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#38 Thom Sesma — Take the Next Step

My guest on this episode is an actor with purpose, Thom Sesma.

With a stage and screen career that spans four decades, Thom’s experience has afforded him insight and wisdom that he shares generously in this conversation. Proud of his Basque-American and Japanese heritage, Thom is a passionate advocate for diversity and inclusion in every field of his profession.

 

He made his Broadway debut in the original production of La Cage Aux Folles and since then Thom has managed to spend most of his life in rehearsal studios, on stages large and small, and in front of cameras on tv and film sets around the United States. His work has ranged from classical theatre to splashy musical comedies, from police procedurals and hospital dramas to soap operas and sitcoms.

There’s an old idiom that says “Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes.” In Thom’s case, you should understand that just one mile in his shoes is nothing. He and his wife Penny have travelled the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, the 500 mile journey across Northern Spain…twice. I was grateful to learn some of what he discovered along the way.

Find and follow Thom online:
website | instagram

Links and show notes from this episode:

SHOW TRANSCRIPT:

 

Matthew Carey

Hi Thom, and Welcome to Studio time.

 

Thom Sesma

Hello, Matt. It's very, very nice to meet you and nice to be here.

 

Matthew Carey

Thom, I have been introduced to you by our mutual friend, Timothy Huang. He pointed me towards your website, and that's kind of where I know you from so far. So I'm looking forward to getting to know you better and getting more of a 360 degree perspective. Something you've mentioned there is that you're a New Yorker who is an actor. But for a bit of context, you weren't born in New York. Can you tell me a little bit about your earliest days?

 

Thom Sesma

I was born in Japan actually. I was born in Sasebo. Japan, my father was in the US Navy and my mother was a Japanese national. They met and I presume they fell in love because they got married. I was born not long after. Soon after that, we moved to the States. My father was stationed in the States and I grew up predominantly in Southern California. He was a career Navy man, but most of his duty stations were in the Pacific so he managed to settle us down.

 

San Diego is a lovely place to grow up. It's a little slice of paradise. It had a really nice, something I didn't appreciate until I was much older, a really vibrant cultural scene. There was lots of theater, there's lots of music. There were just beautiful museums. I was introduced to the artistic side of the American culture very, very early on. I just stayed with it. The rest is sort of history.

 

Matthew Carey

Literally.

 

Thom Sesma

Yeah. Literally, after college, I moved to Los Angeles and then to New York and I seem to have been working ever since.

 

Matthew Carey

Which is remarkable.

 

Thom Sesma

I've been very, very blessed.

 

Matthew Carey

Tell me growing up in San Diego as an Asian American, did you see people around you that looked similar and had a similar cultural background?

 

Thom Sesma

Yeah, I did. If they say the United States is a melting pot, I think the mold is somewhere in Southern California, because there was so many different cultures. Now, does that mean it was a tolerant place? No, not by any means. But then we're talking about the United States in the 60s and 70s. I'm not sure that it can be remotely described as woke. But there were a fair number of Japanese American nationals, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and of course whites. It was a hodgepodge. But having said that, I would also say that I lived in a predominantly white neighborhood, but I never experienced any... except for very, very rare moments when a playmate would lose his temper and say something off color. As we all do. We don't know what's appropriate when we're 10, 11, 12... up to our mid teens, we say something inappropriate and completely unacceptable. But I don't think it was meant with any real sincere kind of prejudice. Although as I understand in other places, it was very, very prevalent. Probably not as angry as it is now.

 

I have to confess I found San Diego and I still find it a very, very odd place. It's a little slice of heaven, you couldn't ask for more perfect weather year round. It's like a little paradise. But it's a very schizophrenic sort of town. People live like they're very, very progressive and very, very liberal, yet they vote very conservatively. Whenever I visit, I'm always struck by how angry a town it is. I don't understand that, but if I were to analyze it in any serious way, I'd say people are angry there because they think life should just be easier. It's so beautiful, and they can't quite understand why it's not easier.

 

Matthew Carey

That's probably not a way of thinking that is unique to San Diego at the moment, but that's a really interesting observation. I understand that when you went to college you studied Modern European Intellectual History.

 

Thom Sesma

Yes, I did. I was influenced by a number of professors that I had when I was a freshman and sophomore in college. That was their field. Growing up, when I wasn't doing plays, I always had my nose buried in a book, either was pulp fiction, or it was some sort of serious history. So I was always inclined towards that. But I never really realized there was this thing called intellectual history, the history of ideas, if you will. I found that modern European history, which started around the 1890s, was such a watershed moment in the arc of Western civilization and I was fascinated by it.

 

Matthew Carey

With your dad being in the Navy, was he away a lot with his work?

 

Thom Sesma

He was when I was growing up. He served, I think, three different long tours of duty overseas. He was not stationed overseas once we move back to the States, but he did have sea duty. He served two tours of duty in Vietnam, or off the coast of Vietnam, I should say, on warships. Then he was stationed in Long Beach for a while, and I think up in the Bay Area up in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

We had an interesting situation in our family. My younger brother was disabled and the Navy did whatever they could, in this case to keep our family on the west coast. I think that's predominantly why my dad was serving in Pacific duty for the bulk of his career. We were able to settle down there.

 

Matthew Carey

The fact that you didn't have to pick up and move the whole family right around the country or around the world is significant, isn't it?

 

Thom Sesma

Yeah. I'm sort of an anomaly in the military family landscape, because we were able to stay pretty much in one place. It was great. But looking back at it now, as an adult, I sort of missed out on a lot of traveling that other friends of mine who were raised in military families got to take advantage of. Still, one can't complain about being raised in San Diego.

 

Matthew Carey

In what ways, Thom, have you continued to be a historian?

 

Thom Sesma

Oh, I think history influences my work all the time. You develop certain ways of reading things, certain ways of analyzing material that's put in front of you, as an academic, as an historian, looking for the roots of problems, of situations, of circumstances. I think I bring that to my text analysis as an actor. I think I bring it to not just my text analysis, but my actual work on my feet. Always looking for the core of a character, sometimes the core of a beat in a three hour play. It's just something that has become instinctual for me and I derive a great deal of pleasure out of it.

 

This is not stuff that I share with anyone in the course of working on a play. When I direct plays, because I used to direct quite a bit, I found that I did that very often. But at the same time, I have to say that I try not to intellectualize too much, I try not to form any preconceived notions of what I'm doing as a director, as an actor, or as a writer. Because I don't want to inform the play, I want to play to inform me. I want the play to remain an active idea in my creativity on a daily basis. I find that sometimes, you can't do that if you come up too prepared. If you walk into a room and you say this is the idea that I have, this is what the play is going to be, you're just going to run into a dead end, after dead end, after dead end. I would rather find out how I feel about a play, what I think about a play, as I'm doing it.

 

Matthew Carey

Significant eras in history didn't happen all at once did they? They happened day by day.

 

Thom Sesma

Yes. And that's the important thing you always have to remember. It's just one day at a time, one step at a time.

 

Matthew Carey

The way we train ourselves to think does tend to show up throughout our lives. I've been reading some of the writings of Neil deGrasse Tyson recently, and he's very clearly a scientist, and he's got a scientific way of thinking about everything. If you were trained as an engineer, then I think you would have a different way of looking at things. I was trained as a musician, and I think that perhaps I see things from a different perspective. Again, you're trained as a historian, and obviously that's really important when you're looking at history, but you perhaps approach other things and other areas of your life from a historian's perspective. Thom, I've heard you talk about the long arc of history - how do you think about the pandemic of 2020 when you consider it through the lens of a historian?

 

Thom Sesma

It's so funny you asked, because earlier today I was thinking about the arc of history, the long game if you will. I don't know if I'm qualified to answer that, except in a very, very personal way. I believe that it's a critical game changer. I'm not going to say it was necessary, but I think that history was heading for a cataclysm like this because the world has seen so incredibly out of balance these past few years.

 

There's a lot of talk, particularly today in the United States, about when the nation can open up again. When we can get back to business. When we can resume our lives the way we were living them 60 days ago. When in fact, I don't believe we can, because the way we were living our lives was untenable. It was not sustainable. Look at the condition of the world right now. The skies are clear. There are dolphins romping in the canals of Venice. Seismologists have said they have a better sense of when and where earthquakes might happen because they can feel and hear the earth shifting the plates shifting better than they have been able to hear them for as long as they've been studying them - because there's so much less sound. It's almost as if the universe is folded in on itself and is saying, this is where you start again. Not again, but this is where you start over.

 

I think that shifts like this happen a handful of times during history. When did they happen? They happened before what we would call Great Ages in history. They happened before the Revolutionary Period. They happened before the Industrial Revolution. They happened before the Reformation. They happened before World War One. These are cataclysmic events where nothing was the same afterwards. Everything was different. There was a new consciousness, there was a new way of thinking, if you will. There was a new step in the evolution of the human spirit. How we viewed the world, how we viewed each other was somehow different.

 

We're supposed to learn from this experience. We're not supposed to go back to what we had before. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if there are enough people in power who are willing to learn from that experience. I think they're still living in a mythology of how great life was before all of this happened. When in fact, that's just nostalgia and nostalgia is nothing more than wishful thinking.

 

Matthew Carey

You certainly speak a truth and it makes me delve into something that I heard you speak about. You said that "artists reveal the heartbeat of the community." I wanted to ask, what do you think makes artists different to other members of the community?

 

Thom Sesma

It's difficult to articulate what makes them different because I've always just taken it for granted. I'm not qualified to talk about any other artists. I'm not qualified to talk about artists as a group of individuals or a type of consciousness. I can only talk about myself. What makes me feel different is that as a person who became or who discovered he was an artist, I felt that in many respects, there was a culture or a normalcy where I didn't belong and I was desperate to try to find out why. Or to find out a way in and yet, I reveled in the fact that I didn't belong. It gave me different tools of observation. It gave me a different sense of response. Different reflexes. Sometimes that was a burden, sometimes it wasn't, but that manifested in creativity. It was how I could express myself. There was a sensitivity of vulnerability about it, there was a defensiveness and there was an assertiveness in it all that at the same time.

 

It's not fun to be an artist. I think in many respects, you're burdened with this. Do you know what it is? You asked a question earlier about the historian's consciousness and how it finds its way into creativity. I think in many respects, all the great historians are like great artists because they continue to dig deep. They continue to look for answers. They continue to look for the core of the question that is being asked. Even when they get to that answer, they never stop. They keep asking. They keep asking. They keep asking. Artists do very much the same thing. It's what makes our work active. It's what gives the Mona Lisa mystery. It's what gives Michelangelo's The Last Judgement another place to look another place to explore the entire time. It's what makes you want to pick up and read the same brilliant book over, and over, and over again. It's why you want to rediscover Shakespeare. The same play in so many different ways. Because it keeps it active, it informs you in a different way.

 

Great art changes as you change. It becomes something new, it becomes something you've never seen when you're 10 years older, 20 years older, or sometimes 15 minutes older. It's exciting to be on the inside of that creativity. I don't know where that comes from, other than the fact that you're on this quest to keep things active, to continually look for what's deeper inside, and how that manifests itself on the outside. There are emotional and spiritual ways that you do that. There are technical ways that you do that. But they're all tools towards discovering something multifaceted, something greater, something deeper. You can say it in any number of ways, but It's about the simplest of things. It's about finding complexity in the simplest of things, and then making all of that complexity simple enough to understand.

 

Matthew Carey

I love that. Just speaking with you for a short while I've got this sense of what you described as thinking about and living the long game. One of the first things that I discovered about you was that you have walked the Camino de Santiago, not once, but twice. Compared to your average vacation, that pilgrimage is certainly a long game. Can you tell me what took you to the Camino the first time?

 

Thom Sesma

Oh, well, I've always been fascinated by the pilgrimage phenomenon throughout history. You talk about the Hajj for Muslims. You talk about Buddhist monks who spend their entire lives as monks on a pilgrimage. And then I knew vaguely about the three great Christian pilgrimage routes in history, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the pilgrimage to Rome and pilgrimage to this place called Santiago de Compostela, which I knew the least about. I didn't really understand what a pilgrim was. I thought a pilgrim was a monk, a religious person. Now, mind you, I'm a religious guy, I'm Catholic. I'm a practising Catholic. I would describe myself as fairly devout, but I'm just a guy, right? I live in New York. I'm an actor. This is what I do.

 

Then I saw a movie that came out I think it was 2010 called The Way with Martin Sheen. It was about a man who walks the Camino de Santiago in order to solve the mystery of his troubled relationship with his deceased son. It's a beautiful, sentimental film. It's kind of a terrible movie, but it works. It's so moving. That movie made me realize that a pilgrim is just an average everyday person who is walking with a purpose. Walking for a purpose. That purpose is simply to find out why he's walking. It had a very immediate impact on me in a deep spiritual sense and kind of a sentimental, emotional sense as well. I was living in Las Vegas at the time, doing a production of The Lion King, and the woman who eventually became my wife was living in New York. I called her up and I said, "You have to go see this movie. It's really wonderful." She went - because at that time, she would do anything I asked her to do - and she called me from the lobby of the cinema as soon as the screening was over. She was in tears and she said "We're doing this." We immediately started making plans. It took us several years but we finally went in 2016.

 

Why did we go? That's a harder question to answer because I don't think we really knew. We knew that we had to go, both of us, for our own reasons. Eventually, reasons presented themselves in a more immediate way. We both needed resets in our lives. All those years later (that would have been six years later) we both needed professional resets in our lives, and we had the opportunity to go. So we did our research. We bought our plane tickets to Spain, and we started walking. We walked every day for 35 days. I think we walked an average of 17 to 20 miles every day, just putting one foot in front of the other. Eventually we found out while we were walking,

 

Matthew Carey

I discovered the Camino through an interview I heard with the author Kamil Ravikant, who wrote a book called Rebirth.

 

Thom Sesma

I've read it!

 

Matthew Carey

I just fell in love with the idea, similar to the way in which you did. I only recently read the book and it made me want to go even more. In fact, I was scheduled to have some time off in the middle of this year, and I was thinking about going then, but of course, my plans changed. One of the things that I wondered about is, what it was like to go as a couple? In a relationship your journey is always two people walking paths next to each other, you're not always exactly on the same path at all times. What was that trip like to share together?

 

Thom Sesma

It was wonderful. I loved walking with Penny, I loved walking the Camino with her. Yet at the same time, we were both very much on our own pilgrimages. We were very much on our own Caminos. We would walk - both in 2016 and recently in 2019 - for miles...miles...hours, without exchanging a word. It's almost like the Camino landscape swallows you up. You're just a part of a very singular experience. It reduces everything to essentials. The way you move forward - it's what is essential. It's the next step you take. I think that that's an experience that everybody has, when they walk the community. They realize that regardless of who they're with, or what they've done in their entire lives - good/bad, success/failure, rich/poor, right/wrong. Whatever you've done. All you have achieved is the right or the ability or the responsibility to take the next step. Physically, to take the next step. That's all everything in your life has ever amounted to. The question is "Where are you going to take that step?"

 

Wherever you take that next step, I will tell you is forward, whatever direction you're going. I know it sounds so simple. It's a huge lesson to learn. It's a very humbling lesson to learn as well. We both experienced that separately in our own ways. It was exciting to be with someone and share that when that happened, but it was her experience. It was the same and yet it was completely different from mine because it was hers. Also, I have to say, walking with your spouse, it reduces things. It's sort of like marriage concentrated on a daily basis. There are days when it was really not pleasant to be with someone and you wanted to be alone. But that would last for 15 minutes. But oh my gosh, those 15 minutes were everything that you didn't want in a relationship. Yet, it was everything that has to be in a relationship in order for a relationship to be full. That's something else you learn on the Camino. But it's all part of one thing.

 

Matthew Carey

Were you this philosophical before your first Camino?

 

Thom Sesma

I think I probably was. That's what I was saying earlier about the artist, and his place in society. That's what makes us different. I think we're a little more sensitive. I think we're a little more available to these feelings, to these sensibilities. I think we just don't have the opportunity to articulate or not necessarily the desire to articulate these things verbally. We articulate them in different ways. through creativity. Through dance, through song, through sculpture, through writing. Through metaphor, if you will. But I think I always had a tendency to be that way.

 

I'm a little surprised that I've had so many opportunities to talk about it at this period of my life, because I find that the older I get, the more satisfied I am with not having to articulate deep things. Not struggling so hard to feel the need to be taken seriously. I still want to be taken seriously, of course, but now it's not... I remember in my salad days, I was desperate to be taken seriously. It's all very result oriented, which again, is something I learned on the Camino. Life isn't about results.

 

Actors always talk about this. Creative people always talk about "It's process. It's the journey that's important." It's the creation of something, not the created thing that's important. But I have to be completely honest, I don't think I ever really fully understood what that meant until after I came back from the Camino, when all I was doing was walking every day.

 

It was eye opening, and I found that out when I started rehearsing my next play. After I got back in the Fall of 2016, we were on our feet in rehearsal. We had just done three or four days of table work, and we put our scripts aside, we started working on our feet, blocking. I realized that I was working in an entirely different way. For some reason I was much more available to what the other actors were doing, to what the director was saying, to what the text had told me in my reading of it. To what the fight choreographer was doing, to what the designers had planned.

 

Of course, I thought I was doing all of these things earlier in my career, earlier in my life as an actor. But I don't really think I got what that meant until after I came back, or at least I wasn't aware of it. It was eye opening and it was extremely liberating to realize that I was actually doing the thing that I always talked about which is being in the moment. Now I knew what that meant and it was exciting. I have to say that it has made every single rehearsal process equally exciting since then.

 

Matthew Carey

That's really exciting to hear. I've thought that the Camino must strip you eventually of the identity that we tend to hold so dear to when we're home and when we're at work. I get the impression from what I've read and how I imagine it that whether you're a singer or a surgeon, a banker or a builder, once you're on the trail, you become a pilgrim like everybody else.

 

Thom Sesma

That's it.

 

Matthew Carey

The 500 mile journey isn't just an external one, but it's a physical manifestation of it. You go through this process of what do you need to discover in order to traverse that sort of distance externally and also internally. It's something that I still really want to do and the more you talk about it, the more I want to go.

 

Thom Sesma

Oh yes, Matt, I can't encourage you enough to find that time and to go. Find a time to do the entire thing. Five to seven weeks, so you don't have to break it up. It's incredible. What do you find? What do you ultimately come face to face with? I think, in a theological sense, what you come face to face with is your own oblivion. Your ego is just gone. You are just this thing, this presence that walks. That walks. That walks, and eventually you will find out why you're walking.

 

The most extraordinary way of discovering yourself is by losing yourself completely. These are things that we talk about in a self actualizing society. We're the generation of self think, right? But it's really amazing to put yourself in this position on a daily basis where you can do nothing else, but the thing that you are doing and you become that thing.

 

Martin Sheen, in an interview, was talking about the greatest book he ever read, which is Dostoevsky's 'Brothers Karamazov'. He said, everyone should read 'Brothers Karamazov', but they shouldn't read it until they're ready to have their lives changed. I would say the same thing about the Camino. Everybody should walk the Camino de Santiago, but you should not do it unless you're ready to have your life changed. Because it will change you.

 

Matthew Carey

That's a powerful recommendation and admonition roll up in one I think. Can I ask you a couple of logistical questions?

 

Thom Sesma

Sure.

 

Matthew Carey

I'm not asking for a spoiler alert. Having been twice now - what have you learned about what you need to do to prepare? Do you find that you take more stuff than what you need? Or do you do realize that you should have packed better before you left on the pilgrimage?

 

Thom Sesma

You know, it's so easy to do research about how to prepare to walk the Camino. Penny and I spent hours if not weeks or months watching YouTube videos on how to pack. As a matter of fact, there was this one pilgrim who specialized in different videos about how she packs. She has gone on many Caminos. The important thing is that you don't take more than 10% of your body weight. Just think about that for a minute. Think about your body weight. Think about what 10% of that is, and then start weighing everything that goes into your bag. If it's too heavy, get rid of it. For instance, get a lighter sleeping bag. Don't take a canteen. Take a little plastic bladder with you. Make sure that you've got the minimum amount of medical gear in your first aid kit. Take only one change of clothes. Do not take jeans, no denim. Go to a really good outdoor activity shop for your equipment. Tell them what you're doing. Rely on advice. Lightweight clothing: take one change of clothes that will dry quickly because you're going to be washing them by hand every day. It's little things like that. It's books about the Camino. Folklore myths. Those kinds of books are very, very helpful. Read different guidebooks. I think the most popular guide book for English speakers is the John Brierley books, which you can find online very easily.

 

The most important thing to do in preparation is to start getting rid of your expectations that you know what this is going to be. As I said, letting go of result. A lot of people now have an expectation that this is a deeply spiritual experience or a deeply mystical experience. You have to get rid of that right away. Because the minute you start thinking that that's what it is, I guarantee it's not going to happen. I'm not going to say that it would happen anyway. It's just that you need to understand that that will come to you if it's supposed to come to you. When you start looking for it, oftentimes, you won't realize that it's already happened. But that's a whole other category of conversation. What we're really talking about is preparation. Should you train? Should you try to walk 10 miles a day? The most important bit of training is walk enough to break in your shoes. That would be the thing that I'd recommend most of all,

 

Matthew Carey

I understand that you're going to learn in a sense. Let go of the results. You're going to learn and the whole idea is that there's only so much preparation you can do in advance. And then you just have to show up. Yeah, and live it day to day, right?

 

Thom Sesma

Yeah. You know, one thing I would also say to you and I would say to anyone else is interested in going on the Camino. It's a beautiful and moving experience. It's not what I would call a really exciting experience. There's a lot of really, really mundane things about it. For the most part, every day is inconvenient in some way. Whether it's staying in hostels that aren't as nice as you want. Whether it's having to eat the same Pilgrim menu over and over and over again, in different places. To not have really great water pressure on a nightly basis for a shower. It's having to do your laundry by hand. I mean, this is all part of it. It's not a glamorous trip, and it's not really roughing it.

 

There's an entire infrastructure there because people have been walking the Camino for 1000 years. So sometimes you'll be walking on a paved road. Sometimes you'll be walking on an old Roman road, and I'm serious - an old Roman road that the Legionnaires built. Sometimes you'll be walking through farm country. In the middle of vineyards. Sometimes you'll be walking on a rocky mountain trail. But along the way there are cafes, there are inns and hostels where you'll stay. You're never really camping out. There might be days when you think, "Well, why isn't this a little more fancy?" Or "Why aren't we roughing it a little bit more?" It's someplace in the middle. And I think that that happens by design. I don't know who designed it, but I think it happens for a reason. I think that's the thing that sort of keeps you thinking and yet not thinking about this journey that you're on. It's neither posh, nor is it really, really arduous. It's somewhere in the middle.

 

Matthew Carey

That's gonna be a metaphor for something though, right?

 

Thom Sesma

it really is. It really is.

 

Matthew Carey

I'm inclined to ask you, given that you're adjusting my expectations a little bit. Having done it the first time, what inspired you and Penny to go back and walk the Camino a second time in 2019?

 

Thom Sesma

Because we were ready to walk the Camino a second time the minute we stopped the first time.

 

Matthew Carey

Was there more you had to learn?

 

Thom Sesma

No. Yes. And no. I mean, there's always more that we have to learn. We just have to be available to that idea that there's always more that we have to learn. But mostly, I'd say it was something that you will find when you do it. And I'm saying when you do it, not if you do it. When you do it, you'll find a lot of pilgrims will say this over and over again, almost ad nauseum. "I don't want to stop walking." "I don't want to stop walking." "What do I do now? I don't want to stop walking." "Oh, we're going to arrive in Santiago de Compostela tomorrow. What will we do after that?" Because walking every day has It's become a way of life for you. It's not just what you're doing on vacation, it actually becomes a way of life for you. So pilgrims say over and over again, "How do you keep walking?" "How do you keep walking?" And then pilgrims say in response over and over and over again, "You take the Camino with you." It's a metaphor. Walking becomes a metaphor. And yet it's still an activity that you do every day. I guess it's manifesting that metaphor.

 

Matthew Carey

It strikes me that you've been on a four decade long pilgrimage anyway. You've been an actor in New York for four decades. I know you've described that it's not only by chance that there's certainly been hard work, passion, commitment, persistence, and low rent helping you to do that. Maybe you've started talking about it in terms of the pilgrimage already, but tell me about the choices you've made over the years to sustain yourself in a profession that's not known as being particularly lucrative, while living in a city that's not known for being particularly affordable.

 

Thom Sesma

I think you just move forward. You just keep walking. Persistence. One of the things that I tell young actors, I tell my students this all the time, and it's in my bio on my website. "I'm not an actor who lives in New York. I'm in New Yorker who's an actor." I moved to New York to be a New Yorker. And yes, I wanted to act. Of course. That's what my metier was, acting. But very early on, when I moved from Southern California I became acclimated to the city right away. Nothing could tear New York out of my soul. I loved everything about it. I think that is the thing that made it possible for me to tolerate, and even love the hardship of being an actor in New York. Because I had a life in New York. I was developing a life in New York.

 

One of the things that was so exciting about my life in New York was that in the first 12 months that I lived here, I moved five times in the first two years. I moved eight times before I found my own apartment. I lived in a railroad flat with a bathtub in the kitchen. It could have been hellacious for me. Instead, it was exciting. It was part of this bohemian life that I had wanted to live since I was a little boy. I don't know, maybe I was rebelling. Maybe I had romanticized New York completely out of proportion, but it made everything okay. And I have to say that that was a huge step in keeping me on beam, keeping me moving forward.

 

I learned early on... and I made a lot of mistakes. Trust me, I've made an enormous number of mistakes. I burned a lot of bridges. I think that there's a small number of people who I may have offended early in my career who still will not work with me based on that. I'm not saying that says anything about them, because I take full responsibility for my actions back then. But I've also found out that this is a business filled with a million second chances. It's very forgiving, and I think in general, people are as forgiving as you can be, or will be, as you're moving along in life. That's another thing that has enabled me to get through.

 

In a practical sense? Yes, I lived in an apartment with very, very low rent that got me through a lot of things. I took a lot of jobs that I didn't necessarily want to do. I'm talking about acting jobs that I didn't necessarily want to do. But they all served me well. They all made me a better actor. And really, really wonderful jobs, well paying jobs came up when I needed them. It was always about being present, and being there. Being willing to learn from every single experience. I'd say the worst experiences in my life were always experiences where I thought I knew more than anyone else in the room. But one of the things I do like to say is, actors are funny. Every single actor believes he's the smartest person in the room, when in fact, the person who really believes he's the smartest person in the room, who is really convinced that he or she has nothing else to learn from this experience, is probably the least smart person in any room. So you just keep reminding yourself that all you can do is learn and learn and learn and make mistakes and pick yourself up and learn. And that will pretty much get you through anything.

 

Matthew Carey

I think the idea about the person that thinks that the smartest in the room probably has the most to learn at that moment, is not unique to actors, either,

 

Thom Sesma

You're probably right, yeah. We're seeing that in action right now. But then again, I have to amend that a little bit. You know, I've worked with Stephen Sondheim a couple times and Stephen Sondheim actually is the smartest person in the room. And I think he knows it.

 

Matthew Carey

There's so many things that I want to speak to you about and learn about from you, but we're not going to have time to do all that today. One of the things that struck me from looking at your list of credits is that not only have you had a rich career in the theater, but you've had a number of appearances on television shows. I'm curious how the contrast in the rhythm works for you. When I think about a theater show, in general, it's a matter of weeks or months that you're working on a project. Whereas from what I understand, if you're a guest on a TV show, it's maybe a week worth of work. You're there for a day or a few days. How do you find that contrast in rhythm?

 

Thom Sesma

Oh, it's hard. It's hard, but it's just something that you accept. It's a different skill set.That's a really, really different skill set. You're the same actor, but you just learn different techniques. You're smaller, you're more present or you're less present. You don't get rehearsal time in television. You can be enormously self indulgent when you're rehearsing a play. You don't necessarily want to be but you can, you can be. You don't have the remotest luxury of being self indulgent, you're just one component, even if you're a guest star, a guest lead on a television show. The money's good, the money is much better. But it's harder. It's harder and people don't understand. I say this in the most loving way. Frankly, they don't care about your process. They don't have time.

 

But I had the great good fortune a few years ago of working with someone I knew early in my career, early in both of our careers, who went on to become quite well known in television and film. I did a television show with him and he was watching the way I was working. He kept pulling me aside in a very friendly way and he would give me advice, tell me how to do things. He wasn't redirecting my scene, but he saw that I was struggling with my place on the set, and this pivotal thing that I had to do. One of the things he kept saying, it's sort of a joke, because you hear actors in television and film joke about this a lot. They say, "Don't worry about it so much, they'll fix it in post." That's exactly what he said to me. But he also intimated to me why. Because I was making everything so much more important than it needed to be. I just had to remind myself that I was one component. That every single thing that I was doing was a rehearsal and I wasn't in charge of my performance. It was just one component and once we were off the set, once it was in the can, everyone was going to work to make my performance better after I was gone. And they did. I was very proud of my work in that. But on the set that day, if someone had asked me "How you doing? How's your work?" I would have said, "It's terrible. I don't know why anyone asked me to be an actor." It was necessary for me to lose myself in order to allow someone else to do their job, which allowed me to do my job.

 

Matthew Carey

There's something in the idea that while you're there, it's all just a rehearsal that's being captured and somebody else will take it and craft it into what they need it to be. But our process as artists, and as humans, is all just a series of rehearsals as well, right. Even if we're in a show - we work things out, we practice them so that we can do them in a similar fashion each night. But as well as you hone your performance, it's a bit different, you're bringing different energy, you're responding to a different energy from night to night. The show that the people in the audience that night see is a snapshot of where you were at that particular point in time. I guess, when it's on film, it feels like it's captured for more posterity. But really, in most cases, somebody is only going to watch it once. They're going to see where you were at that point in time [then through the filter of the people that make the decisions after you go home.]

 

Thom Sesma

Right. You know, last summer I worked with Uma Thurman on really extraordinary production of Ibsen's Ghosts, and we had just started to work on the play. she was doing the scene and the director Carey Perloff, wonderful director, said "Oh, I really love what you're doing there." And Uma, her eyes got big and she just held her hand out. She said, "Please never tell me that. Never tell me that." We were all sort of shocked because she was just so insistent about it. She said, "I am a creature of film. If you tell me I did something well, I will do it different the next time. That's what we do in film."

 

It's interesting because in the theater, you don't do that. You do something, the director says, "That's a really great, let's have a little more of that." And that's the direction you go in. But it's true, what my friend told me early on. Every take being rehearsal is absolutely true. What that does is it frees you up to be full for that one moment that they're going to try to capture on film. You can have any number of different wonderful moments that are equally valuable, but they're still yours. They're still choices that you're making, in that moment of reality, but they're different. And that's what Uma meant that day. She said, "Don't tell me I'm good, because I will do it different. Instinctually I will have to do it differently."

 

Matthew Carey

That's a great indicator of how they're slightly different crafts.

 

Thom Sesma

Completely different.

 

Matthew Carey

I read or heard you say that "The theater is a place where you can present your vision of how the world could or should be." So, Thom, as we start to wrap up, I wonder - what does your vision of the world look like at the moment?

 

Thom Sesma

As Martin Luther King said, and as our dear former President Obama repeated over, and over, and over again, "The arc of history is long, but it ends in justice." My vision of the world right now is, of course, influenced by the pandemic. And the fact that I'm more inspired and reassured by the humanity of my fellow human beings. At the same time, more heartbroken and more disappointed about the depths to which some of my fellow human beings have willingly fallen or thrown themselves into, in order to score some political points. I could say it's bleak.

 

But I guess if I'm being pressed to genuinely answer that, I think I'm more optimistic. I think I'm more optimistic than I realize, because I think things will change. You know, I spoke earlier about this being a watershed moment in our culture. I think it's a watershed moment in our civilization. How it will change. I have no idea, but I know that we keep walking forward one step at a time, we'll discover where the values are and where they're not. We'll be able to shed those things off. Some will cling on but for the most part, when you are losing thousands of people all around the world every day... Do you know in New York, a person dies every two minutes of Coronavirus? When that happens, how can you not change? How can you not see the world in a different way? So I look forward to seeing what happens. With a degree of trepidation, of course. But I think I'm realizing that we're better than we are.

 

Matthew Carey

Thank you for your ability and your willingness to look at the past to see what we can learn from that. From your willingness to look within to see what you can learn there. And thank you for sharing your hope and your optimism for the future. This has been a really powerful conversation for me, Thom, and I hope we can do it again sometime soon.

 

Matthew Carey

Well, I hope so too, Matt. It's been an absolute pleasure.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT:

Matthew Carey

Hi Thom, and Welcome to Studio time.

Thom Sesma

Hello, Matt. It's very, very nice to meet you and nice to be here.

Matthew Carey

Thom, I have been introduced to you by our mutual friend, Timothy Huang. He pointed me towards your website, and that's kind of where I know you from so far. So I'm looking forward to getting to know you better and getting more of a 360 degree perspective. Something you've mentioned there is that you're a New Yorker who is an actor. But for a bit of context, you weren't born in New York. Can you tell me a little bit about your earliest days?

Thom Sesma

I was born in Japan actually. I was born in Sasebo. Japan, my father was in the US Navy and my mother was a Japanese national. They met and I presume they fell in love because they got married. I was born not long after. Soon after that, we moved to the States. My father was stationed in the States and I grew up predominantly in Southern California. He was a career Navy man, but most of his duty stations were in the Pacific so he managed to settle us down.

San Diego is a lovely place to grow up. It's a little slice of paradise. It had a really nice, something I didn't appreciate until I was much older, a really vibrant cultural scene. There was lots of theater, there's lots of music. There were just beautiful museums. I was introduced to the artistic side of the American culture very, very early on. I just stayed with it. The rest is sort of history.

Matthew Carey

Literally.

Thom Sesma

Yeah. Literally, after college, I moved to Los Angeles and then to New York and I seem to have been working ever since.

Matthew Carey

Which is remarkable.

Thom Sesma

I've been very, very blessed.

Matthew Carey

Tell me growing up in San Diego as an Asian American, did you see people around you that looked similar and had a similar cultural background?

Thom Sesma

Yeah, I did. If they say the United States is a melting pot, I think the mold is somewhere in Southern California, because there was so many different cultures. Now, does that mean it was a tolerant place? No, not by any means. But then we're talking about the United States in the 60s and 70s. I'm not sure that it can be remotely described as woke. But there were a fair number of Japanese American nationals, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and of course whites. It was a hodgepodge. But having said that, I would also say that I lived in a predominantly white neighborhood, but I never experienced any... except for very, very rare moments when a playmate would lose his temper and say something off color. As we all do. We don't know what's appropriate when we're 10, 11, 12... up to our mid teens, we say something inappropriate and completely unacceptable. But I don't think it was meant with any real sincere kind of prejudice. Although as I understand in other places, it was very, very prevalent. Probably not as angry as it is now.

I have to confess I found San Diego and I still find it a very, very odd place. It's a little slice of heaven, you couldn't ask for more perfect weather year round. It's like a little paradise. But it's a very schizophrenic sort of town. People live like they're very, very progressive and very, very liberal, yet they vote very conservatively. Whenever I visit, I'm always struck by how angry a town it is. I don't understand that, but if I were to analyze it in any serious way, I'd say people are angry there because they think life should just be easier. It's so beautiful, and they can't quite understand why it's not easier.

Matthew Carey

That's probably not a way of thinking that is unique to San Diego at the moment, but that's a really interesting observation. I understand that when you went to college you studied Modern European Intellectual History.

Thom Sesma

Yes, I did. I was influenced by a number of professors that I had when I was a freshman and sophomore in college. That was their field. Growing up, when I wasn't doing plays, I always had my nose buried in a book, either was pulp fiction, or it was some sort of serious history. So I was always inclined towards that. But I never really realized there was this thing called intellectual history, the history of ideas, if you will. I found that modern European history, which started around the 1890s, was such a watershed moment in the arc of Western civilization and I was fascinated by it.

Matthew Carey

With your dad being in the Navy, was he away a lot with his work?

Thom Sesma

He was when I was growing up. He served, I think, three different long tours of duty overseas. He was not stationed overseas once we move back to the States, but he did have sea duty. He served two tours of duty in Vietnam, or off the coast of Vietnam, I should say, on warships. Then he was stationed in Long Beach for a while, and I think up in the Bay Area up in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We had an interesting situation in our family. My younger brother was disabled and the Navy did whatever they could, in this case to keep our family on the west coast. I think that's predominantly why my dad was serving in Pacific duty for the bulk of his career. We were able to settle down there.

Matthew Carey

The fact that you didn't have to pick up and move the whole family right around the country or around the world is significant, isn't it?

Thom Sesma

Yeah. I'm sort of an anomaly in the military family landscape, because we were able to stay pretty much in one place. It was great. But looking back at it now, as an adult, I sort of missed out on a lot of traveling that other friends of mine who were raised in military families got to take advantage of. Still, one can't complain about being raised in San Diego.

Matthew Carey

In what ways, Thom, have you continued to be a historian?

Thom Sesma

Oh, I think history influences my work all the time. You develop certain ways of reading things, certain ways of analyzing material that's put in front of you, as an academic, as an historian, looking for the roots of problems, of situations, of circumstances. I think I bring that to my text analysis as an actor. I think I bring it to not just my text analysis, but my actual work on my feet. Always looking for the core of a character, sometimes the core of a beat in a three hour play. It's just something that has become instinctual for me and I derive a great deal of pleasure out of it.

This is not stuff that I share with anyone in the course of working on a play. When I direct plays, because I used to direct quite a bit, I found that I did that very often. But at the same time, I have to say that I try not to intellectualize too much, I try not to form any preconceived notions of what I'm doing as a director, as an actor, or as a writer. Because I don't want to inform the play, I want to play to inform me. I want the play to remain an active idea in my creativity on a daily basis. I find that sometimes, you can't do that if you come up too prepared. If you walk into a room and you say this is the idea that I have, this is what the play is going to be, you're just going to run into a dead end, after dead end, after dead end. I would rather find out how I feel about a play, what I think about a play, as I'm doing it.

Matthew Carey

Significant eras in history didn't happen all at once did they? They happened day by day.

Thom Sesma

Yes. And that's the important thing you always have to remember. It's just one day at a time, one step at a time.

Matthew Carey

The way we train ourselves to think does tend to show up throughout our lives. I've been reading some of the writings of Neil deGrasse Tyson recently, and he's very clearly a scientist, and he's got a scientific way of thinking about everything. If you were trained as an engineer, then I think you would have a different way of looking at things. I was trained as a musician, and I think that perhaps I see things from a different perspective. Again, you're trained as a historian, and obviously that's really important when you're looking at history, but you perhaps approach other things and other areas of your life from a historian's perspective. Thom, I've heard you talk about the long arc of history - how do you think about the pandemic of 2020 when you consider it through the lens of a historian?

Thom Sesma

It's so funny you asked, because earlier today I was thinking about the arc of history, the long game if you will. I don't know if I'm qualified to answer that, except in a very, very personal way. I believe that it's a critical game changer. I'm not going to say it was necessary, but I think that history was heading for a cataclysm like this because the world has seen so incredibly out of balance these past few years.

There's a lot of talk, particularly today in the United States, about when the nation can open up again. When we can get back to business. When we can resume our lives the way we were living them 60 days ago. When in fact, I don't believe we can, because the way we were living our lives was untenable. It was not sustainable. Look at the condition of the world right now. The skies are clear. There are dolphins romping in the canals of Venice. Seismologists have said they have a better sense of when and where earthquakes might happen because they can feel and hear the earth shifting the plates shifting better than they have been able to hear them for as long as they've been studying them - because there's so much less sound. It's almost as if the universe is folded in on itself and is saying, this is where you start again. Not again, but this is where you start over.

I think that shifts like this happen a handful of times during history. When did they happen? They happened before what we would call Great Ages in history. They happened before the Revolutionary Period. They happened before the Industrial Revolution. They happened before the Reformation. They happened before World War One. These are cataclysmic events where nothing was the same afterwards. Everything was different. There was a new consciousness, there was a new way of thinking, if you will. There was a new step in the evolution of the human spirit. How we viewed the world, how we viewed each other was somehow different.

We're supposed to learn from this experience. We're not supposed to go back to what we had before. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if there are enough people in power who are willing to learn from that experience. I think they're still living in a mythology of how great life was before all of this happened. When in fact, that's just nostalgia and nostalgia is nothing more than wishful thinking.

Matthew Carey

You certainly speak a truth and it makes me delve into something that I heard you speak about. You said that "artists reveal the heartbeat of the community." I wanted to ask, what do you think makes artists different to other members of the community?

Thom Sesma

It's difficult to articulate what makes them different because I've always just taken it for granted. I'm not qualified to talk about any other artists. I'm not qualified to talk about artists as a group of individuals or a type of consciousness. I can only talk about myself. What makes me feel different is that as a person who became or who discovered he was an artist, I felt that in many respects, there was a culture or a normalcy where I didn't belong and I was desperate to try to find out why. Or to find out a way in and yet, I reveled in the fact that I didn't belong. It gave me different tools of observation. It gave me a different sense of response. Different reflexes. Sometimes that was a burden, sometimes it wasn't, but that manifested in creativity. It was how I could express myself. There was a sensitivity of vulnerability about it, there was a defensiveness and there was an assertiveness in it all that at the same time.

It's not fun to be an artist. I think in many respects, you're burdened with this. Do you know what it is? You asked a question earlier about the historian's consciousness and how it finds its way into creativity. I think in many respects, all the great historians are like great artists because they continue to dig deep. They continue to look for answers. They continue to look for the core of the question that is being asked. Even when they get to that answer, they never stop. They keep asking. They keep asking. They keep asking. Artists do very much the same thing. It's what makes our work active. It's what gives the Mona Lisa mystery. It's what gives Michelangelo's The Last Judgement another place to look another place to explore the entire time. It's what makes you want to pick up and read the same brilliant book over, and over, and over again. It's why you want to rediscover Shakespeare. The same play in so many different ways. Because it keeps it active, it informs you in a different way.

Great art changes as you change. It becomes something new, it becomes something you've never seen when you're 10 years older, 20 years older, or sometimes 15 minutes older. It's exciting to be on the inside of that creativity. I don't know where that comes from, other than the fact that you're on this quest to keep things active, to continually look for what's deeper inside, and how that manifests itself on the outside. There are emotional and spiritual ways that you do that. There are technical ways that you do that. But they're all tools towards discovering something multifaceted, something greater, something deeper. You can say it in any number of ways, but It's about the simplest of things. It's about finding complexity in the simplest of things, and then making all of that complexity simple enough to understand.

Matthew Carey

I love that. Just speaking with you for a short while I've got this sense of what you described as thinking about and living the long game. One of the first things that I discovered about you was that you have walked the Camino de Santiago, not once, but twice. Compared to your average vacation, that pilgrimage is certainly a long game. Can you tell me what took you to the Camino the first time?

Thom Sesma

Oh, well, I've always been fascinated by the pilgrimage phenomenon throughout history. You talk about the Hajj for Muslims. You talk about Buddhist monks who spend their entire lives as monks on a pilgrimage. And then I knew vaguely about the three great Christian pilgrimage routes in history, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the pilgrimage to Rome and pilgrimage to this place called Santiago de Compostela, which I knew the least about. I didn't really understand what a pilgrim was. I thought a pilgrim was a monk, a religious person. Now, mind you, I'm a religious guy, I'm Catholic. I'm a practising Catholic. I would describe myself as fairly devout, but I'm just a guy, right? I live in New York. I'm an actor. This is what I do.

Then I saw a movie that came out I think it was 2010 called The Way with Martin Sheen. It was about a man who walks the Camino de Santiago in order to solve the mystery of his troubled relationship with his deceased son. It's a beautiful, sentimental film. It's kind of a terrible movie, but it works. It's so moving. That movie made me realize that a pilgrim is just an average everyday person who is walking with a purpose. Walking for a purpose. That purpose is simply to find out why he's walking. It had a very immediate impact on me in a deep spiritual sense and kind of a sentimental, emotional sense as well. I was living in Las Vegas at the time, doing a production of The Lion King, and the woman who eventually became my wife was living in New York. I called her up and I said, "You have to go see this movie. It's really wonderful." She went - because at that time, she would do anything I asked her to do - and she called me from the lobby of the cinema as soon as the screening was over. She was in tears and she said "We're doing this." We immediately started making plans. It took us several years but we finally went in 2016.

Why did we go? That's a harder question to answer because I don't think we really knew. We knew that we had to go, both of us, for our own reasons. Eventually, reasons presented themselves in a more immediate way. We both needed resets in our lives. All those years later (that would have been six years later) we both needed professional resets in our lives, and we had the opportunity to go. So we did our research. We bought our plane tickets to Spain, and we started walking. We walked every day for 35 days. I think we walked an average of 17 to 20 miles every day, just putting one foot in front of the other. Eventually we found out while we were walking,

Matthew Carey

I discovered the Camino through an interview I heard with the author Kamil Ravikant, who wrote a book called Rebirth.

Thom Sesma

I've read it!

Matthew Carey

I just fell in love with the idea, similar to the way in which you did. I only recently read the book and it made me want to go even more. In fact, I was scheduled to have some time off in the middle of this year, and I was thinking about going then, but of course, my plans changed. One of the things that I wondered about is, what it was like to go as a couple? In a relationship your journey is always two people walking paths next to each other, you're not always exactly on the same path at all times. What was that trip like to share together?

Thom Sesma

It was wonderful. I loved walking with Penny, I loved walking the Camino with her. Yet at the same time, we were both very much on our own pilgrimages. We were very much on our own Caminos. We would walk - both in 2016 and recently in 2019 - for miles...miles...hours, without exchanging a word. It's almost like the Camino landscape swallows you up. You're just a part of a very singular experience. It reduces everything to essentials. The way you move forward - it's what is essential. It's the next step you take. I think that that's an experience that everybody has, when they walk the community. They realize that regardless of who they're with, or what they've done in their entire lives - good/bad, success/failure, rich/poor, right/wrong. Whatever you've done. All you have achieved is the right or the ability or the responsibility to take the next step. Physically, to take the next step. That's all everything in your life has ever amounted to. The question is "Where are you going to take that step?"

Wherever you take that next step, I will tell you is forward, whatever direction you're going. I know it sounds so simple. It's a huge lesson to learn. It's a very humbling lesson to learn as well. We both experienced that separately in our own ways. It was exciting to be with someone and share that when that happened, but it was her experience. It was the same and yet it was completely different from mine because it was hers. Also, I have to say, walking with your spouse, it reduces things. It's sort of like marriage concentrated on a daily basis. There are days when it was really not pleasant to be with someone and you wanted to be alone. But that would last for 15 minutes. But oh my gosh, those 15 minutes were everything that you didn't want in a relationship. Yet, it was everything that has to be in a relationship in order for a relationship to be full. That's something else you learn on the Camino. But it's all part of one thing.

Matthew Carey

Were you this philosophical before your first Camino?

Thom Sesma

I think I probably was. That's what I was saying earlier about the artist, and his place in society. That's what makes us different. I think we're a little more sensitive. I think we're a little more available to these feelings, to these sensibilities. I think we just don't have the opportunity to articulate or not necessarily the desire to articulate these things verbally. We articulate them in different ways. through creativity. Through dance, through song, through sculpture, through writing. Through metaphor, if you will. But I think I always had a tendency to be that way.

I'm a little surprised that I've had so many opportunities to talk about it at this period of my life, because I find that the older I get, the more satisfied I am with not having to articulate deep things. Not struggling so hard to feel the need to be taken seriously. I still want to be taken seriously, of course, but now it's not... I remember in my salad days, I was desperate to be taken seriously. It's all very result oriented, which again, is something I learned on the Camino. Life isn't about results.

Actors always talk about this. Creative people always talk about "It's process. It's the journey that's important." It's the creation of something, not the created thing that's important. But I have to be completely honest, I don't think I ever really fully understood what that meant until after I came back from the Camino, when all I was doing was walking every day.

It was eye opening, and I found that out when I started rehearsing my next play. After I got back in the Fall of 2016, we were on our feet in rehearsal. We had just done three or four days of table work, and we put our scripts aside, we started working on our feet, blocking. I realized that I was working in an entirely different way. For some reason I was much more available to what the other actors were doing, to what the director was saying, to what the text had told me in my reading of it. To what the fight choreographer was doing, to what the designers had planned.

Of course, I thought I was doing all of these things earlier in my career, earlier in my life as an actor. But I don't really think I got what that meant until after I came back, or at least I wasn't aware of it. It was eye opening and it was extremely liberating to realize that I was actually doing the thing that I always talked about which is being in the moment. Now I knew what that meant and it was exciting. I have to say that it has made every single rehearsal process equally exciting since then.

Matthew Carey

That's really exciting to hear. I've thought that the Camino must strip you eventually of the identity that we tend to hold so dear to when we're home and when we're at work. I get the impression from what I've read and how I imagine it that whether you're a singer or a surgeon, a banker or a builder, once you're on the trail, you become a pilgrim like everybody else.

Thom Sesma

That's it.

Matthew Carey

The 500 mile journey isn't just an external one, but it's a physical manifestation of it. You go through this process of what do you need to discover in order to traverse that sort of distance externally and also internally. It's something that I still really want to do and the more you talk about it, the more I want to go.

Thom Sesma

Oh yes, Matt, I can't encourage you enough to find that time and to go. Find a time to do the entire thing. Five to seven weeks, so you don't have to break it up. It's incredible. What do you find? What do you ultimately come face to face with? I think, in a theological sense, what you come face to face with is your own oblivion. Your ego is just gone. You are just this thing, this presence that walks. That walks. That walks, and eventually you will find out why you're walking.

The most extraordinary way of discovering yourself is by losing yourself completely. These are things that we talk about in a self actualizing society. We're the generation of self think, right? But it's really amazing to put yourself in this position on a daily basis where you can do nothing else, but the thing that you are doing and you become that thing.

Martin Sheen, in an interview, was talking about the greatest book he ever read, which is Dostoevsky's 'Brothers Karamazov'. He said, everyone should read 'Brothers Karamazov', but they shouldn't read it until they're ready to have their lives changed. I would say the same thing about the Camino. Everybody should walk the Camino de Santiago, but you should not do it unless you're ready to have your life changed. Because it will change you.

Matthew Carey

That's a powerful recommendation and admonition roll up in one I think. Can I ask you a couple of logistical questions?

Thom Sesma

Sure.

Matthew Carey

I'm not asking for a spoiler alert. Having been twice now - what have you learned about what you need to do to prepare? Do you find that you take more stuff than what you need? Or do you do realize that you should have packed better before you left on the pilgrimage?

Thom Sesma

You know, it's so easy to do research about how to prepare to walk the Camino. Penny and I spent hours if not weeks or months watching YouTube videos on how to pack. As a matter of fact, there was this one pilgrim who specialized in different videos about how she packs. She has gone on many Caminos. The important thing is that you don't take more than 10% of your body weight. Just think about that for a minute. Think about your body weight. Think about what 10% of that is, and then start weighing everything that goes into your bag. If it's too heavy, get rid of it. For instance, get a lighter sleeping bag. Don't take a canteen. Take a little plastic bladder with you. Make sure that you've got the minimum amount of medical gear in your first aid kit. Take only one change of clothes. Do not take jeans, no denim. Go to a really good outdoor activity shop for your equipment. Tell them what you're doing. Rely on advice. Lightweight clothing: take one change of clothes that will dry quickly because you're going to be washing them by hand every day. It's little things like that. It's books about the Camino. Folklore myths. Those kinds of books are very, very helpful. Read different guidebooks. I think the most popular guide book for English speakers is the John Brierley books, which you can find online very easily.

The most important thing to do in preparation is to start getting rid of your expectations that you know what this is going to be. As I said, letting go of result. A lot of people now have an expectation that this is a deeply spiritual experience or a deeply mystical experience. You have to get rid of that right away. Because the minute you start thinking that that's what it is, I guarantee it's not going to happen. I'm not going to say that it would happen anyway. It's just that you need to understand that that will come to you if it's supposed to come to you. When you start looking for it, oftentimes, you won't realize that it's already happened. But that's a whole other category of conversation. What we're really talking about is preparation. Should you train? Should you try to walk 10 miles a day? The most important bit of training is walk enough to break in your shoes. That would be the thing that I'd recommend most of all,

Matthew Carey

I understand that you're going to learn in a sense. Let go of the results. You're going to learn and the whole idea is that there's only so much preparation you can do in advance. And then you just have to show up. Yeah, and live it day to day, right?

Thom Sesma

Yeah. You know, one thing I would also say to you and I would say to anyone else is interested in going on the Camino. It's a beautiful and moving experience. It's not what I would call a really exciting experience. There's a lot of really, really mundane things about it. For the most part, every day is inconvenient in some way. Whether it's staying in hostels that aren't as nice as you want. Whether it's having to eat the same Pilgrim menu over and over and over again, in different places. To not have really great water pressure on a nightly basis for a shower. It's having to do your laundry by hand. I mean, this is all part of it. It's not a glamorous trip, and it's not really roughing it.

There's an entire infrastructure there because people have been walking the Camino for 1000 years. So sometimes you'll be walking on a paved road. Sometimes you'll be walking on an old Roman road, and I'm serious - an old Roman road that the Legionnaires built. Sometimes you'll be walking through farm country. In the middle of vineyards. Sometimes you'll be walking on a rocky mountain trail. But along the way there are cafes, there are inns and hostels where you'll stay. You're never really camping out. There might be days when you think, "Well, why isn't this a little more fancy?" Or "Why aren't we roughing it a little bit more?" It's someplace in the middle. And I think that that happens by design. I don't know who designed it, but I think it happens for a reason. I think that's the thing that sort of keeps you thinking and yet not thinking about this journey that you're on. It's neither posh, nor is it really, really arduous. It's somewhere in the middle.

Matthew Carey

That's gonna be a metaphor for something though, right?

Thom Sesma

it really is. It really is.

Matthew Carey

I'm inclined to ask you, given that you're adjusting my expectations a little bit. Having done it the first time, what inspired you and Penny to go back and walk the Camino a second time in 2019?

Thom Sesma

Because we were ready to walk the Camino a second time the minute we stopped the first time.

Matthew Carey

Was there more you had to learn?

Thom Sesma

No. Yes. And no. I mean, there's always more that we have to learn. We just have to be available to that idea that there's always more that we have to learn. But mostly, I'd say it was something that you will find when you do it. And I'm saying when you do it, not if you do it. When you do it, you'll find a lot of pilgrims will say this over and over again, almost ad nauseum. "I don't want to stop walking." "I don't want to stop walking." "What do I do now? I don't want to stop walking." "Oh, we're going to arrive in Santiago de Compostela tomorrow. What will we do after that?" Because walking every day has It's become a way of life for you. It's not just what you're doing on vacation, it actually becomes a way of life for you. So pilgrims say over and over again, "How do you keep walking?" "How do you keep walking?" And then pilgrims say in response over and over and over again, "You take the Camino with you." It's a metaphor. Walking becomes a metaphor. And yet it's still an activity that you do every day. I guess it's manifesting that metaphor.

Matthew Carey

It strikes me that you've been on a four decade long pilgrimage anyway. You've been an actor in New York for four decades. I know you've described that it's not only by chance that there's certainly been hard work, passion, commitment, persistence, and low rent helping you to do that. Maybe you've started talking about it in terms of the pilgrimage already, but tell me about the choices you've made over the years to sustain yourself in a profession that's not known as being particularly lucrative, while living in a city that's not known for being particularly affordable.

Thom Sesma

I think you just move forward. You just keep walking. Persistence. One of the things that I tell young actors, I tell my students this all the time, and it's in my bio on my website. "I'm not an actor who lives in New York. I'm in New Yorker who's an actor." I moved to New York to be a New Yorker. And yes, I wanted to act. Of course. That's what my metier was, acting. But very early on, when I moved from Southern California I became acclimated to the city right away. Nothing could tear New York out of my soul. I loved everything about it. I think that is the thing that made it possible for me to tolerate, and even love the hardship of being an actor in New York. Because I had a life in New York. I was developing a life in New York.

One of the things that was so exciting about my life in New York was that in the first 12 months that I lived here, I moved five times in the first two years. I moved eight times before I found my own apartment. I lived in a railroad flat with a bathtub in the kitchen. It could have been hellacious for me. Instead, it was exciting. It was part of this bohemian life that I had wanted to live since I was a little boy. I don't know, maybe I was rebelling. Maybe I had romanticized New York completely out of proportion, but it made everything okay. And I have to say that that was a huge step in keeping me on beam, keeping me moving forward.

I learned early on... and I made a lot of mistakes. Trust me, I've made an enormous number of mistakes. I burned a lot of bridges. I think that there's a small number of people who I may have offended early in my career who still will not work with me based on that. I'm not saying that says anything about them, because I take full responsibility for my actions back then. But I've also found out that this is a business filled with a million second chances. It's very forgiving, and I think in general, people are as forgiving as you can be, or will be, as you're moving along in life. That's another thing that has enabled me to get through.

In a practical sense? Yes, I lived in an apartment with very, very low rent that got me through a lot of things. I took a lot of jobs that I didn't necessarily want to do. I'm talking about acting jobs that I didn't necessarily want to do. But they all served me well. They all made me a better actor. And really, really wonderful jobs, well paying jobs came up when I needed them. It was always about being present, and being there. Being willing to learn from every single experience. I'd say the worst experiences in my life were always experiences where I thought I knew more than anyone else in the room. But one of the things I do like to say is, actors are funny. Every single actor believes he's the smartest person in the room, when in fact, the person who really believes he's the smartest person in the room, who is really convinced that he or she has nothing else to learn from this experience, is probably the least smart person in any room. So you just keep reminding yourself that all you can do is learn and learn and learn and make mistakes and pick yourself up and learn. And that will pretty much get you through anything.

Matthew Carey

I think the idea about the person that thinks that the smartest in the room probably has the most to learn at that moment, is not unique to actors, either,

Thom Sesma

You're probably right, yeah. We're seeing that in action right now. But then again, I have to amend that a little bit. You know, I've worked with Stephen Sondheim a couple times and Stephen Sondheim actually is the smartest person in the room. And I think he knows it.

Matthew Carey

There's so many things that I want to speak to you about and learn about from you, but we're not going to have time to do all that today. One of the things that struck me from looking at your list of credits is that not only have you had a rich career in the theater, but you've had a number of appearances on television shows. I'm curious how the contrast in the rhythm works for you. When I think about a theater show, in general, it's a matter of weeks or months that you're working on a project. Whereas from what I understand, if you're a guest on a TV show, it's maybe a week worth of work. You're there for a day or a few days. How do you find that contrast in rhythm?

Thom Sesma

Oh, it's hard. It's hard, but it's just something that you accept. It's a different skill set.That's a really, really different skill set. You're the same actor, but you just learn different techniques. You're smaller, you're more present or you're less present. You don't get rehearsal time in television. You can be enormously self indulgent when you're rehearsing a play. You don't necessarily want to be but you can, you can be. You don't have the remotest luxury of being self indulgent, you're just one component, even if you're a guest star, a guest lead on a television show. The money's good, the money is much better. But it's harder. It's harder and people don't understand. I say this in the most loving way. Frankly, they don't care about your process. They don't have time.

But I had the great good fortune a few years ago of working with someone I knew early in my career, early in both of our careers, who went on to become quite well known in television and film. I did a television show with him and he was watching the way I was working. He kept pulling me aside in a very friendly way and he would give me advice, tell me how to do things. He wasn't redirecting my scene, but he saw that I was struggling with my place on the set, and this pivotal thing that I had to do. One of the things he kept saying, it's sort of a joke, because you hear actors in television and film joke about this a lot. They say, "Don't worry about it so much, they'll fix it in post." That's exactly what he said to me. But he also intimated to me why. Because I was making everything so much more important than it needed to be. I just had to remind myself that I was one component. That every single thing that I was doing was a rehearsal and I wasn't in charge of my performance. It was just one component and once we were off the set, once it was in the can, everyone was going to work to make my performance better after I was gone. And they did. I was very proud of my work in that. But on the set that day, if someone had asked me "How you doing? How's your work?" I would have said, "It's terrible. I don't know why anyone asked me to be an actor." It was necessary for me to lose myself in order to allow someone else to do their job, which allowed me to do my job.

Matthew Carey

There's something in the idea that while you're there, it's all just a rehearsal that's being captured and somebody else will take it and craft it into what they need it to be. But our process as artists, and as humans, is all just a series of rehearsals as well, right. Even if we're in a show - we work things out, we practice them so that we can do them in a similar fashion each night. But as well as you hone your performance, it's a bit different, you're bringing different energy, you're responding to a different energy from night to night. The show that the people in the audience that night see is a snapshot of where you were at that particular point in time. I guess, when it's on film, it feels like it's captured for more posterity. But really, in most cases, somebody is only going to watch it once. They're going to see where you were at that point in time [then through the filter of the people that make the decisions after you go home.]

Thom Sesma

Right. You know, last summer I worked with Uma Thurman on really extraordinary production of Ibsen's Ghosts, and we had just started to work on the play. she was doing the scene and the director Carey Perloff, wonderful director, said "Oh, I really love what you're doing there." And Uma, her eyes got big and she just held her hand out. She said, "Please never tell me that. Never tell me that." We were all sort of shocked because she was just so insistent about it. She said, "I am a creature of film. If you tell me I did something well, I will do it different the next time. That's what we do in film."

It's interesting because in the theater, you don't do that. You do something, the director says, "That's a really great, let's have a little more of that." And that's the direction you go in. But it's true, what my friend told me early on. Every take being rehearsal is absolutely true. What that does is it frees you up to be full for that one moment that they're going to try to capture on film. You can have any number of different wonderful moments that are equally valuable, but they're still yours. They're still choices that you're making, in that moment of reality, but they're different. And that's what Uma meant that day. She said, "Don't tell me I'm good, because I will do it different. Instinctually I will have to do it differently."

Matthew Carey

That's a great indicator of how they're slightly different crafts.

Thom Sesma

Completely different.

Matthew Carey

I read or heard you say that "The theater is a place where you can present your vision of how the world could or should be." So, Thom, as we start to wrap up, I wonder - what does your vision of the world look like at the moment?

Thom Sesma

As Martin Luther King said, and as our dear former President Obama repeated over, and over, and over again, "The arc of history is long, but it ends in justice." My vision of the world right now is, of course, influenced by the pandemic. And the fact that I'm more inspired and reassured by the humanity of my fellow human beings. At the same time, more heartbroken and more disappointed about the depths to which some of my fellow human beings have willingly fallen or thrown themselves into, in order to score some political points. I could say it's bleak.

But I guess if I'm being pressed to genuinely answer that, I think I'm more optimistic. I think I'm more optimistic than I realize, because I think things will change. You know, I spoke earlier about this being a watershed moment in our culture. I think it's a watershed moment in our civilization. How it will change. I have no idea, but I know that we keep walking forward one step at a time, we'll discover where the values are and where they're not. We'll be able to shed those things off. Some will cling on but for the most part, when you are losing thousands of people all around the world every day... Do you know in New York, a person dies every two minutes of Coronavirus? When that happens, how can you not change? How can you not see the world in a different way? So I look forward to seeing what happens. With a degree of trepidation, of course. But I think I'm realizing that we're better than we are.

Matthew Carey

Thank you for your ability and your willingness to look at the past to see what we can learn from that. From your willingness to look within to see what you can learn there. And thank you for sharing your hope and your optimism for the future. This has been a really powerful conversation for me, Thom, and I hope we can do it again sometime soon.