Steven Good of Gilroy will be up in front of a national TV audience in a leading role for the first time next week and he feels pretty good about it.
“It’s fantastic, it really went well,” he said of the Los Angeles premiere Feb. 17, of Nightmare Nurse, attended by his parents, Pat and Mark Good of Gilroy.
The movie’s national premiere is Saturday, March 5, at 8 p.m. on Lifetime TV. Good co-stars with Sarah Butler, Lindsay Hartley and Traci Lords.
A 2005 Gilroy High School graduate, Good didn’t even try for an acting role until he performed in the senior class production of Annie Get Your Gun.
Now, it’s less than a dozen years later and he’s in his first film role on national TV—in addition to performing with two rock bands, maintaining a modeling career and working a regular blue-collar job.
But Good, 28, would be the first to tell you that he has only just started on a long and difficult road to his dream of an acting career that’s replete with endless auditions and rejection.
In the cliché of all clichés, he supplements his performing income as a singing waiter at Miceli’s restaurant in Universal City.
“In acting, you don’t make anything until you make a lot. You have to love it and you have to be passionate about it and you have to figure out how make money to survive. I really realized what it’s like to be a starving actor,” during the filming of Nightmare Nurse, he said.
In fact, it’s a profession he was warned away from a few years ago. A mentor told Good, “‘If you guys can do anything but act go do it,’” Good recalled in an interview last week from a sushi restaurant near his home in Van Nuys where he lives with his wife, Minea. The couple married in July 2013 in her hometown of Happy Camp, California. She’s studying teaching at Pepperdine University.
Born and raised in Gilroy, Good said that as a youth he was into just about everything but acting.
“I was really involved in music across the board and sports and not so much drama,” he said.
He played basketball and volleyball in high school. One of his choices for a musical instrument to master was the bassoon, a sort of baroque didgeridoo that so enthralled Mozart he wrote concertos for the unwieldy woodwind. And then there was the singing.
“I was in three school choirs, the men’s choir, the chamber singers and the jazz band. I played the sax and jazz guitar and bass and the bassoon in the wind ensemble,” he said.
“He was always a positive kid, just came to class always upbeat and happy and ready to give everything he had to give,” recalled Phil Robb, former long-time GHS choir director. “That was the kind of personality he brings into everything.”
As a child, Good’s range and intensity of interests would cause his father to remark that the lad spent “three years in his terrible twos,” Good recalled of his father, a lawyer and board member and past president of the Gilroy Unified School District Board of Trustees.
By the time he graduated from GHS and headed off to the UC-Santa Cruz, Good had his heart set on becoming a film composer for Disney.
That put him on a road that would wend its way through the world of opera, to the ivied walls of Harvard University, on to rock dives in Los Angeles and then the legitimate theater.
As a classical voice and music composition double major in college, Good sang in four operas: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, an adaptation of the Shakespeare play by Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears; The Magic Flute and The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart; and Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Consul.
Around the same time, he was hired to compose music for Shakespeare Santa Cruz and began interacting with the campus theater department. Those contacts in turn led to acting classes, where the bug bit deep into his psyche and pulled him from opera, which he enjoyed but came to realize was not his calling.
“What I really like about the stage life is the storytelling, that really turned me on; I wanted to be an actor,” Good said of that decision.
And while he ignored earlier entreaties to stay away from acting, once committed and bent on studying and seeking work in the Bay Area, Good did follow advice from mentor/acting teacher Paul Whitworth, a member of the United Kingdom’s Royal Shakespeare Company and former artistic director of Shakespeare Santa Cruz.
“He advised us away from San Francisco, he told me he knew of only one person who was a full time actor in San Francisco, and he said to go to the East Coast,” Good recalled.
He heeded the call to go east. It was while he was there and considering applying to acting schools at Yale and New York universities that a chance encounter sent him to Boston instead.
“At the auditions [for Yale and NYU] I ran into a little Russian lady in the elevator who told me I should audition with her. She was at Harvard.
“I graduated from UC-Santa Cruz around June 13th and by the 13th of July I started [acting] classes in graduate school at Harvard,” Good said.
Since then he has worked on small film projects and performed and recorded with his two rock bands, Cyliva and The Thieves of Paradise. (See a photo gallery and more about Good and his bands at his website, www.stevengood.net.)
Of Nightmare Nurse, he said, “It’s my first lead in a feature film.” (More about Nightmare Nurse is here, http://bit.ly/21482d4.)
Good plays a man bedridden after an auto accident who needs in-home care. The nurse who gets the job causes big problems for Good’s character and his girlfriend.
While awaiting more movie roles, Good spends his days and nights performing with his bands, doing live theater and attending endless auditions for TV pilots and movies.
Last spring he was commuting between auditions in Los Angeles and performances in a Santa Barbara production of Tom Waits’ version of the intense 1837 play, Woyzeck, by German poet Georg Buchner.
“It was our closing weekend and I got a call and they said, ‘Hey, Steven, you are booked (for Nightmare Nurse)!’ We closed on Sunday and I started shooting on Tuesday in L.A.,” he said.
“We only shot for two weeks, 12-hour days. It’s fantastic, it was really interesting to come from the theatrical experience to a film experience, they are just so different. In theater, you get up on stage and go through the whole play. With the film, on the first day we shot the last scene.”
Good looks forward to the film’s TV broadcast and local folks’ reactions, including his family. His grandmothers live in Morgan Hill and Gilroy; he also has four siblings, including Gilroy Mayor Perry Woodward, and nieces he said will be watching, as well as old school friends, teachers and mentors.
Good is deserving of his success, said family and friends, who described him as caring, kind, talented and full of energy.
“He has a personality that doesn’t get discouraged,” said his mother, Pat Good.
She and Steven’s dad, Mark, seem to have been in awe of his boundless energy as a youth, some of which made for the kind of family humor that lives on.
“We’d joke about how he changed from his basketball uniform to a tux (for choir) in the back seat of the car,” his mother said.
Mark Good talked about his amazing “sticktoitiveness” in the face of so much audition rejection in Hollywood. And he recalled that his son’s willingness to give 110 percent on the court earned him the nicknamed him “psycho” from his high school basketball coaches.
“There was never any downtime with Steven,” his dad said.
Friends also seem in awe of Steven Good the person as much as Steve Good the talented performer.
“Steven was good to everyone from every walk of life; no matter who you were, he was kind to you,” said Tamura Miguel, a childhood neighbor who graduated from GHS with Good. “He just makes you feel at home, he’s very loving. As silly as it sounds, his [last] name says it all.”
Ryan Scott, another former neighbor and a year ahead of Good at GHS said, “He’s a real renaissance man … whatever Steven touched turned to gold, he could do anything. He’s such a good guy and I am so happy for him.”
For his part, Good’s not shy about handing out thank-yous for the help he has received along the way.
He cited his mother’s ceaseless support and endless hours of driving, and called his father, “an incredible example of selflessness, resilience, character, and responsibility.” His parents, Good said, afforded him “… the freedom to pursue my creative aspirations.
“I also would like to credit [former GHS choir director] Phil Robb, who was an inspiration…and a refuge/refinery for my creative spirit. It was with him and with the music we made together that I developed my compositional taste [and] developed courage, which fortified my creative ambitions,” Good said.
And for others in whom the creative spirit burns, he offered this: “To anyone who wants to do it, it’s possible. I hope they see it by a little Gilroy guy making a movie.”
