Allow Me to Introduce Myself

My name is Dylan Murphy, I am a 23-year-old actor born, raised, and living in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York. Since this is the first time I’m writing for the site (and first time writing a blog) I wanted to take some time to tell you who I am, why I became an actor, and what I plan to provide to the website in the future.

Now I should start with a disclaimer:

I am a habitually lazy person. Anyone who follows me on social media knows I rarely post anything. Not because I am afraid of what people will think or how I will be perceived by others from my posts. It simply is because I am too lazy to persistently post every single thing that is happening in my life. When I see something ridiculous happen in front of my eyes, which in New York can happen at any moment, I don’t whip out my phone to record a Snapchat of a Subway rat eating a Buffalo Chicken Taquito from 7/11 that someone half ate and threw onto the track. I usually just laugh at myself and if I remember it later I might mention it to a friend, preferably not while we’re eating. So I will try to be better at posting stuff about whatever I find interesting on this site and my social media accounts, and if you like what I post and I haven’t in a while let me know and I’ll post more. Same goes for if I’m posting too much and losing touch with reality or mainly blowing up your timelines. Talk to me, let me know, I’ll work on that shit.

Now let me tell you about who I am.

I have lived in the same apartment, other than my four years in college, my entire life. I have a loving and supportive family that consists of my mom Anne, my father Billy, my brother Liam, and my stepdad Mike. I live in the Bay Ridge neighborhood in Brooklyn and I could not have grown up in a better place. Everything is within walking distance and has the convenience of a city and has a quiet, safe environment that any suburban town has.

Most of the friends I have, I met while attending Xavier High School, a private Jesuit high school in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. I took the subway every day to school starting at 14 and that is where I have learned some of my first, really important life lessons. Such as letting people off the train before you get on or giving your seat to an elderly person or pregnant woman and knowing when a turn is coming so if you aren’t holding onto something or sitting down to do so quickly or you will go flying into someone or just end up on your ass. I gained a great education and work ethic in high school but the education that I got from ballbusting with my friends would prove to be priceless. Besides the crippling laughter, it forced me to be very quick with my humor and it gave me a thick skin which in the profession I am in helps a great deal. This will also come in handy when my friends read this blog and as great friends do make fun of me ruthlessly for it.

After high school, I attended West Virginia University. Now you may be wondering why a kid from Brooklyn would want to go to school in Morgantown, West Virginia. Very logical question. I wish I had an answer like “my family all went there” or “I got a scholarship and it was cheaper to go there than actually stay in New York.” Those answers would make sense and be deemed acceptable. But in all honesty, West Virginia was the only college that accepted me. It was either that or Kingsborough Community College, nothing against “K by the Bay” but I always knew I wanted to go to a big school preferably out of state. Kinda always thought that school would be in Florida or California but if West Virginia was the place I needed to be than West By God Virginia it was. This turned out to be the best decision I ever made in my entire life. I already had some friends down there but we became even closer over my 4 years in Morgantown and I have met some of my closest friends that otherwise, I would have never met. More importantly, I felt like I really found who I was. I know I could not have typed a more cliche/douchey sentence but it’s true. In college, I felt like I became more aware of who I was and who I wanted to be. I also had some great fucking times with some hilarious stories resulting from those times but that’s another blog for another day. I also met my good friend and collaborator Roger Turner Jr. and our friendship was what turned my dream of becoming an actor into a reality.

Now let me start by saying why I became an actor.

From the time I was a little kid, I was obsessed with movies and television. I remember watching Space Jam over and over again in awe that Michael Jordan was playing basketball with Bugs Bunny. It was also my introduction to Mr. Bill Murray, and to this day when he screams “Let’s Go Bulls” at the end of the movie after being reaffirmed by Larry Bird that he will in fact NEVER play in the NBA and his scream has a slight crack while he fightbacks tears, it makes me laugh every time. I remember obsessing over the Rocky movies, watching them more times than I could count to the point where I could tell you every detail of the entire saga from start to finish by the time I was about 10. I remember watching Jamie Foxx’s performance in Ray at 10 years old and feeling like I was watching Ray Charles’ life happen in front of my eyes rather than another person just doing a really good impression. I saw Jamie Foxx become Ray Charles and I had never seen anything like it before.

Also, from a very young age, I became a fan of theater. Growing up in New York, one of the biggest perks is you get to see some of the best actors, singers, performers in the world right in front of you. I couldn’t tell you how old I was but I remember seeing the Lion King and thinking the beginning of the play where the actors walked on stage like the animals in the movie was the craziest thing I had ever seen up to that point. From there I was hooked. Both of my parents, especially my mom, have been avid theatergoers and I have been lucky to see some of the best performances in the history of live theater. Jessica Lange in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Bryan Cranston in All the Way, Bradley Cooper in Elephant Man, Ben Platt in Dear Evan Hansen. The list goes on and on. I thought to be an actor was the coolest job anyone could have because it is the only job where you could be any person you wanted and have any job you wanted, there were absolutely no limitations to what you could do. So even though I never studied acting or did any plays in school, I decided when I moved back to New York that I would give it everything I had to become an actor, but I had no idea how I was going to start. That was until I met Roger.

When I met Roger I thought he was a cool kid. We had similar interests, he was about as laid back a person I had ever met and thought he was a good roommate, especially given the fact we didn’t know each other until we moved into a house my senior year with 5 of our mutual friends. One day, Roger was typing on his laptop and I thought he was just typing an article for the school newspaper, as he was a Journalism major and this is something he did quite often. I asked him what he was working on figuring it would be an article about the football team, the women’s basketball team, the swimming and diving team or whatever team he was covering that week. I was surprised when he responded by saying “No, I’m working on the pilot for this show I’m creating which is all I’m trying to do so I’m pretty happy.” When he told me he was trying to be a screenwriter, I, of course, told him I wanted to be an actor. To which he responded with “Oh yeah? Cool.” As I’m sure he had heard that from every single person he’s told about his writing because “Who wouldn’t want to be an actor? I could do that!” is so often the reasoning for people. Later that day he asked me if I was serious about it and I assured him I was. That my plan was to move back to New York and take classes and go on auditions etc. A few weeks later, he told me about the Film Club at WVU, a few weeks after that I went to my first meeting, two weeks after that they had auditioned for their next short film and I got the lead role. Filming that film was the most fun I ever had doing “work” and it reassured me that this is what I want to do with my life. I then posted it on my Facebook unsure of how it would be received. But the response I got was overwhelmingly positive. My friends, who I was almost certain would make fun of me, were ecstatic for me and excited that I wanted to be an actor and were supportive of my dream. They are also fighting as to who will be the Turtle in my Entourage if I become a successful actor, and I keep reminding them that the position is still open so until I get famous they have to duke it out every now and again to remind me how badly they really want it.

Since I started acting and graduated college I have done three short films, two have them been with UpStream Productions: mine, Roger’s and Gary Murray’s (our producer and magician behind the camera) production company (I’ll explain the name of the company in the next blog.) We also shot a pilot for a television series which should be available soon and we just finished production on our first feature film which Roger wrote a blog about if you want to know more about that. I took a year of classes at HB Studio, a famous acting school in New York where people like Al Pacino, Matthew Broderick, Barbara Streisand, Robert De Niro to name a few have studied. I joined a theater company, The Complete Theater Company, where I have been able to perform live doing improv, scenes, and monologues, and last November played Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. It is also where I met my girlfriend who is an actress with the same aspirations as I and with the same taste of obscure Youtube videos. If you haven’t seen it in a while, or if ever God forbid, go watch “Drinking Out of Cups.” It’s a classic that I haven’t watched in a very long time and when I did it had me in tears laughing. The classics are classics for a reason, they stand the test of time no matter what’s topical, and a shitty animated lizard playing over audio of a kid tripping on acid in a closet does just that.

Now here is what to expect from me on the website moving forward.

When Roger told me about the launch of the UpStream website I was very excited. When he told me that he and Gary would be putting their photography work as well as our past and future projects on here, I thought “Fantastic!” When Roger asked me what I would be bringing to the site I thought “Um…well I could…fuck I have no idea.” Then after a little time, I thought what would I want to see on a site about aspiring actors, directors, and writers. I would want to see what their life is like trying to make it happen. Now, this doesn’t mean that I will be posting about every single thing going on in my life, as I reference at the disclaimer. I will write and post about auditions I go on and what that looks like through some vlogs. I will post some videos from performances from my theater company. I will also write about different films and plays that I saw that really moved me. I will try to exclusively write about stuff I like and not about stuff I hate because taste in movies and theater can be very subjective. Unless I spend hundreds of dollars to go see a play and there was an old couple talking the whole time and it was a play that got a lot of awards and it was terrible and a complete waste of money. Then I am just doing my service as a good citizen of this city.

Now every now and again if I feel like it I may talk about things outside of film and theater like sports. Besides obviously being a WVU fan I am a Giants, Yankees, Rangers, and Knicks fan so if something happens that I have to blog about regarding my teams I might. Something tells me I will be writing about the Yankees a lot this season which means many people will probably not enjoy reading those blogs because that’ll mean the Yankees are doing well and I am happy, and if I have learned anything in this life, it is no one wants that. But if you have been a supporter of UpStream up to this point I thank you for your continuous support and if you are new to us, we welcome you with open fins.

Let’s Go Swimmin’.  

Stay up to date on everything going on in my crazy life. Give me a follow and let the journey begin!

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