About Kris

Basically: I’m an out, proud, kinky professional actor who loves the theatre, politics, and all kinds of things in between.  You can find my complete acting resume on Casting Workbook.

I was born in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, raised in far too many cities and towns in Saskatchewan and Alberta, and have been living in Ontario since I left home for university way back in 1993. Ottawa has been my permanent home since 1998, and I have been acting professionally since 2003.  In the Spring of 2012, I’ll be moving to Edmonton.

My love affair with acting — and especially the theatre — actually began much earlier, near the end of Grade 9, when my 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 me of the fever that overtook me. Three years later, after a steady diet of Rocky Horror singalongs and a healthy exposure to Sweeney Todd, I wanted to study theatre as a career, but my mother told me that would not be the best way to stay out of debt or make a decent living.

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

Since then, I have been a full-time, professional artist, training wherever and whenever I can (most notably and profitably at Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts and as part of the Banff/Citadel Professional Theatre Program in Alberta); subsidizing the effort with occasional teaching and other work.  I used to earn a lot of money doing work I hated, and now I prefer to earn a sufficient amount of money doing the things I really love.

Since this blog was first created way back in April of 2002, I have 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. I’m still very interested in technology, and am always looking for ways to exploit it for the sake of my own creativity.

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

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