One on One: Brandon Barash

see you, guys. Good to see you, Brandon, So thanks for coming on. Of course, thanks for Yeah. Man, you played the role of Jamie when Gilmore Grows for three episodes two thousand to two thousand four, student at Princeton, Paris's very first boyfriend. Um, you were also So that was the first time. Last time we saw you was season four, episode twelve A Family Matter. So we have that to look forward to from St. Louis. Uh. You lived in Missouri, Texas, California. Family business is Oh my goodness,

really wow? Damn? What else do you know about? Look at this guy? Wow? We need to talk. Yeah, I know all about that company. Cisco. Yeah, I do. How do you know about Cisco because I have a coffee company. We're trying to get in, yes, and we know that we know there the beverage, the beverage portion of that businesses is quite large. In the coffee slice of the beverage business is something I wanted to try to get a piece of, but it's very difficult to get a meeting.

So you went to USC you got a degree. Wow, you're on the West Wing Criminal Minds, and you've been on General Hospital two thousand seventeen and two thousand sixteen, and since two thousand nineteen you've been on Days of Our Lives. You're working your butt off. You play Jake Demera. So let's talk about the first time you got the role, and uh, tell us how you got the part? All right? So I was, I was fresh out of college, all right.

I had gotten to use a douche industry term, hip pocketed by an agency from our senior showcase, which for non industry people basically means they'll kind of see something in you, but they don't like you enough to say, yes, we're gonna sign you and you're gonna take up space on our roster. Hey, Brad, Brad Pitt was hip pocketed. There you go, And so I would get pocketed by this agency. And one of the first auditions they sent

me out on it was Gilmore Girls. I was working at Nordstrom selling clothing at the time, and drove to Warner Brothers on my lunch break, drove back, found out when I got back, I got a call back. Cool, So the callback was scheduled for a day when I was supposed to be in Manhattan Beach on like a staycation hero. Right. This was before smartphones. Okay, this is when we still had to take out the Thomas Guide right and page L four and then continue to page

like a six point three. And we didn't have ways. The point is, so I couldn't gauge how much traffic there was going to be from Manhattan Beach to Warner Brothers. I miscalculated, uh really really badly, not in my favor. And it was about an hour late to my audition. All right. Called my manager on the way. I said, I'm would be an hour late. Should I just turn around?

He's like, no, I just go. I walked in the room and I just started making fun of myself about how late I was because it was the only thing I could think I could do, and made some really terrible jokes in the process, and uh walked out of the audition not knowing what the hell had just happened, and was driving home and found out I booked the

part and it was, Yeah, it was. It was the coolest feeling ever because I don't know my sad card right, So they, you know, taft Hart lead me in and and it was it's a big set, uh, And I thought, great, I'm gonna go quit my job now because it's only up and up from here. And cut to five years later, I was still working in retail, but five years later I was able to finally quit my day jobs. Oh good. Um. Yeah, So what do you remember about your first Dawn set?

I was freaked out, as as is evident by my brilliant acting um in that first episode in any I mean, I was my acting chops were not up for the television when I did go more girls. But that's okay, So I didn't notice anything. You did a fine job. What are you talking about anyway? You're too kinds, You're two kinds. You you you you filled the role perfectly. Yeah, it was just I couldn't get out of my head though.

You know, as young actors, like the biggest hurdle that we have is to just tell that voice to shut the hell up, right, you know, the voice is like, how's this going? Are they? Like? Am I making senses? I don't even know what my scene partner just said, but I'm gonna say in my line. It was just I was so in my head on all the episodes.

So you only have you only have one voice, not voices. Well, I'm only telling you about the ones I got you yet, So yeah, so anyway, no, I mean I was I didn't know, you know, my ass from my elbow on a set at usc which is where I went. I got my degree in theater, and I could have moved to New York the day after graduation and established myself

as a really great theater actor. They only and I think the curriculum has changed since, but they only gave us I think two classes um auditioning for the camera and acting for the camera. And they were just kind of thrown in at the end of our curriculum. So, you know, hitting a mark, we not not once we were heard sitting a market. So it was just all this new information swirling around in my head. I was a nervous wreck. But I guess I made it work.

You did, you know? Yeah? You you blended in perfectly. I mean it was all a good buddy um. Anyway, so you had what we all described a perfect Princeton preppy vibe going, uh, tell us, tell us what you remember about that character. I remember in you know, throughout the audition process, the note I kept getting was young Bill Clinton, think young phil It okay. And this is of course after the getting on the whole thing. I was like, well, which which part about Bill Clinton's life

in my emulating year? Just to be clear, be careful, should I take a cigar into the mission room or and so you know, the notes I kept getting were think young Bill Clinton and speak faster, okay. And so it was, you know, just trying to negotiate again all of those things that the cameras, the lights, the booms, the you know, the the mind splitting silence of a TV set or a movie set, right, and so it was just, yeah, young Bill Clinton is what I keep

remembering from that whole process. Yeah, that's very interesting, very interesting. Um so paris uh fell for Jamie at first. Uh, pretty hard, you know, pretty hard. She was her first point. What do you think about the character of Paris. I, well, I'm Eliza was great. I'm sure she still was great. Um speaking about her like she's not here anymore. But yeah, she was great to work with. Uh, she was. Paris was intense and uh I think you know, I think

Jamie enjoyed that. It was it was a different Uh. You know, he wasn't used to that. You know, he was kind of a slower speed kind of guy. But he was just along for the ride until we all know he wasn't we all know what happened there? Um? Would you have liked to see that relationship continue on

through the series? My career would have loved that. Look, I'm not I'm not an happy worrying might now I'm very happy, but back then, yeah, yeah, I was bummed out for sure when when I found out that she had left Jamie for an older man and Jamie's time and was it stars hollow? Is that right? Was it was over? So you were born into the Cisco food business. Um,

did you did? Did your parents support you when you were announced you were going into acting or did your dad wants you to come in uh to that business so he could teach you that business. Was there any pressure there? What was the reaction like when he said I'm going I want to go to USC and get a theater degree. It was well, I mean, look, the food business was was a very important part of my

family's history. They immigrated here from Ukraine, actually a town called She told me, um, you know back hundred sixteen years ago when they were doing the same thing they're doing now, except they were singling out juice. And so they came here and they started. My great grandfather started a fruit stand, and the fruit stand, this is a long story short turned into the biggest seafood purveyor in the Midwest. He didn't make the best decisions, you know.

At that point my dad was working with the company as well. The company went under. So then my dad got offered a great job from H. B. Cisco Cisco Foods out in Los Angeles when I was I think three years old, so that's when we moved out here. So yeah, I come from a very kind of corporate family. Conservative, not in like the political sense me no conservative now, but conservative and that you know, you should be a doctor,

lawyer or do something corporate. And so when I got accepted by USC into their b f A program which only accepts ten to twenty students a year, and my dad said, well, you'd be silly not to not to take that UM. And at the time I wanted to do Uh, I was really torn because my whole m you know, young life, I'd wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be a cardiaco with the pedic search. That was like, that was my jam. Science was my jam. The human body, you know, I just I couldn't get

enough of it. I still can't. But two years, about a year and a half into college, I was, you know, taking twenty two units a semester. I was in classroom eight in the morning to ten at night between classes and theater rehearsals. And finally, halfway through my sophomore year, I thought, Okay, I'm doing fine at both of these things,

but I'm not. I'm not excelling it one. And if I'm honest with myself, me, you know, going through the premed motions is now more about what my family wants me to do rather than what I want to do. And once I came to terms with that and was able to say, all right, I'm gonna, you know, put all the proverbial eggs in one basket and go for the acting. I called my dad and I was terrified, and he was. He couldn't have been more supple. It

was awesome. It was it was a game changer. It sounds like it sounds like a great man, great guy. He wasn't. Maybe we all have fathers like that. Um right, my god, um well, it certainly seems like you made the right choice. You're making a lot of people happy in your career. Um. Do you still get nervous? And this is from me, do you still get nervous going to auditions? Absolutely? I get you know. I think I

think nerves are healthy. I think the day, as performers, the day we stop getting nervous is the day we should start finding something else to do. I think a healthy dose of nerves, as long as you know how to harness them. I think it's good for any performer. I really do, any artist. It's uh, yeah, I get nervous going to auditions. I get nervous, you know. I mean I've probably filmed I don't know, between well, episodes of daytime television, and I still get nervous before I

go on, and it's part of my ritual. I enjoy the nerves I I you know, it's more of like a surge of adrenaline now whereas before. And I'm sure you can relate to this. Any you know actor can harken back to their younger days and find a time where their nerves ruled then, right, And it's a real paradigm shift happens when you realize you're in control of that. That makes sense, Yeah, Yeah, for me, it was just all about the level of preparation to write to control

the nerves. Yeah, because if you're prepared, you know that you're ready for anything that happens in that room or on that set, and you can be loose and you can play a Preparation is huge, Um, because there's really two schools, right, it's like not really knowing. I mean, you hear the stories of Brando and Jack Nicholson. They don't want to know. They don't want to repeat their lines, they don't want to rehearse. James con never wanted to rehearse. I did a film with him, he did. He didn't

want to rehearse. He knew his stuff. He looked at it. Once he knew it, let's just do it list I don't. I don't want to make it stale, and we need to keep it fresh. And so there's but unfortunately, when you work in television, you're in these very tight schedules, and yeah, you gotta know your stuff called especially in soap operas. For God's sake, you guys are covering. You guys are doing how many pages a day we do on average? When I walk in the building, I'll do

anywhere between usually between fifteen and thirty pages. It's crazy, that's crazy, and it's nuts, man, But it's it's such a great lesson in preparation, like we're saying, and commitment.

You know, you have to walk if you want to do good work, and doing good work is important to you, and being a good scene partner is important to you, then you have to walk into that building knowing you're lines, knowing your intention, you know, knowing all that right, like having broken down the script and knowing the circumstances your characters walking into because when you you know, at one o'clock whenever these shows are on, when you turn on

a daytime television show, you're not seeing a fleshed out product. You're just not because there's not time for that. You're seeing a rehearsal. You're seeing, you know what You and I on Gilmer Girls or any other prime time show would spend thirty forty minutes doing while we're blocking, while they're calling in you know everybody too, you know the grips and props and everybody to watch while they're lighting. That's you're watching the first one of those on daytime.

And so it, yeah, it takes a lot, It takes a lot of discipline commitments. So do you have a system that was learned memorizing your lines? You do? How do you do? How do you It's evolved, it's evolved over time. I used to, and you're gonna think I'm a nut. I used to take yellow legal pads and write every scene, every single not every scene in the script,

but every scene that I was in. So if I had twelve scenes that day, thirty six pages, I would sit and write out, you know, the scene from beginning to end, including stage directions. And that helped me get into the character's said, to help me get into the writer's and the directors, so that by the time I had to break the script down and actually memorize the lines they were memorized because you know, pen to pen to mind for me, happens to work. That's your theater training.

It is, it is and so but then you know there were nights it was taken me four hours. Script can't do it, and you and I can't do like you can can't do that and so and so. You can do it if you're in a play. Oh yeah, you know you have the you have have the time and rehearsal to do that. If you're gonna play. You can't do that on serious television's funny, no chance. So

then now what I do. You know, I have my iPad and I have which totally I don't know how if you work from an iPad or you work from paper. I prefer paper. But again, doing the volume of scenes I do a day, the amount of paper I'm wasting, and you know, just ink and everything, and it's great to keep everything together on one device. I know, if I go to work and I have five scripts that I'm working on that week, they're all in this timy

little device. So now it's you know, it's on the iPad and it's just this um I have a system that I go through. It's much more streamline. Now, well, we want to say big congrats on your engagement to Isabella. Thank you. Photo is that Devotov because one team is de Voto? Yeah? Uh uh, and we saw that adorable proposal on Instagram. How is the wedding planning coming along? It's going well. We found a date. We found the venue, which is like half the battle right, so uh, we're lucky.

We found the venue that covers a lot of you know, the things that you'd have to normally go outside and rent. So h the hardest thing, man, is this guest list? It's right, be careful man. Yeah, people have the humans have the uncanny ability to make someone else's wedding one h about them. It's just it's really getting married. Yeah. Um, so fans loved, they really enjoyed that your daughter Harper

was involved in the proposal. Did she help that? Did she help you use those nerves when you were popping the question hunt the please? She eases every every nerve in my body, that little girl. Yeah, oh yeah yeah. And it was just as much about her as it was my fiance. I mean, the reality is I would not be marrying Lisa without Harper. I mean she led me directly to her. Harper was in a Spanish Emergence summer camp one year, and he said, was one of

her teachers. And that's how it happened. And you know, we got to know her very well, and she started spending time around us. And one day, Harper, when she was I think five, sits me down at the breakfast table and she said, Daddy, are you and Lisa friends? I said, yeah, nothing was going on, and I said yeah. She said, you guys should be together. I said, wait, what, how do you know what that even means? What? What? What?

What do you mean be together? And she explains the concept of being together with somebody, being a partner with somebody. Where did you get this, bro, And and so she has been advocating for this relationship since before it happened. And then we waited a while. Once it did happen, we waited a while to tell her because dating as a single parent it's a minefield, man, And if you have your kids best intentions at heart, you're not going to introduce that kid to every person you did, because

that would just I mean, come on. Yeah, So you know, we waited, god, almost a year I think, until we told her, until we knew that it was going in a serious direction. Then it became I knew it, And when is she going to become my step mom? Yeah? And so you know, and it's just it's great because we get along well with with my ex wife, Harper's mom, and it's you know, they're sure ups and downs, but it's um, yeah, Harbor, my daughter is fully on board

and we wouldn't be here without her. So important, isn't it. It's so important, so important. Yeah, well, I'm really happy for you. That's great. So do you have a passion for music? M isn't that fantastic? What's the status of your band, pork Chuck. The status of my band pork Chuck is well, we couldn't perform at all during the

pandemic at least. So what we did to kind of, you know, get rid of the bug was we broadcast a couple of shows from this great studio in Burbank, and I think we did that three are so times, which was a lot of fun. The hard thing with the guys in the band is that I'm on days. Uh. One guy is still in general hospital and to the other one lives in Nashville, and another one lives pretty

far south of Los Angeles, an one within Sacramento. So it's very difficult for us to get our schedules SYNCD up to say, hey, we're gonna go on tour, you know, the third week of October, market out because it doesn't work for everybody. So we're trying to figure out a time when we can go out on the road, but we have full intentions of hopefully doing that. Sometimes do you have management and the whole thing? And yeah, we

have booking you know, we have a booking manager. We don't have a band manager, but we do have a you know, a booking manager we worked very closely with and she books us, and you know, she's booked us anywhere from like you know, two fifty people person comedy clubs to like the Wilbert Theater in Boston and you know, all venues in between. And so yeah, I think what we'd like to play is, you know, a house that's really no bigger than like four because we know we

can sell that out and and it's a party. We're a cover band and we just you know, we put our own twist on on classic songs and just have a party. Yeah, well that is fantastic. Are you ready for rapping fire? I'm gonna fire. I'm gonna I'm gonna fire questions at you haven't done this in a while with the guests, but I'm gonna fire all these questions that we gotta do. We gotta go through a quick That's why it's called rapid fire. Ready. Oh, that's that's

the rapid part of it. This is the rapid apartment. You got that part? Okay? How many coups of coffee you having today? Zero? Are you a team Logan, Team Jess, Team Dean? Huh? Exactly? What is your favorite Gilmore girl's character? There you go? What would you order it? Luke Steiner? I would order a grilled cheese inside of talks? Would you rather go on a road trip with Taylor or Michelle? Both? Finish the lyric? Where you lead? I will follow dot

dot dot take me to your leader. Jackson's vegetables are Suki's baked goods, sake goods every day the week and twice onthiing there you go. Would you rather listen to Drella's harp or the Trooperdour's cover? So songs, songs, children prep or Stars, Hollow high Man. There you go. It was a pleasure of Brandon. Um, thank you so much. Good luck with everything. I hope the band gets back together and starts touring. I know people love that. UM so much fun and uh, it was a pleasure talking

to you, and uh, good luck with the wedding. Stay safe, all the best to you my friends. Likewise, all right, take care m hm hey everybody, and don't forget follow us on Instagram at I Am all In podcast and email us at Gilmore at I heart radio dot com. Oh you Gilmore fans. If you're looking for the best cup of coffee in the world, go to my website for my company scott ep dot com s C O T T y P dot com, scott ep dot com Grade one Specialty Coffee. Yeah.