happening.”
Billy is just one of the many characters that inhabit the world of “The Bridge,” which chronicles the actions of controversial union boss Frank Leo, played by “Battlestar Galactica” alum Aaron Douglas.
Joy has a number of television and film credits, including appearances on “Nip/Tuck,” “Entourage,” “Reno 911!: Miami,” and “Puck Hogs.” At one point, Joy was also a former NFL Cheerleader (Buffalo Jills 1998-2001). The actress currently splits her time between Toronto, New York City, Los Angeles and Europe.
When comparing herself with her character, Joy says playing Billy gives her a certain feeling of empowerment.
“Billy’s intimidating and I am not. I’m passive and I don’t like fights… I’ll let people be jerks and shrug it off because I don’t need to confront them. It’s weird, because if there’s a character that is not like me, then I really feel like I’m faking it,” says Joy.
“I never felt that way with Billy, so there must be something inside of me. It feels so comfortable to be her. She’s everything I would want to be. My characters in the past, they’d be someone Billy would have in handcuffs!”
When Joy found out she landed her role in “The Bride,” she discovered what life for police offers is really like.
“I went on a ride along in Buffalo, with the Buffalo Police Department in one of the most dangerous parts of Buffalo, and it was scary,” remembers Joy.
“I thought I was brave, but when I got there, I got a bullet proof vest, and I laughed and thought I was going to stay in the car the whole time. The first time I stepped into a house, it was a domestic call, but it’s the east side of Buffalo and it’s pretty scary, I don’t think I’ve even driven through the east side. So it was intimidating just to be there. The house was dark, the two officers I was with went in front of me, and all of a sudden I was like — ‘I don’t know who is around the next corner, I don’t know who is in the next room, I don’t know who might have a gun’ — I felt so helpless. Of course, they had guns and I didn’t. It was really scary. We did a high-speed chase, talked to some gang members, there was a robbery. I think we basically went through a lot of the crimes I find in my scripts, and that was all on one shift.”
The biggest lesson that Joy took from her ride along experience, was just how similar the lives of the officers on “The Bridge” reflect those of real-life cops.
“As an actor, you’ll read the scripts and hear about marriages going bad with alcoholism and suicide and somebody might think, ‘Oh, its TV, they want to keep the show interesting.’ From what I heard from the police officers, is that it’s all real. It’s hard on them. It’s not like other 9 to 5 jobs.”
During her ride along, Joy also remembers some of the more unusual reactions she received while accompanying the police officers.
“I was in character, in a sense, so I was wearing what Billy wears for the first few episodes. I just pulled something out of my own wardrobe which resembles that… these straight leg jeans and this black leather coat,” says Joy.
“During this one stop, this girl came out and said, ‘That’s what the cops are wearing now? That’s too cool for cops!’”
As our esteemed editor Rick Chandler made note of on Friday, there’s been a surprising revelation for fans of NBC’s long-running sitcom The Office: program stalwart & favorite put-down target of the lovably sociopathic Michael Scott, idle-minded Dunder-Mifflin employee Phyllis was once an NFL cheerleader. Well not the character, but the actress who plays her — who is unimaginatively also named Phyllis (Smith) — was once a paid pom-pom waver for the football Cardinals of St. Louis, before her life took her on a decidedly different career path (and workout plan, but hey, that happens to the best of us).
