Ammar Daraiseh

Intro: Gina ordered her theatre school transcripts
Let Me Run This By You: knowing when to let go, moments of clarity
Interview: We talk to Ammar Daraiseh about being an MFA, homesickness, Joe Slowik and Bella Itkin, Joe Mantegna, type casting, being a middle eastern actor, Sweet Smell of Success, film noir.
www.ammardaraiseh.com - there is where you can watch Ammar's acting reel and my short films he produced 

www.karenkanas.com - Ammar's wife's website

FULL TRANSCRIPT (unedited):
2 (10s):
And I'm Gina <inaudible>. We went to theater school

1 (12s):
Together. We survived it, but we didn't quite understand it. 20 years later,

2 (16s):
We're digging deep talking to our guests about their experiences and trying to make sense of it all

1 (21s):
Theater school. And you will too. Are we famous yet?

2 (34s):
Frog into my, my morning frog out of my throat yet. How you doing? I am. Wow. I have a lot to talk to you about, oh, I

1 (45s):
Half expected you to have red hair this morning.

2 (49s):
Oh, do you think I should. I okay. But like, did you see the picture? I put a run Lola run. I mean, that might be a little hard to maintain.

1 (59s):
It's super hard to make, like you'll, you'll have to be the salon and read six weeks at least, or four weeks for root touch-up. But I mean, I personally think the routes coming in would look cool, but wow. Yeah,

2 (1m 13s):
The whole rally thing. Well, I'll keep you posted cause I, I definitely want to do something different, much different what's going on. Okay. So first thing I'll just get out of the way is for fun, because we're always trying to remember our classes and who taught and what gear we did, everything I ordered my transcript, which unfortunately does not have the names of your professors. Just, yeah, it just has the name of the class and my grades were fair, not great. Like I had a 3.5 or something like that, which I would have, I thought in my memory that I got really good grades in college, but they were really just pretty average.

2 (2m 1s):
But guess what my lowest grade was in

1 (2m 8s):
Was it, was it, well, the easy choice is add Colleen,

2 (2m 13s):
My C my, my one and only see mine was an intro to psychology. I was talking to my husband about it and he goes, yeah, I got a low grade too. He's like, we were just basically saying, this is all too real. We're not ready yet. I think

1 (2m 40s):
That's a great observation by him.

2 (2m 44s):
See my whole areas. It's just hilarious. And then in other classes where I was sure, you know, I was hated like an alcohol use class in that I got A's so my God isn't that it's also subjective, like our, our experiences, something as subjective and then our memory about something totally changing. Only subjective as the years go by. Right.

1 (3m 7s):
It's not just subjective. It's yeah. It's very like mutating subjects, right? Yeah. That's crazy. Oh my God. So you ordered your transcript. Okay. Now you have a transcript

2 (3m 21s):
And guess what? Anybody can, it's 25 cents. Like if you have, if you haven't ordered, like you have a certain number, you can get in a certain period of time. And so your first one is 25 cents. You,

1 (3m 33s):
Anybody else want to have a transcript? You

2 (3m 36s):
Could relive your, your grades. Oh my gosh. Might find some surprises. Do you think you would find some surprises in your

1 (3m 42s):
I'm? Sure. I mean, I know for a fact that I, that I, I was supposed to drop a class, a, a non, obviously non theater school class, and I never dropped it. So if you don't drop it, you get an F. So I got an F in, like, I want to say it was like sociology or something like that. And I almost didn't graduate because they thought, yeah. And so you can't, I knew it was like, I remember my last year, my senior year, I had to like, do all kinds of regular role. And the other thing is that I didn't do was one year, one quarter or something you had to like re up your financial aid and I didn't do that.

1 (4m 24s):
So I didn't pay for like a quarter. And they were like, yeah, you're, I'm so shocked. I graduated. I don't know what was happening. They were like, yeah, you have to pay.

2 (4m 35s):
I had to do some real tap dancing to my parents graduate.

1 (4m 39s):
Yeah, I remember that, but I don't. Yeah. I I'm sort of scared to look at the grades. I don't.

2 (4m 46s):
Yeah. I mean, whatever, it's like a grade and acting school is just kind of funny. It should probably be, and maybe at some schools it is pass, fail. It just should be pass, fail. Like you either got it. Or you didn't get it. You either write forth effort or you didn't. Right. So that's kind of, wow. Okay. And update on surprises. Because last week I was saying like, I'm open to surprise. And it worked, which is to say, I think pretty much not that like some big surprise came falling out of the sky, like is what, the thing that I was really after. But instead I did, I took my own advice and like pursued, doing something differently.

2 (5m 27s):
And on Saturday we ended up, I just on Friday night when Aaron came home, I said, I want to have fun tomorrow, but I've got to get out of this house. I've got to get out of this town. And so he searched up like fun things to do. And he found something which actually was terrible, but it didn't matter because it was different. And we, it was a car. It was, it, it was promoting itself as some like amazing fall festival with all this kind of stuff. And it was literally a carnival, like the Carney trucks. It's amazing.

1 (6m 7s):
Like, yeah. Right. Oh, well they had some good marketing.

2 (6m 11s):
Yeah, they sure did. Cause it was listed as the number one thing to do in my state this weekend, the state and the state and the state. But even, maybe it was a slow weekend and we had fun. Anyway, we had fun. We went to a town we've never been to, we spent time together. You know, it, it was fine. It was good. And more importantly, I feel like it, it just doing something like that and genders like, okay, what else can you do? What else? You know? So I think that, that was the important thing is that it opened me up to

1 (6m 43s):
Novelty. Did anyone else, did anyone get hurt on a ride?

2 (6m 48s):
No, but the whole time I was like, I bet this is going to be one of those times where one, we're one of these things just going to go flying off into the, so if you really want to call it,

1 (6m 58s):
If you really want to go down a crazy dark rabbit hole, like, okay, well I'm obsessed with fail videos fails. You know, if you watch carnival fails. Oh my God. And most of them are deadly. Thank God. But they're just like, where thing flies off. Or like, like a lot of times what you have is cell phones going crazy or birds like birds attacking people on rollercoasters is one of my favorite things to watch. It's not that the bird is attacking. It's at the bird is just trying to fucking fly. And it runs smack into a person on rollercoaster, the best thing you've ever seen.

1 (7m 38s):
But the sad thing is 90% of the time the bird dies, you know? But like, because the velocity, the force is so great, but it's pretty freaking funny. People are filming themselves usually like right then all of a sudden, a huge pigeon like common. So carnival fails is, is one thing where like someone's standing there like videotaping their friend on t...