29 April 2008
Interview with Jason Dohring
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Jason Dohring does not look four hundred years old. He´s not a billionaire. Nor a vampire. He´s actually an actor, and a good one, considering he passes for four hundred-year-old Josef Kostan, the billionaire investment manager (and vampire), on CBS´s Moonlight.
Jason started with commercials before moving into film and television roles. He has appeared on JAG, Roswell, Boston Public, The Division, Judging Amy, Cold Case and others.
As a child actor, Jason starred in Broken Record, directed by Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum, Pink Panther), and Hallmark Hall of Fame TV Movie Journey, starring Jason Robards and Brenda Fricker. Jason´s feature film credits include Deep Impact, Black Cadillac (opposite Randy Quaid) and Disney Channel´s Ready to Run.
Jason´s breakout role, however, was portraying the scene-stealing Logan Echolls on the critically-acclaimed Veronica Mars, a role that garnered him reviews such as “Wildly charismatic!’ as Nikki Britton of the Houston Chronicle said. “[Jason] is a real actor. He has an intensity that almost can make you uncomfortable... I´m just riveted by him,’ said Rob Thomas, creator and executive producer of Veronica Mars. “Almost everyone in the ensemble shines, particularly Jason Dohring as Veronica´s hypnotically incorrigible nemesis, Logan,’ said Entertainment Weekly. “People do love Logan, which I think is a testament to how good Jason Dohring is in the role. He does rotten thing after rotten thing, and yet people want things to turn out well for him,’ said TV Guide Online. “A big shout-out to Jason Dohring´s Logan Echolls — a masterfully designed and performed nemesis whose twists and turns are always credible,’ wrote Kevin Smith.
Jason is currently starring in Moonlight, which earned a People´s Choice Award for Favorite New TV Drama earlier this year.
Jason is also a second generation Scientologist. He started in Scientology at an early age and never looked back.
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When did you decide to be an actor?
You know it´s funny, it´s not like I always wanted to be an actor. I can´t say that it was my aspiration from childhood. But, I´ll tell you something, it wasn´t until about 4 years ago, just before booking Veronica Mars, when I was getting some auditing, that I really made the decision to be an actor. See, my dad does pretty well for himself and I probably could have stayed at home until I was about 35 [laughs], and I´d never get kicked out. But that wasn´t me. I just remember being in session one day and deciding, “That´s it, dude. I´m going to be a professional at this. When I go in that room [to audition], I am going to blow people away.’ I wanted to be the best. And no matter how much work it took, however long, that´s exactly what I would do. And I would say that it was this decision that totally changed everything — not more classes, not more learning, or anything else. It was simply the desire to be good. Now, I still go to class several times a week and I get a lot out of it. I´m just saying that my decision to be a professional in the field changed everything for me.
I also decided at the time that I was going to work every month. And funny enough, that´s exactly what happened. I got a guest starring role in January, another guest starring role in February, a pilot in March, a double guest star in April, I got offered my first movie role the next month, and then my pilot got picked up. That show was Veronica Mars which aired for three years.
When did you start applying Scientology to your life?
I went to schools that used L. Ron Hubbard´s Ethics and Study Technology, which I´d also used at home from an early age. I never got into drugs and that sort of thing, and I would look up words I didn´t understand. These basics were always a part of my life, growing up with my mom and my dad.
It was around this time when I started to realize that this stuff really works.
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What´s a win you´ve had from your auditing?
I was in session one time and we got to the end of an incident and the auditor asked if there was anything earlier, similar to the incident that we were just running. I couldn´t think of anything and I thought that was pretty much it. But she kept asking for something earlier. And all of a sudden I got this picture of this tree. “Well, I don´t know what this is. I´ve just got a picture of a tree,’ I said.
“Is there anything more to that?’ she asked.
So, basically, while doing that, I came up with the most unbelievable [injury] incident. And at the end of it, we found the underlying decision I had made at the time. And it´s amazing, man! You find these decisions that are affecting your life today, from past incidents, past experiences. The decision was, “I´m not listening to you, buddy.’
You can see how much of a problem that would be, if you had that attitude toward everyone, especially if someone is honestly trying to help you — and as a kid, I definitely had a lot of people trying to help me. I would just push it off. I was just rebellious. Well, I´m still a bit rebellious — but at least I know it! But before I had that realization in session, I would push away what people would say, whether it was good or bad. I couldn´t evaluate the world around me, or my life, because of that decision.
Afterwards, I can still say “no’ and I´m the first guy to not conform. But now, I can evaluate what´s being offered as help and then decide. I have my own self-determinism and it´s me doing it. I´m not the effect of old decisions or past incidents.
When you receive auditing, you see how your past decisions stay with you and unknowingly affect your life today. Once you uncover those decisions, you´re not the effect of them anymore.
What has been successful for me though is making Scientology a priority. You know, I might have missed a couple nights being out with my friends. But it´s so great when you look back and you´re so glad that somebody pushed you through the barriers, through the relatively unimportant stuff that didn´t matter — another party I would have gone to vs. spiritual freedom, you know?
This is lasting gain. This is something that´s never been done before. You can actually improve a person´s life with Scientology technology. It can improve your life for real — it´s not like getting a new pair of shoes.
From the tools you´ve learned in Scientology, which do you use on the job?
One of the things I find extremely useful are the drills that take communication and break it down into its different parts. Once I learned about those — and especially how to have the ability to just be there comfortably (which is really one of the main points of communication) — then I was all set.
Have you ever noticed when you´re in a conversation with someone who is quite nervous, it can make you kind of nervous? After I thoroughly drilled these communication drills, I was totally calm when talking to people and, funny enough, it put them at ease as well.
And from this I got — and it´s sort of a big concept — that if I sort things out for myself, my life sorts itself out. I don´t wait for the world to right itself. I make myself right, and therefore things around me magically “sort out.’
Essentially, when I learned how to be comfortable using this one communication drill, my auditions became so much simpler. You can get into being nervous as an actor. But if you can just go in and be comfortable for real, and do your art, it´s so much more enjoyable.
There are actually a bunch of different tools that I´ve used with great success.
Another factor is that I assume full responsibility for what happens in my life, and I don´t recognize the right of other things or others to determine what will happen to me. So when something bad comes in (negative thoughts, etc.) I´m like, “Forget it! I´m going ahead. I´m not listening to that.’ And that alone has saved me more times than I can count.
You ever wake up on the day of a final audition, and all of a sudden something´s different about this one? Suddenly “it´s important.’ And suddenly it´s — worry, worry, worry — “Oh, am I really good enough?’ “There are so many other actors out there…’ — all kinds of “helpful’ ideas that really just wind up psyching you out.
I decided that all those crazy thoughts, negative thoughts, critical thoughts, reasons why not — they have no right to interfere. And suddenly, I wasn´t the effect of them anymore.
I can achieve what I want to, no matter what — anything that comes up, it didn´t matter. Any bad thought, I could be above it, and still get on with my choices as an actor and execute what I wanted to do.
That little piece of tech got me Veronica Mars, which is ultimately the job that wound up getting me Moonlight as well.
If I didn´t have that... well, you can so easily get talked out of things — by yourself! It´s such a funny thing. And having that datum on responsibility, I didn´t listen to the noise in my head. I just put my intention toward what I wanted to do and just executed it. It was a beautiful thing. I was at cause over my own mind.
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It comes from my decision to be a professional. Part of it is to work hard, and I don´t mean strenuous hard — I´m not killing myself over it — but it´s work. I study these films and watch the really great actors, and find out what they are doing that makes them interesting, that I find interesting. I find out what I like about what they are doing and how I can add that to my own work. You gotta be a professional.
Another thing, I don´t listen to what other people say about the business. “Well, several hundred actors move to LA every day.’ Well, that´s fine. But as soon as you begin to listen to that, to agree with that… well, that´s what becomes real to you. And then you start to think that way — that maybe you don´t have as good a shot at it, blah, blah, blah. That´s when you get into trouble, when you start agreeing with other people´s negative ideas. I mean, chances are, that´s an unemployed actor saying that to you anyway, right?
As soon as I decided to work hard and be great, I saw my confidence shoot up. And if it wasn´t Veronica Mars, or Moonlight, it would have been something else. Because I was certain in my ability and I think that´s the greatest certainty there is. And even if I didn´t book the job, I knew I just laid down an unbelievable performance and no one was going to come up with those choices I had made in the audition. I think you have got to be so good that they can´t even take the guy who is right for the part, because you are so good.
What do I have to do to be that good? That´s what I asked myself. Two hundred other actors are going to read every single line that´s on the page. That´s what we have in common. Well, what´s different? What makes you different are your ideas. So I just went wild with that. I would come up with the best ideas, the most creative stuff I could think of as I was reading it — stuff that really turned me on, and that I knew would be exciting and interesting to the audience. I think that around this time my booking success rate was about 60 to 80 percent.
There was no attention on the other actors who were reading for the same role. I wasn´t even going in to get the job. I was going in to nail the audition. And oddly enough, that resulted in getting lots of jobs. And even if they didn´t choose me, I wasn´t upset because I knew I delivered!
Why would you recommend someone get auditing?
Well, for a long, long time, people have been searching for answers, for something that really works. And while speaking for myself (although I think it may be true for others as well), we all have negative stuff to deal with. Maybe it´s a bit different from person to person, but I think for the most part, at one time or another, we all have it — counter-creative thoughts, irrational fears, and countless other things that suppress creativity. For the first time in history, we have, with auditing, L. Ron Hubbard´s tech available to anyone who wants to reach for it, to better the quality of their lives.
And the first time you get a little taste of it and you realize that you´re different because of it — that your life has honestly changed for the better — it´s so incredibly exciting!•
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