Interview with Darius De La Cruz

On balancing professional acting and playwriting, getting more introspective with age, and deep canvassing

This week, I’m excited to share my interview with actor and playwright Darius De La Cruz. Darius provides insights into the acting and writing life, including sharing how some of his most meaningful creative experiences have happened alone in his apartment, staring at a wall. He also reflects on his feelings on turning 40 this week, and his process of getting more introspective in adulthood. And he shares wisdom he received from an older woman he met in the process of deep canvassing, a new approach to voter persuasion. Darius has been a good friend since our high school days, but I learned so much in this conversation I never knew.

You can find out more about Darius and his acting roles on his website, dariusdelacruz.com. You can also watch him in a few weeks on the May 15 episode of Abbott Elementary (season 3, episode 13). And on December 6, you can see him in the long-awaited Marielle Heller/Amy Adams film Nightbitch based on the novel of the same name. For more information about deep canvassing,

Dave Fleischer

’s Substack is a great resource.

Darius with colleagues Stacey Swift and Ella Thomas from Nightbitch shoot

Q. Do you mind sharing how old you are?

I’ll be 40 in a few days.

Q. Where are you at with this birthday?

I’m excited for the week and the small celebrations that will punctuate it throughout. I have a growing craving for some sort of change and affirmation of the path I’m on. I’ve been asking myself somewhat regularly if I’m happy with the way things are because this is it, you know? But recently, I am getting this little hunger—something around needing to make sure that I’m getting to a higher percentage of time being fulfilling.

Q. How do you think about what’s fulfilling?

Pride is a big part of fulfillment to me. I can say that starting to work on something that will make me proud is not always what’s on my mind. Starting can be daunting or frustrating. But having put up with that initial frustration is part of the pride and fulfillment that I feel after the fact.

On really productive days, the colors look brighter, and the air smells sweeter and shit. But that can be hard to remember in the mornings when I’m trying to get myself to begin. It’s also not just how I feel at the end of the day that makes something fulfilling. I will start to enjoy it and feel like this is working sometime in the middle. It would be much harder to keep going if I only felt good at the end of the day. 

Q. If you were to tell the story of your career so far to your grandchildren, how would you describe it?

I would say I really loved all the ways I got to create and explore, especially starting in undergrad. In looking for what my biggest pursuits were going to be after that, I settled on a place where I could pursue improv, which had an intense feeling of both creation and exploration that I really liked. So that helped me decide on L.A., and L.A. then helped me see that an even slower version of acting could be exciting and could feel meaningful to me. Investing and putting in the work to specialize more gave me a deeper sense of storytelling and allowed me to act a bit more. And then hopefully I’ll be telling the story of how a lot more plays I write will be produced, and I’ll be able to dictate the creative terms of those going forward.

It’s interesting because specialization was something I was kind of fearful of when I was younger. I was such an extrovert in high school and college, and I could sense the way in which specialization could create distance, especially in relationships I enjoyed so much then.

Q. Do you feel like specialization has created that distance in your relationships now?

Yes, but it has introduced a whole new lens, which is one of identity. I feel like my identity is so much stronger now. Both are good—identity and being unified with others. In some ways, my experience has been that identity is on the other side of a spectrum from connection. I feel good about who I am now.

Q. What is the sense of identity that you have now?

Right now, I’m thinking of the identity I’ve arrived at as clarity on what feels meaningful and real to me. It’s how I fit, or that sense of what I’m able to do or offer in a situation, and it helps me take action. So, even for something I’ve never tried before, I can see how connected it is to other stuff that I have done or am capable of, so I’m more likely to take a risk.

Q. Did you like theater growing up, and if not, how did that interest evolve? I’ve always been interested in when and how actors knowingly start to act.

These are things I’ve had to be reminded of. They didn’t exactly stick with me. But I did do plays in elementary school. In one, I had a prominent role, but I don’t remember it at all. It’s interesting that I felt sort of unseen sometimes in life but in that play I was second-billed only to Santa Claus.

I also recorded a documentary with the family camcorder. “Dangerous Beasts,” I think it was called.

Q. How old were you when you made the documentary?  

My brother was in it, and he was maybe three or four, which would have made me nine or ten. I was using an Australian accent to narrate what all these animal toys were doing or thinking.

I think it’s interesting what you’re saying about whether people knowingly start to act. I don’t think that’s what I was doing when I was doing plays. I was thinking about another part of acting I find really compelling, which is how to cultivate the real, underlying honesty of right now. That is something I could sense and that was attractive to me about plays and improv. But it wasn’t until later in my 30s that I had a sense of how I could cultivate different beliefs in my acting, to be able to play someone really different from me.

Q. I love the idea of acting as a way to tap into what’s real. I think of writing that way too. My characters are made up, but I’m writing to try to get to a truth you wouldn’t see otherwise.

Yes. Trying to cultivate authenticity.

Q. Is there a milestone moment you’ve had in your acting career?

I can remember one, yeah, which is interesting because it was in a class I took in my 30s, at a place out here called The Imagined Life. I got an assignment on a play called The Owl and The Pussycat. They do very long assignments, and I continued to have this assignment for four months. I remember being in a four-month state of frustration and crashing on my bed again one day, feeling like I was not achieving anything. And then I had this realization. It was a two-person play, and I realized that this woman living with me in my apartment in the play, she proves that I’m a man. Without her, I’m not a man anymore.

It’s interesting it brings up the same emotion I had then saying it now. This character I was playing had a belief different from what I walk around with on a regular basis, but now it feels real, like a fact I can reference: I believed that about her.

Q. What creative experience has meant most to you, and what creative experience has been most defining? Are they different?

That example I just talked about makes me proud. Some other similar ones have come from working at home and staring at a wall. That perseverance that’s required, and then all of a sudden seeing the poetry in it. Those experiences at home are pretty defining, and they definitely do mean something to me.

And also, I do this because I want to engage others. I want to be in service, you know. I’m not a producer at this stage. I don’t have a ton of control over who sits down to watch my work. But I would like to offer a service. So one of the more gratifying moments I’ve had was in a play called The Judas Kiss about Oscar Wilde at the point in his life when his success was collapsing and things were very hard for him due to his sexuality. I just loved so much of working on that play. Really almost every performance felt like I was able to take work that felt special to me and be in service of other people in the story and hopefully give people that were watching a lot to think about. In that play, I knew my work was substantial; my investment was effective.

Q. What do people usually not understand about what it takes to be a professional actor?

I’m not sure I understand what it takes to be a professional actor. There’s certainly lots of ways to go about it, but I do often feel different than many other actors.

There are times that working on a role for an audition can be rewarding in and of itself. Some people will have a good intuition of the roller-coaster that casting must feel like. It might be harder for others to see that even if I didn’t get a part, maybe I learned something from it or it was a productive way to use my time in other ways. It’s interesting to feel that progress and get something out of it, but then be like, I sure do need a paycheck at some point though.

Q. Would your younger self that moved to LA feel proud of you now? Did you have a clear sense of your ambitions when you moved?

I didn’t have a clear sense. I rarely had specific goals, like being in certain casting offices or going on tape for certain projects. I’m starting to think more about goals now, like in the last year. Once thing I never thought about them is now nice it could feel if you envision something before, that could make it more rewarding when it happens.

Q. What’s your ideal balance between acting and playwriting?

My sense right now is it would feel pretty good if it were around 50/50. At the moment, I feel like I still work really hard at acting. And that’s rewarding in some of the ways we’ve talked about. Persistence, and when it happens, it feels all the more special for that persistence. Writing right now feels more like play. So that seems like a pretty good balance for continued growth.

Q. If your elementary-school, documentary-making self could tell you something today, what would it be?

People want to see me goof around. And part of the reason there’s no reason to be embarrassed about any of that is that no one watching is finding it shameful. It’s just goofy.

Q. In what ways are you becoming the person your younger self needed, if that resonates?  

My mom gave me different bears as gifts a few times growing up, for the bear’s symbolism of introspection and interior knowledge. Introspection wasn’t a particular strong suit growing up. My mom remembers asking how I was doing at various times, and I just said I don’t know. And now I know. And now I’m interested. Which helps add to my self-worth.

Q. Tell me about the most significant relationship you’ve had with someone multiple generations older than you.

There’s a woman named Jean I met when I was learning about politics and bias reduction and doing deep canvasing. She was in a DA’s office somewhere in the state of New York. It was just really great working alongside her to figure out how to draw personal stories out of a stranger at their door.

Jean had a really good ability to articulate how she was feeling in different moments and a willingness to do so. I was impressed that she could pinpoint moments in a conversation twenty minutes after the fact and tell me what else was on her mind during these micro interactions. She was generous and open with me, and affirmed my own ability to ask deep, probing questions by narrating what that process had been like on the receiving end. She showed me how my earnest and personal curiosity can be welcome if I’m gently making space for whatever is going on with the other party to the conversation. 

Q. Anything else about your deep canvasing work you’d like to share?

The canvassing work is also storytelling work. I can’t remember if these are words from a play—I think they’re from a play: Don’t you find that the way you do anything is the way you do everything?

I like knocking on people’s doors and asking them where they are on a political issue. I say political, but I want the conversation to be personal, you know? When do many of us make time to think about exactly the kinds of questions you are asking in this interview?

I find it so rewarding just to be there asking questions, to just make space for someone to tell their story of, There was this beginning and then this happened, and this is how I feel about it.