About Kris

My complete acting resume is available on Casting Workbook!

Kris Joseph was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, raised in far too many cities and towns in Saskatchewan and Alberta, and has been living in Ontario since he left home for university way back in 1993. Ottawa has been his permanent home since 1998, and he has been acting professionally since 2003.

His love affair with acting — and especially the theatre — actually began much earlier, near the end of Grade 9, when his drama teacher burst into a lunchtime band practice to ask if anyone wanted to be in the chorus of the school musical. That musical was written by Barry Manilow, but even that couldn’t cure Kris of the fever that overtook him. Three years later, after a steady diet of Rocky Horror singalongs and a healthy exposure to Sweeney Todd, Kris wanted to study theatre as a career, but his mother told him that would not be the best way to stay out of debt or make a decent living.

So Kris got an engineering degree from Queen’s University, and worked in high-tech for about eight years. He started getting involved in community theatre in 1999, and created an Internet radio station dedicated to showtunes that ran for seven years. By 2002 his passion for the stage had made going to work unbearable. In 2003 he and some friends founded a theatre company and produced a hit musical in Ottawa; in the summer of 2004 he toured central Canada with a Fringe play, and in October of 2004 he left high-tech forever.

Since then, he has been a full-time, professional artist, training wherever and whenever he can (most notably and profitably at Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts); subsidizing the effort with occasional teaching and other work.  Kris used to earn a lot of money doing work he hated, and now he prefers to earn a sufficient amount of money doing the things he really loves.

Since this blog was first created way back in April of 2002, Kris has gone from being an engineer who dabbles in theatre to a unionized professional actor with a growing list of too-good-to-be-true projects under his belt. He’s still very interested in technology, and is always looking for ways to exploit it for the sake of his own creativity.  One day he dreams of making a really great income at his art… because his husband is picking up the financial slack most of the time, and he hopes to be able to return the favour.

In his spare time, you can find Kris at the gym, watching movies, or indulging in his irrational love of spandex. Occasionally you may catch him doing all three of those things at the same time.

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