I was born in Bountiful, Utah and raised in Alaska. We moved North when I was 9 and I lived in Anchorage through high school and a year or so of college. I traveled the country for a while, spending some time in New York, until putting down in L.A. about 25 years ago. Now I have a sweet little house on a little piece of land. My wife, Riad and I named it Chez Seamus, after our son.
I started my acting career as a clown and wire walker for Satan's Wild Animal Circus of Agony in the mid-1970's and then served my theatrical apprenticeship with the Alaska Repertory Theatre during its 1977-79 seasons. Since then, I've done about a hundred plays at theatres like the McCarter Theatre, the La Jolla Playhouse, the Mark Taper Forum, the LA Stage Company, The Jupiter Theatre, The Salt Lake Acting Company, The Old Globe, and The Pasadena Playhouse with such wonderful directors as Emily Mann, Des McAnuff, Jack O'Brien, Charles Nelson Reilly, Jose Quintero and Harry Mastrogeorge.
I picked up a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Performance (in a play called El Salvador. It's where I met my wife.) and three Drama-Logue Awards. I was in the London premiere of Emily Mann's Still Life at the West End's Donmar Warehouse and the Riverside Studios after we played The Edinburgh Festival at the venerable Traverse Theatre (it was a brothel a couple of hundred years ago) where the production received a Fringe First Award.
I've been in the films Catch Me If You Can, The One, Falling Down, Abilene, Wilderness Survival for Girls and Jarhead.
On television, I was Bill Buchanan in seasons four, five and six of FOX's 24 and McQueen in the one and only season of FOX's Space: Above and Beyond. Since the mid-'80's I've taken numerous episodic assignments including Six Feet Under, West Wing, Frasier, Millennium, The X-Files, and Cold Case, among many others.
You could have heard me on the radio if you tuned into the BBC production of Julius Caesar or the LA TheateWorks/KCRW productions of Ruby McCollum and Rainmaker for National Public Radio.
In '96 I directed my first film, Parking. It's based on my short play, and was produced by my wife, Riad Galayini. Parking has screened at a whole slew of festivals including Slamdance (Audience Choice Award for Best Short Film); the Palm Springs International; the Portland, Cleveland, Sedona, and Albany; the Taos Talking Picture Festival, Austin's South By Southwest Festival; New York's New Directors/New Films Festival presented by Lincoln Center at the Museum of Modern Art; the South Beach Film Festival in Miami; the Central Florida Film Festival (third place narrative film award); the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival; the Montreal World Festival; The Festival of US Shorts in Brisbane, Australia; Ireland's Cork International Film Festival; the St. Louis Film Festival; and The Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema. It also aired on Sundance channel for over a year.
In December 1997 Riad and I completed our second short film, Nude Descending, which she directed. It won the George Melies Award at the 1998 Taos Talking Picture Festival. In 2000 Nude Descending was selected for special recognition by the reelshort.com New Short Film Directors Showcase and Universal Studios at the Hitchcock International Director's Series presented by the American Cinematheque. Riad also directed me in the short she wrote, Crossing, which is doing really well on the festival circuit.
In the early '80's, while I was at Sundance Institute's Playwright's Conference as an actor, I realized that I was just enough of a sociopath to be a playwright. Idle Wheels, my first play - a semi-autobiographical examination of growing up in Alaska - was developed at Sundance and first produced at the Salt Lake Acting Company. I'm a member of the Ensemble Studio Theatre, the company that first produced Parking on the stage. I've written a few plays now and they've been seen at The Playwrights' Center of Minneapolis, LA Theatre Works, The MET Theatre, City Theatre in Miami, The Two Parts Theatre Company, The Classical Theatre Lab, The Road Theatre in L.A.
I used to be a Lecture Fellow at Bournemouth University School of Media in the UK and hope to make it back to talk to them again someday. I'm also certified to teach Hatha yoga by the White Lotus Foundation in Santa Barbara, where I still study and teach with my friends Tracey Rich and Ganga White, and I teach regular weekly classes at L.A.'s oldest studio, The Center for Yoga (founded by Ganga White in 1967) part of the YogaWorks family. You can find out more about my yoga practice here.
