Growing up

Sam was born in Edmonton Alberta Canada to two very artistic parents and was practically raised in a theatre, whenever his parents or their friends needed a baby for a sketch in their comedy show he was the one they went to. Despite this, in his early years of schooling he was much more interested in becoming a paleontologist until he played Linus in A Charlie Brown Christmas in fifth grade. Since then Sam has been involved in at least one play a year but it has often been more.

High School

When Sam was entering high school he was still unsure about whether or not he wanted to go into the arts even though he was currently playing rhythm guitar and singing back-up for a pop-punk band called Aimhere which broke up after winter break. A month after that, about half-way through tenth grade, while Sam was sitting in rehearsal for The Odyssey he realized that he had never been happier than at that moment, and for a young teen who had been struggling with depression for a number of years already he couldn’t shake the feeling that this is what he wanted to do with his life. While attending Victoria School for the Arts, his high school in downtown Edmonton, he took part in everything that could help him do what he loved to do, he took the advanced acting course, directing, jazz dance classes, improv, master classes with guests the school brought in, and he was in the main stage productions of The Odyssey, Miracle on 34th St, and The Grapes of Wrath. A couple months into the eleventh grade Sam joined a different pop-punk band called Smile For The Bullet which later changed their name to Nothing Gold Can Stay where Sam found his love for performing music. A year and a half later he unfortunately had to leave NGCS in order to focus more on his theatre career as he was a month away from his first venture into directing a production of Two Beers and a Hook Shot by Kent R Brown.

Post High School

After graduating with honours from Victoria School of the Arts, Sam began working in the box office of the Citadel Theatre and performed in his first musical as A-Rab in West Side Story. During this production he became friends with other actors and producers in the city and was able to reprise his role of Will from the original production of a one-act called Exposure in the revival production at The Edmonton International Fringe Festival 2015 which also led to him playing Arpad in She Loves Me. Two months after the run of She Loves Me, Sam flew to Vancouver to audition for The American Academy of Dramatic Arts only to be accepted four days later, Sam was now 19 and moving to New York, every young actors dream. Right before leaving Edmonton to begin his first year at The Academy, Sam played Man 2 in a production of Edges at the Edmonton Fringe 2016, a month later his apartment was emptied and he flew to NYC with 3 suitcases, a backpack and nothing else.

AADA and After

Sam began his classes in September of 2016, he didn’t know anyone in the city and was ecstatic to begin his life here. While training at The Academy Sam did scenes from This Is Our Youth, After Ashley, The Star-Spangled Girl, Beyond Therapy, Pocatello, subUrbia, The Dreamer Examines His Pillow, North of Providence, A Streetcar Named Desire, Hamlet and A Doll’s House with his acting and Shakespeare teachers Burke Pearson, Zenon Kruszelnicki, Lester Shane and Susan Pilar. In his Shakespeare series he played Winchester/Mortimer and was fight captain for Henry VI Part 1 directed by Lisa Milinazzo and for his graduation series he played Stan in Unity (1918) directed by Rory McGregor. In January of 2018 Sam and his best friend Andrew Thomas began their professional relationship by starting their own movie discussion podcast titled Welcome Back which has a new episode released every Monday on iTunes, Spotify, SoundCloud, and GooglePlay. Sam’s first acting job after graduating was playing an Ad Buddy in promotional material for the Netflix limited series Maniac with Improv Everywhere, quickly after Improv Everywhere asked Sam to be in their Ocean Spray Jellied Cranberry Sauce Thanksgiving commercial. Sam was also cast in his first NY theatre productions as Fredrick Farmington IV in Barefoot written and directed by John DeBenedetto performing at the Manhattan Repertory Theater in November 2018, and as Durmond in Angels Among Us written and directed by Elise Milner performing at the American Theater of Actors in December 2018. In 2019 Sam continued working with Improv Everywhere on their work for Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy, Iowa Real Estate, and the new Disney+ show Pixar in Real Life. Before leaving NY to move back to Edmonton, Sam was asked to be in Jaclyn Biskop’s segment of the One-Minute Play Festival taking place at the New Ohio Theatre working with his friend Katryna Nicole Williams once more. Also during this time Sam and Andrew Thomas produced a short film that Andrew directed titled Fleeting that Sam wrote and starred in alongside Dorea Slagle.

Returning to Edmonton

Sam returned to Edmonton in the summer of 2019, this was very difficult for him as he had been living his dream in NYC but this didn’t stop Sam from continuing his work! Sam and Andrew continue to record and release Welcome Back every week, Sam also was cast in a new work written by his old friend Mitch Caddick and directed by Andres Moreno called Restless Abandon that earned a Fantastic Show to see at the Fringe pick from InfoEdmonton at the 37th Annual Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival. Sam played an 8 hour shift at the 27th Annual Die-Nasty Soap-A-Thon at the Varscona Theatre and was asked to return throughout the season as an occasional guest star during the regular Die-Nasty shows. In the fall he joined Sorry, Not Sorry Productions a local improv group and began regularly performing in their weekly shows yegDND, Prairie Improv Federation, Malarkey Murders, and Thunderprov at The Grindstone Theatre. Sam was also asked to play Hamilton Barnes in Butcher for his friend Ben Osgood’s final project in his directing class at the University of Alberta. Come the spring of 2020 when the lockdown first began, Sam was unable to do any performing but continued releasing weekly episodes of his podcast and slowly getting back into performing more shows at The Grindstone Theatre as Edmonton started to reopen.

Returning to Performing

During the lockdowns, Sam decided it would be best for their own mental health if they took a break from theatre and focused on themselves for a year. Sam left Sorry, Not Sorry Productions and spent time trying to figure out what he actually wanted to do and how he wanted to live his life. In this time Sam was a part of an online reading of The Size of a Mustard Seed written by Andrew Thomas & Justin Jones, but besides the weekly episodes of Welcome Back, Sam did very little creative work. In this time Sam also came out as non-binary and started using he/they pronouns, this has been a large shift for Sam and they still haven’t gotten used to all that that means for them but they are happy to be on the journey. In late spring of 2022, Ben Osgood was approached to direct a full production of Butcher at the 41st Edmonton International Fringe Festival which will be Sam’s first foray back onto the stage reprising the role of Hamilton.