I don’t know how old I was when I started hearing the name. I was probably ten or eleven. I grew up kind of adjacent to the LSU/Baton Rouge theatre world. Even before my mom enrolled in the MFA program started by John Dennis (she was in the second class) she had been doing shows at the Baton Rouge Little Theatre. I vividly remember her as Madge in Picnic, and then there was that time she blew my mind as Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. I was so proud of her, so proud to be her daughter. Then there was her boyfriend, who I regarded with some amazement and thought might be the greatest actor who ever lived. And then there’s John Mese, who, as a golden boy in the MFA program, everyone thought very likely to “make it.” He did “make it,” although I’m not sure everyone would agree about what that means. To me, it means that he “made it” as a working, professional, and extremely creative person who still gets to be an actor after doing it for almost four decades. As he told me in our interview, he knew he wanted to be an actor ever since he did a play called Sly Fox. That was in 1982. He was not even 20 years old.
I wasn’t hearing his name yet in 1982. I was five. In 1987, though, my mom was in a play called The Rose Tattoo.1 John was in that too, as well as a guy called TJ Rotolo, who taught me in summer classes at the Little Theatre. Tennessee Williams wrote The Rose Tattoo about life in a Sicilian village, and so how very fitting that John, a descendant of Sicilian immigrants to America, got to play the lead, Alvaro Mangiacavallo. At any rate, it’s probable that this is when I began to hear his name.
He was born and raised in Baton Rouge. His father was a dentist, as he reveals in the above YouTube clip. He tells a funny story about using his dad’s cotton swabs to pull off a Vito Corleone impression, which is so much more amusing in light of the role that might be his proudest accomplishment as an actor. He talks about doing an 8th grade play, rehearsing in the church at school, and inadvertently issuing a swear word (in the presence of nuns) after he messed up his lines. I also grew up in Baton Rouge (though I was actually born in Alexandria) and I went to the same Catholic elementary school that John did. It’s a coincidence of some interest to me that I learned only when I read an old feature done on him in 1992 where the writer happened to mention that he was a St. Aloysius boy.2
After eighth grade, John went to the all-boys, sports-obsessed Catholic High School. He was rather preoccupied with being a teenager and trying to fit in there, so for the time being, the impulse to act was, we might say, a sleeping giant. Fast forward to John Mese the advertising major at LSU. In the Sigma Chi frat house, he met a “brother” who spurred his curiosity about the performing arts again. He didn’t “love” his major, and I sensed in our interview that it just wasn’t creative enough for him, but he says that he figured he could parlay it into something out in Los Angeles after graduation—perhaps making commercials, which seemed to him like “mini-movies,” he said.
The movie King of Herrings (2013) was a dreamscape for John and four friends from wayback who had also been in the MFA program at LSU. By then, the five of them had rather vibrant careers out in the City of Angels. There was John, for one, who’d had some good breaks in the no-nonsense, cutthroat world of television acting—to name a few, there were 16 episodes on Reasonable Doubts, a guest-starring role on a Monster of the Week episode of The X-Files, and what he called an interesting “bad guy” on Law & Order in 2005. Hilariously, he had also been Samantha’s “re-run man” on Sex and the City. But by the time the five friends got together in 2013 to shoot a very low budget (but also very lucky) film in New Orleans, they were all pretty fed up with playing formulaic, generic roles on primetime shows where none of them felt he was reaching his creative potential. That being said, each King of Herrings actor was determined to use the opportunity to bring it in terms of character acting—or, rather, as John put it later in another context, to “swing for the fences.” It wasn’t a money maker, but it brought other kinds of rewards, things more long-lasting, like the chance to unleash yourself and do it your way. They “ate it up and spit it out,” as one of my favorite songs goes.
One day, shortly after graduation, biding his time in Baton Rouge, he bumped into John Dennis at Coffee Call. Watch him tell the story below:
He repeated his amazement at the language of Sam Shepard in our interview: “I went and read The Tooth of Crime and, I don’t know, it just blew my mind. It was…just crazy language, lots of cuss words…” That’s when he asked if it was all right with me if he cussed in the interview. I was a little taken aback, and unsure. I wouldn’t say I’m a regular cuss-word user, but I do say “shit” a lot, and I do appreciate how expressive, not to mention cathartic colorful language can be. I like it in movies and books, especially when it illustrates colloquial, real-people dialogue. So I didn’t want to be like the nuns at St. Aloyisus and tell John he had to talk like an altar boy, and I absolutely loved it when he said, “If you don’t want it, I won’t [cuss] but I do tend to cuss a lot, especially when I talk about acting.” I understand what he was saying about the fascinating way that Shepard uses language, like so many writers before and after him, to create worlds. Playing Hoss in The Tooth of Crime was for John “like being Hamlet in a rock ‘n roll world and it blew my mind.”
John later got into writing his own stuff. In the 2000s, when he and his friend Eddie Jemison attended a Wednesday night class to do scenes “from David Mamet, Shepard, anybody,” he experimented with a screenplay that he titled Perfect Day. He gave tips to Eddie when the latter was writing scenes for what became King of Herrings. Eddie wrote one scene at a time, “getting actors from [the class] to get up and read it.”3 They certainly used colorful language there! While Eddie wrote scenes for King of Herrings in that class, John experimented with a script-in-progress of his own, a full-length screenplay called The Husband Killer. “[Steven] Soderbergh read The Husband Killer and told me it was really good, and it wasn’t something he could mount, but I should keep writing. It was the script that I feel like I landed in the fullest way.”4
I feel like we both wanted to say much more than we did about “Augie,” the role that John played in King of Herrings, and I also feel, looking back, that we might have been (at times) speaking on two different streams. As he said, though, his bigger role on that movie was a behind-the-scenes one, as producer and first Assistant Director. John’s a talker. I’m not so much of a talker. I’m a thinker, which John is too, and that’s why I enjoy talking to him so much. Sometimes it felt like he was taking the words right out of my head and it was cool when he remembered things I had said to him in emails and Facebook Messenger before the interview—things like Augie being a “lost man.” Playing “lost men” certainly seems like a through line in John’s career. In one of our emails before the interview, he mentioned, in reference to the “lost men” hypothesis, the experience playing Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof—not at LSU, but at USM Hattiesburg. Lost, broken, withdrawn—however we might put it, these are the characters that drew John into acting. With his indie film in 2007, Perfect Day, he flipped the script and wrote, instead, the story of a lost woman. She was his female archetype, a little more complex and interesting (not to mention mysterious) to him simply by virtue of being of the opposite sex. Further to the point, there is a metaphor he likes to draw between being lost in New Orleans at the age of five (during Mardi Gras) and being “lost” his whole life— “looking, searching…until I finally found Acting.” Acting, though, “opened up new searches for me….”5
John got it in one when he surmised that I didn’t know Derek Sitter was from the LSU MFA court of “king” John Dennis. The friendship between John Mese and Derek Sitter is such a natural one, for so many reasons. They compliment each other as actors and, quite frankly, if their Facebook banter is anything to go by, their demeanors. I love the story (from John) about Derek going to L.A. to see John do Wild Son: The Testimony of Christian Brando. Afterward, Derek showed John his latest project, a script for a short film called Bugtussle. John read it and immediately connected with the role of Crow—not by coincidence, another “lost man!" (Bugtussle is really about two very broken men, half-brothers, whose story recalls George and Lenny in Of Mice and Men.) According to John, Derek admitted that he had not thought of casting John as Crow, but he liked the idea and that’s how it went—John played Crow (the “George,” we might say) while Derek played Coyote—not exactly like Lenny in terms of deadly pettings, but rather Lenny-esque in the sense of being the loose cannon who constantly got them in trouble. Both John and Derek have Best Actor Awards (at different festivals) for this movie. John won the Best Acting Performance Award at the Oregon Short Film Festival. Derek has won several—Best Actor at least four times over. Amusingly, Derek admits it’s been hard to keep track of all the accolades that keep on flowing to the cast and crew of Bugtussle. “Keeping track of festivals and awards is impossible,” Derek tells me via Facebook Messenger. “Seriously, it’s been quite the ride for the whole team.” As of this writing, Bugtussle has won awards for editing, score, acting, and direction, as well as countless best overall awards in the short category.
John talked a lot about both Eddie and Derek, and the wonderful fantasy of doing movies in a way that one dreams of yet rarely happens in the big-soundstage, blockbuster world. Eddie Jemison, David Jensen, Wayne Pére, Joe Chrest, and John “swung for the fences” with King of Herrings—each hit his own home run, to further the baseball analogy. Each played his role as if it was the first, last, and best thing they would ever do. No less, Derek Sitter is mastering the art of the short—of hitting the home run and quickly running the bases before anyone has recovered the ball. I get the impression that Derek is not the type of man to waste time. Neither are any of those who worked with him and John on Bugtussle. Taylor Morden, for example, one of Derek’s Bend, Oregon friends, famous for directing The Last Blockbuster—Derek brought him onto the Bugtussle team as a producer. These are professionals, but, as John kept indicating, they are also highly creative and talented people who just know what they are doing. They arrive on set; they do the job; they get it done.
I loved the comparison we formulated—between Joe Chrest playing Ted Wheeler and John playing Augie. These are both small roles with impactful, interesting, compelling performances. The Stranger Things fandom has grown to love Ted Wheeler for his eccentricities. I think part of the appeal of Ted Wheeler is the mystery—or the “oddity,” as John put it, of the actor. There’s a great interview where Chrest, in talking about his role on Stranger Things, compares it to Jessica Rabbit: “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”6
Augie, too, as John notes in our interview, is not so much better or worse than the others in the film… He looks down on them, though. He sits in stoic silence and cooks for them and serves them coffee, but he doesn’t approve of their immature behavior. Augie is lonely. He runs a diner (Anita’s Grill) that’s “pretty bust out,” as John puts it. Augie is withdrawn. He judges but he bites his tongue—except once in the movie when he finally speaks up to give us some glimpse into his heart. He advises against withholding love, because that’s what Augie has done, and perhaps Augie knows better now, but it may be too late for Augie.
Christian Brando is the role of a lifetime for John. It’s a blessing and a curse, though, because while it is everything he ever wanted as an actor, it makes everything else pale in comparison. This might have been the most emotionally charged part of the interview, for two reasons. One, it’s amazing to see John light up like a Christmas tree as he talks about feeling like a young, wide-eyed actor again. Doing Wild Son has reminded him of what he dreamed about when he first did plays at LSU and read the spicy language of Sam Shepard, Tennessee Williams, and David Mamet. Two, it’s cathartic to see the “lost man” that was Christian Brando having his story expressed. I loved the part in the interview when John recalled Champ Clark (writer of Wild Son) telling him how “flabbergasted” Christian was at the notion that anyone was interested in his story. Christian truly was a “wild son” in the most literal sense—stuck in the wilderness (but strangely at peace there too) because no one “saw” him except as Marlon’s son, and no one wanted him, except as Marlon’s son.
John is immensely proud of what he’s done with Wild Son, though he is humbled by it too. The story is so good, and so universally relatable, it speaks for itself quite apart from the actor doing the performance. He feels blessed to be able to play a role so engrossing and so rich in liberating dividends. The story of Christian Brando finds liberation, too, as it channels through John. What’s striking to me about the way John does Christian is how ageless the whole performance is. Not only does the play open with Christian being dead and speaking to us from the afterlife, it continues in the vein of the eternal. Christian has no age; John has no age. In that way, I guess, it’s not a story of coming of age. Do we really become an age, and then another age, or is it more like John said in the interview—that we just live, or we just are? Age puts a marker on the passage of time and we emphasize it because it’s noticeable by the external changes—the graying hair, for example. Yet, in the case of Christian, who, despite having parents, was scarcely parented, there remained a childish essence, a craving for love and acceptance, that John executes masterfully. Actor and character seem as one. The Wild Son in each has found his sanctuary—Christian because his story finds expression through Champ and John, and John because it’s the apotheosis of his career.
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“The Rose Tattoo.” The Baton Rouge Advocate Magazine via Newsbank. 26 April 1987. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88-2004&rft_id=info%3Asid/infoweb.newsbank.com&svc_dat=AMNEWS&req_dat=1006417D79E1C198&rft_val_format=info%3Aofi/fmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Actx&rft_dat=document_id%3Anews%252F0EB4745AD5A79B54.
Lamb, Madelyn. “Doubts making career for BR native.” The Sunday Advocate, Baton Rouge, via Newsbank. 15 March 1992. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88-2004&rft_id=info%3Asid/infoweb.newsbank.com&svc_dat=AMNEWS&req_dat=1006417D79E1C198&rft_val_format=info%3Aofi/fmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Actx&rft_dat=document_id%3Aimage%252Fv2%253A138F0D9908AC8D5F%2540EANX-14ADB848068B3043%25402448697-14ADB4B911A60035%2540126-14ADB4B911A60035%2540/hlterms%3A.
Email from John Mese, 29 March 2023.
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Ivie, Devon. “An Interview With Stranger Things’ Most Oblivious Dad.” Vulture. 27 June 2022. https://www.vulture.com/article/stranger-things-4-joe-chrest-ted-wheeler-interview.html.