Sam Morgan Discusses His Approach to Acting and Why He Always Seizes the Moment

Sam Morgan is an artist, actor, director, musician, model, and coach to his friends. Morgan’s charm, personality, focus, and talent have resulted in standout performances in several TV shows and movies. Best known for his roles in Shameless as Patrick, one of the “yuppie owners” of Born Free, and Adam in Paramount’s American Woman, a charming artist, his star power is undeniable. Ingrained in Hollywood since his teenage years, Morgan has carefully crafted his career by studying under various directors and educators at NYU and the New York Film Academy. He’s also graced the modeling runway at numerous fashion shows and is a huge believer in seizing every opportunity or idea to grow his writing.

In celebration of Morgan’s career, The Koalition spoke to him to learn more about his approach to acting, his love for directing, his modeling career, the importance of music, how his life inspires his writing, upcoming projects, and more.

You’re modeling. You’re acting. You’re into wellness. You have your brand. You’re running things. So, which came first? Is it a modeling? Is it acting? Is it wellness?

I was one of those kids who was always making the kids in my neighborhood, my cousins, and everyone else do little plays. I was always directing. I feel like directing actually came first, and so I started there. I’ve always liked singing and making music. My dad and my brother are both musical, and that kind of got me into it. I grew up with Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and all of these folk musicians. Music and directing were my very first loves, and then I went into film. I must have been 14; I went to a film summer program at New York Film Academy, and we all lived in the Oakwood apartments, and I made all these friends. That’s how I got into directing, and then I went to NYU, and as soon as I got there, the upperclassmen started putting me in their film projects to act. By the end of that first year, I had Professor Ramón Menéndez, who directed Stand and Deliver, pull me aside and say, “Sam, you have to go to LA. You got to be an actor. You have to do it.” I said, “That is terrible advice.” The only thing that’s going to make my parents more upset than me being at film school instead of law school is me coming out of this being like, “I’m actually an actor now.” But he was right. It was good advice at the end, and it inspired me to really start taking acting seriously.

In the summers, I would go to the William Esper Studio in New York. They teach Meisner, and I trained with them and this amazing teacher, Suzanne Esper. That’s where I got my start. Modeling was something that started while I was at school. I would leave class, and then I would go to castings, presentations, and fashion shows. I never had a free minute. That was my entire life while I was in school. I was one of those people who always had a job. I don’t rest. Rest feels foreign to me, which is probably why I have been practicing transcendental meditation for nine years in December. That’s why meditation is such an important part of my life, because the idea of sitting scares me.

How do you feel within that stillness by using meditation and the Meisner technique? How does that help guide the characters and their purpose within a scene and within the script?

The transcendental meditation is 20 minutes twice a day. When I started meditation, I was like, ‘What the hell? Who’s got that kind of time?’ It didn’t make sense to me. Then I started meditation, and suddenly those two pockets of the day, once when I wake up and once in the afternoon, are so important for my brain function and my life function. It allows me more hours in the day.

Tom Hanks said that between 3 and 6 p.m., it used to be his lull, where you didn’t come to him for anything between those hours because he was just out of commission. But now, because he practices meditation, those are some of his most productive hours. That has been true for my experience, at least where it’s that lull. That 3 pm dip just becomes so much more effective. When I’m on set, I tell everybody whenever I work anywhere, whether it’s a modeling job, acting job, or whatever, everyone knows my lunch break is when I eat really quickly, and I just meditate. I get my 20 minutes in. It really helps me with memorizing. It helps me be present with my scene partner. It’s really beneficial to my craft.

My first time learning how to act and the importance of having a craft was by using the Meisner Technique’s Knock on the Door. This is where people are screaming at each other; they listen and repeat each other. The way that I’ve viewed my career now is that every character kind of requires something a little different.

For example, I did this film called Object of Desire, and my character does some pretty awful stuff. He’s supposed to be charming, but then, as you get to know more about him, he’s pretty dark. I was working with this amazing director, and we would do these rehearsals. I just wasn’t the guy in terms of who I am as a person; maybe I could be perceived that way if I behaved a certain way, but it wasn’t one of those apples-to-apples kinds of character matchups. I needed a new way in, and the character is kind of predatory, but he moves slowly.

So I started doing animal work. I asked myself, ‘What’s an animal that is a predator that moves slowly and then strikes?’ I landed on a python, this sort of slow winding thing. You start really big, and basically, I’m rolling around and slithering on the ground, and then it gets more and more dialed in. Every time I lit a cigarette, the smoke wrapped around her. I was always reminded that was the purpose. It was interesting because this was before the director and I had become good friends, before we really knew each other. I asked her if I was getting biblical imagery of Eve in the Garden of Eden, and the snake at her feet moving up. It turns out we were both raised Catholic, and she went to Catholic school, and I was like, “Yeah, it feels like there’s something about that.” So for that character, I used the imagery of a predatory animal, and dialing into that is what really made that film so successful for me. There were a lot of other actors who did really well, too, but I was proud of that work. And no Meisner. Maybe a little bit, the day-to-day, but I definitely leaned heavily in the animal work.

If you’re a visual artist, you’re like, “Okay, maybe this year I want to work with pastels, or I want to work with oil paints.” I feel like that’s the cool thing with acting; you can always mix up your media. “I want to do charcoals; I want to do whatever.” And that has kept acting so exciting because I’m never at the expert level. I never know exactly if I’m going to do it right. That kind of keeps it electrified in my experience.

You’ve been on Shameless, you’ve done American Women, you’ve done shorts, and you have future projects in the works. How do you choose the characters that speak to you, or is it the roles that don’t speak to you that have surprised you the most?

There is sometimes a disconnect between how we are perceived and who we are. How I am perceived is still a part of me, even though that’s not how I identify. That’s been a big lesson for me in being an actor. I do a lot of the auditions and play cowboy-type wrangler people, because I grew up on a farm. I grew up riding horses. I think part of me is always going to be a little bit like that. Even though in my day-to-day life, I’m a laid-back artist and musician, that’s how someone else perceives me. I also have to acknowledge that person enters the room as well, even though that’s not who I see in the mirror every day when I go home.

Sometimes the roles just have to pick you, especially early on in your career. What’s been really nice is the roles that have come my way are always the ones that teach me something about who I am, and I learn something about myself. They can be really special existential moments as well, because usually the character is there to teach you something about who you are.

What inspires your writing, and what is your approach to it?

My dad passed away unexpectedly this summer. So, that’s been interesting because that has bled into my work in a sort of indirect way. I’m writing a novel that I think I want to turn into other projects. I’m writing a play, something that I’ve never done before, but it’s me processing my dad being in the ICU, and there are a lot of body horror elements to that experience, and navigating the projects that come down the pipeline.

There’s this concept I heard about when I was living in Berlin that genius isn’t something you have; it’s something that comes to visit. Elizabeth Gilbert talks about this in Big Magic, her really great book that everybody should read. The idea is that these ideas belong to a collective unconscious we all have access to. If an idea comes to me, then I put it in the bottom drawer of my desk, and I’m like, “Ah, I’ll get that idea later. I’ll get that idea later.” Well, it’s a guest that is being ignored. That guest could very well pick up and go to somebody in Japan who I’ve never met before, who knows nothing about the project I’m developing, but they understand what that project is, and then they put it out. That’s my belief system around having ideas and taking the inspired downloads that you get when you have that moment where the light bulb goes off.

I’m a huge Billy Bob Thornton fan. The one thing that inspired my move to LA the most back in the day was this Billy Bob Thornton autobiography. One day, I want to work with Bob Thornton. I’m putting it in the universe. I love that man. I just identify so much with a lot of the things he stands for and talks about, and I just think he’s an awesome writer, director, filmmaker, actor, and everything. I remember him saying in this book that he writes all of his scripts on legal pads in one night. He would just stay up smoking cigarettes and getting this full manuscript out. It’s like the idea doesn’t actually belong to anyone. The idea just comes to visit you, and you can become a vessel for that idea to be birthed. But if you don’t birth it, it has to go to someone else who’s willing and able to give the idea to the world.

I’m a big fan of The Artist’s Way, the Julia Cameron book. I lead people through The Artist’s Way sometimes. I’ll lead little groups of people through it. Rick Rubin talks about this as well, but the idea is that creation is a devotional act. Whether your higher power is God or a spirit source, the matrix, or whatever, by creating art, by creating anything, whether it be a sculpture or a business or a character in a movie, that’s a devotional act that’s me giving to the universe. That’s me honoring my higher power and making it an act of devotion. We’re creative beings. Every single person is a creative being. We’re created by two people, and then we are supposed to create, whether that be art or ideas: we’re all innovative.

What is next for you in the wellness space?

The next thing for me in the wellness space is just finding more ways to help other creative people live their creative lives. I’m very much a disciple of the Julia Cameron school, where everyone’s an artist and art belongs to you. It’s a birthright. It’s my birthright. Everybody has that.

I work with artists to help them create. I’ve just been helping friends sort through their creative processes. I’m more involved in creative wellness. I believe we are inherently creative beings, and I like seeing people birth ideas. There’s nothing more gratifying. People have come to me and just sort of turned around. Maybe they have the golden handcuffs of a really good, well-paying job that they hate. I ask them, “What turns you on creatively? What are you excited about? What makes you feel like today is worth living?” Because during COVID, especially the lockdown era, I found peace. I was lucky because, being a freelance artist, I was used to sitting at home alone and occupying my time. I was grateful as long as everybody was healthy. I was very grateful to just be given permission to garden, do home workouts, and let ideas hit me.

What are your next acting projects?

We have a movie coming out, The Red Mask, which is cool. It’s a horror film. I have a lot of horror films. I’m not a horror film guy. The Red Mask is an indie horror film about a group of filmmakers who are rebooting a 1980s slasher film. It’s like the movie within the movie, kind of like Scream. It’s kind of that vibe. It’s really cool. We have an amazing crew and an amazing cast. There’s this other film that we’re in pre-production on called The Betrayer, which will be shooting in Spain. It is a psychological horror with an unreliable narrator. All of her insecurities become externalized, and this entity called The Betrayer starts taking shape through her friends and family, which causes her to go into this state of psychotic hallucination.

To learn more about Sam Morgan, including his love for Berlin, MoviePass, watching Weapons in theaters, and more, check out our full interview in the video above.