Seth Burnham sat in a dim corner of Kaldi Coffee & Tea, clutching a mug as he tried to conjure some confidence.
Being here in L.A., I'm giving it everything, he thought.
But after three years of living in Los Angeles, he hadn't had a single role he could be proud of. In a cable TV comedy, he played Percy the Carjacker, a dimwit blown to shreds by an air hose. For an independent film, he had been the best friend of a beautiful woman — a role the script called Small Gay Man.
Hollywood is one big lottery. You have to play it if you want a career in movies or TV....You have to be here. You have to believe.
Sometimes that was tough. Take STARmeter, the entertainment insider's website that measures the popularity of Hollywood actors.
"I was No. 80,000," Burnham said, "for a while."
Frustrated and fatigued, he would retire to this worn, cave-like cafe in Atwater Village.
He had found his surrogate Los Angeles family here, a group of a dozen or so who eased his loneliness and shared his Hollywood ambition: Amy, the animator who had worked on "South Park," Nicholas, whose latest film was well received at the Sundance Film Festival, and Amad, a rising African American actor who worried about being typecast in criminal roles.
They stayed for hours, talking, typing, hunched hard over laptops, nursing lattes. They were actors, writers and directors; stragglers, success stories and hard-luck cases like Burnham.
Many days, he sat in a torn leather chair reading through newspapers and memorizing scripts. He seemed swallowed in the furniture — brown-haired, bearded, not much more than 5 feet tall, with worry lines marching from the corners of his eyes.
Time was against him. Asked his age back in February, Burnham paused. "Mid 30s-ish, early 40s-ish," he said.
Outside of the cafe, he had few Los Angeles friends. His wife, a medical student, moved to St. Louis last year for a residency, but he stayed here. They decided that if she was going to devote herself fully to her dream, then he would too.
But how much more rejection could he handle? And was the unrelenting struggle worth more to him than his marriage?
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Since his college days in the early 1990s, the acting quest had taken Burnham to several cities. He lived in San Francisco and London, where he trained at a drama school in the classical English style and started a theater company. He lived in Portland, Ore., and Seattle, where he got good reviews for his role in a modern adaptation of Chekhov's "The Seagull."
Everywhere he put down roots he found a place like Kaldi. "The anti-Starbucks," he said. "Just my style."
In Los Angeles, he developed a cafe routine. Each morning, he awoke in his cramped apartment, fed kibbles to his cats, threw on his sneakers and walked across Glendale Boulevard.
He drank two iced coffees a day, no more. He couldn't afford more, not when he didn't have a job — he had to be free for auditions. He relied on credit cards and his wife's salary to pay his bills.
Burnham didn't want fame; he wanted to simply be a journeyman, a working actor, appreciated for his skill, making roughly the same yearly salary as a union electrician.
He sat in the cafe for entire mornings and sometimes entire days. "Wrestling demons," he said.
An actor despairs in Tinseltown
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An actor despairs in Tinseltown
