Former Mustang cornerback/safety Michael Mitchell

[MrMustang1965]

By DAVE FERMANSTAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER

The dream is at least as old as the famous Hollywood sign on the hill, probably older. A kid arrives in town from Anywhere, U.S.A., with a big dream but hardly any money or experience. The dudes with power and pull pick him from among all the other fresh-faced hopefuls from all the other Anywhere, U.S.A.s, and he makes it.

Often, the dream leads to a career as a waiter, usher or pizza-delivery person.

But for Michael Mitchell, 22, and not so long ago Colleyville Heritage High School’s big man on campus, it’s real life. After 10 months of living full time in Los Angeles, Mitchell has struck pay dirt — several times.

The former Southern Methodist University football player has scored a recurring role in the upcoming series Thief and a guest spot on CSI Miami, played Derek on three episodes of Invasion and appeared in five episodes of the Disney Channel’s Phil of the Future. He was also recently seen alongside Anne Heche and Tate Donovan in the Christmas story Silver Bells on CBS.

“I’ve been very lucky and very blessed,” Mitchell said recently from Los Angeles, where he lives with several other young actors in a 91-year-old mansion once owned by Charlie Chaplin. “I’m not just practicing what I love to do — I get to play. That’s what I get to do every day.”

But those who have worked with Mitchell as he developed as an actor in high school and college say they were confident that he would succeed. Jenny Phagan, Colleyville Heritage’s theater director, and James Crawford, assistant theater professor at SMU’s Meadows School for the Arts, say Mitchell constantly tried to improve as an actor.

“He had a work ethic and a drive that rivaled some of the people I’ve worked with in grad school,” said Phagan, who worked with Mitchell for two years. “Michael would eat up everything I told him, and he’d want more. We’d be up here sometimes until 10 p.m. working on his monologues. He craved knowledge.”

Mitchell’s dive into acting in high school followed a childhood and adolescence full of goofing around with acting and playing a lot of sports. He is the second of Bill and Cindy Mitchell’s four sons, the others being Chris, 25, Brian, 20, and Tyler, 18. Bill owns several full-service car washes in Dallas and Collin counties, and Cindy is a flight attendant for American Airlines. Growing up in Colleyville, the Mitchell boys played a lot of baseball and built a baseball field. But they were also constantly using the family video camera and playing characters.

“Jim Carrey had a big effect on me,” Michael Mitchell said. “I was Ace Ventura for about a year after that movie came out. When you have three brothers, you’re always doing something. We’d do random things — commercials, running around and having the video camera out for hours and hours.”

When he was in the sixth grade, Mitchell was in a skit, The Emperor’s New Clothes.

“I fell in love with it,” he said. “It was this rush nothing else can give you.”
That progressed to working with Phagan in high school. Mitchell acted in two plays, West Side Story and Hello, Dolly!

By now, Mitchell was also a serious athlete, a football cornerback/safety.
“I just couldn’t not do either one,” Mitchell said of his involvement in football and acting. Some days, he said, he would practice football from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. and rehearse from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m.

“Acting and football are a lot alike. The most interesting things that happen in a scene are when both characters have a want, and there’s a conflict. And in football it’s the same — you have two teams, and each play is a conflict, a battle of wants.”

Phagan said Mitchell was “almost like a god in this school, almost to the point of awkwardness. There were girls who were literally obsessed with him. He was very charismatic and charming and good-looking and funny. I think he just loved it [acting] — it’s where his heart was. But I think he was afraid of it — it’s a very unstable career. But he’s not someone who loses. He’s going to succeed at whatever he does.”

Chris Cunningham, Colleyville Heritage’s head football coach, said the same thing: Mitchell — who was a captain of the 2001 team, which went 10-2 and won the district championship — is goal-oriented and confident.
“He was a phenomenal player for us,” Cunningham said. “He’s not arrogant, but if he wanted to do something, he got it done. He’s just that kind of person. His success doesn’t surprise me at all.”

Mitchell began attending SMU on a theater scholarship in fall 2002, and he also played football. But doing both full time was too much, and Mitchell stopped playing after his first semester to concentrate on his craft.

Crawford said Mitchell was good enough to do what a lot of young actors do — seek fame and fortune in Los Angeles or New York. But Mitchell was determined to get more training at SMU, so he stayed until the end of the fall 2004 semester.

“I knew I wasn’t as good as I could be,” he said. “They trained me and introduced me to a way to work and take on any role, and I’ve applied the things I learned at SMU in every role and every audition, which is why I’ve been so successful so young.”

The summer after his freshman year, Mitchell went to Los Angeles for three months of knocking on agents’ doors, seeking representation. He and his brother Chris lived in a ratty little one-room apartment in Venice, Calif. After a while, Chris went back home, and Michael was lonely and homesick.

Then his father visited him. He didn’t like what he saw. So he moved his son to the Highland Gardens Hotel in Hollywood, which turned out to be a major break. Mitchell met a hotel employee who told him to call a manager, Paul Nicholls, who had sent actors to stay at the hotel.
The two met, and during the fall and the next year, Mitchell flew to California several times for auditions while taking acting classes and performing in plays at SMU.

The fall 2004 semester ended Dec. 5; five days later Mitchell auditioned for Phil of the Future, and on Jan. 5, he was told he got the part. He moved to Los Angeles within weeks.

“I was planning on taking a semester off and giving it a shot,” Mitchell said. “I did Phil and started booking things and really enjoyed it.”
Bill Mitchell said that despite his worries about Michael moving to Los Angeles, he is confident that it was a good choice.

“He’s been able to work and not starve and not wait one table,” he said. “He said to me, ‘Dad, I’ll never do anything you won’t be proud of.’ ”
So far, Michael said, his favorite role has been on Thief, which recently completed shooting in Louisiana and will air in March.

“It’s not my biggest role. It’s two kids who are in love for the first time and running away, and it was so much fun to do,” he said.

[covok48]

Man I think that's really neat. He really is an all-around person, a Renassiance-Man if you will. He reminds me a bit of myself back in high school (Fall: Football, Winter: Speech & Debate, Spring: Track) only this is someone who was much more successful and talented. I wish more athletes were like this.