We had a fantastic opening weekend full of energy, laughter, tears and joy. And I have been wanting to shout about this show from the rooftops since the moment I first read the script.

So I was thrilled to sit down with the tremendously talented Ryan Garcia on his podcast Big Theatre Kid Energy for an in-depth conversation about the show, what went into making it, and why I think it matters.

We are living in a moment where so much of what we consume is flattened, optimized and churned out by algorithms and AI and the relentless machinery of content. And I think in that context, messy human-made art matters more than ever. Live theatre especially! The kind where real people are in a room together, breathing the same air, sharing the same energy, feeling the same emotions collectively at the same time.

Tomb Quest is a show about friends who come back together to create. Not to get rich. Not to get famous. Not even to share what they’re making with the world. Just the simple act of creating for the joy of creating. That idea has never felt more radical or more necessary to me than it does right now.

Ryan has built something special with Big Theatre Kid Energy. I love that he has a platform to celebrate this art form and spark these kinds of conversations. Go give it a watch / listen!

15 years ago, I moved across the country to pursue a dream. I had this vision of what success would look like, and I told myself that achieving it would justify everything. The sacrifice. The longing. The years of grinding toward a thing. The failures, the small victories would all add up one day to achieve what I would consider to be success. And I have sacrificed a lot in pursuit of this dream. Often sacrificing the very thing that fuels the possibility of the dream. My own physical and mental well-being. Spending time with loved ones. Being present in the world. Putting all of that on pause for the pursuit of the dream. And then I sat in a theater to watch Christoper Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey and watched a man tied to the bow of a ship and realized that everything he ever wanted, he already had.

In that moment I saw myself tied to that boat.

What makes The Odyssey the quintessential story, the one that has lasted thousands of years, is that we can see ourselves in it no matter where we are in the journey. Perhaps we are stranded on that beach for ten years waiting for our shot at glory. Perhaps we are within the walls of Troy itself, the bitterness and rage of denial finally unleashed as we get exactly what we came for. Or perhaps we’re somewhere along the journey home, wondering if everything we did was worth what we gave up.

You look at Christopher Nolan’s filmography and there’s a recurring theme about time, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we think we are. Memento. Inception. Interstellar. Oppenheimer. Each one a different angle on the same question. Who do we believe ourselves to be? Versus what do we actually do? The Odyssey is his most ambitious attempt at that question yet. And it’s very much an interpretation. The dialogue is modern. The characters speak in plain American English. There’s no overwrought Shakespearean cadence. There’s no archaic formality we’re used to out of these sword and sandal epics. At first it can feel jarring, but I think Nolan is doing something very specific here. These stories began as an oral tradition, and the movie begins as such.

They were told around fires and in feasting halls. They were passed between people. They were kept alive in the mouths of whoever was telling them. They were never meant to feel like these archaic museum pieces. They were meant to feel like they were of the now, like us. Like something happening to someone you know. The choice to embrace the modern dialect and vernacular here, I think, is Nolan saying this story belongs to you, it belongs to us, it belongs to this present moment. And it has a lot to say about who we are and where we are in this current moment of our civilization.

Because in many ways, The Odyssey is about literally everything. It’s the story of stories. Grandeur, ambition, regret, hope, dreams, victories, failures. That mishmash of all the ideas could leave you feeling like you got a buffet of everything but not a singularly satisfying meal. But I think Nolan very astutely locks into something specific. He has a very specific take here. I want that to be clear. I don’t think this is necessarily Homer’s Odyssey. The ancient text is not particularly interested in Odysseus’s guilt. In fact, maybe the ancient Greeks weren’t really that concerned with it at all. Odysseus is a hero. Granted, he’s flawed, but he wins. He comes home. This is something very different. This is Nolan’s Odyssey. And Nolan is obsessed with the weight of victory. What it cost to win and whether the world is better off for it. For me, it actually puts the film in direct conversation with his last film, the Oscar winning Best Picture, Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer, facing a great evil, tasked to rise to the occasion, won the war with his mind and his ingenuity by creating the bomb. And in doing so, he handed humanity the means of its ultimate and seemingly inevitable nuclear damnation. Was the world better for it? He spent the rest of his life inside that question. Nolan asks the same thing of Odysseus. At the center of it all is the regret of what might be the single greatest evil one human can visit upon another: offering peace as a ruse for violence and power. And that is Nolan’s Trojan horse.

Odysseus lives with this. It haunts him quite literally. The journey is long. The gods are cruel. And yet some part of him knows he doesn’t deserve to go home. He knows what he did. And he knows exactly when he did it.

There’s a really interesting moment in The Odyssey that the audience in my theater absolutely erupted into cheers for. Odysseus has come up with the concept of the Trojan horse. It works. The horse is taken inside the gates of Troy. They are able to infiltrate Troy, and Odysseus goes to open the gate. He opens the gate and there stands Agamemnon. He’s towering. He’s commanding. He looks like a freaking superhero. He looks like Batman. And you can feel the electricity in the theater. Everyone in my theater burst out cheering because it’s awesome. It’s pretty badass. He comes strutting in and the entire army rushes in and begins to destroy and sack the city.

Nolan brings you back to this exact moment much later on in the film, and like Odysseus himself, you understand what you’re actually looking at, and it’s not a heroic moment. It’s the moment he opens the gates to destruction. He lets in violence where he offered peace. He betrays the ethic. He betrays the law of Zeus. Odysseus is introduced as a man of principle. He demands that beggars be fed. He demands the weak and disenfranchised be given what they need. He plucks his hunting bow in pursuit of equanimity. He wants even the animals he’s hunting to have a fair chance. He is by every measure he holds himself to a good man. And then he burns Troy to the ground. Through trickery, he tricks an entire city with the promise of peace and rains down destruction in its place. The burning horse. The screaming. The ash. He spends the rest of the film wandering through a purgatory of his own making. The winning itself was the wound.

On a personal level, despite the scale, the scope, the battles, the fury of the elements, the pounding of the score, there is a singular scene that clarified not only the thesis of the film but my own personal connection to it. Odysseus is tied to the bow of the boat as they drift past the sirens on the rocks. We all know this scene. The famous siren song. All the men put wax in their ears save for Odysseus. We only perceive the song through Matt Damon’s heartwrenching performance. When asked what the siren song said, he remembers: “It told me what you most want is what you most can’t have. What you most can’t have is what you already had and lost. And most, it was the song of all the promises I failed to keep.”

That line took my breath away. He already had everything he could have ever wanted. Before the war. Before the idea of the horse. Before he burned the city to the ground. It was already in his hands. He left it all behind in pursuit of something he convinced himself was greater. It made me think about my own journey, the vision I carried halfway across the country, the version of success that I told myself would justify everything. How much of my life I have put on hold in pursuit of the idea of a dream. How much of my life I sometimes don’t live because I’m waiting around for the phone to ring or for an email to come through. And I wonder how much of what I’ve been chasing has already been there. Already mine. Before I decided it wasn’t enough.

Most of us have never burned a city down. Most of us do know what it feels like to convince ourselves that winning is more important than how we win. That the achievement of our success will justify everything we give up in the present. That not living now, that putting our life on hold, that not spending time with our loved ones, that not prioritizing the things we already have at our fingertips, it’s all going to be worth it when we finally achieve something we don’t yet have.

I think the ultimate takeaway for me is that going home is about being present in this very moment. I believe in hard work and I think hard work comes with sacrifice. But I found myself recently asking, what does that mean? What kind of sacrifice is it? The sacrifice of comfort and leisure? Okay, I’m willing to give some of that. But is it the sacrifice of my own mental and physical health? Is it the sacrifice of being present for the people around me? Is it the sacrifice of family and loved ones? Is it the sacrifice of my own ideas for other ideas that I think would be deemed more valuable? It’s really easy to give everything up that you already have in hopes of something better. The truth is, often the best things you have to offer the world, you already have. They’re already inside you. Next to you. There with you. Your mind. Your heart. Your loved ones. The people you’re on the journey with.

This movie reminded me that returning home, embracing what I already have, is an act of bravery. Is an act of courage. So much of our society revolves around rejecting that notion. Believing that value is achieved by earning a certain amount of money, or having a certain title in your job, or achieving a certain amount of success for your peers and for the people that follow your work. The truth is, if you give up everything that made you you in the process, what’s left is nothing. An empty shell.

I love that The Odyssey made me think about the world, our country, and my own very specific personal journey as an artist and as a creator and as a person living on this earth. And that’s the power of stories. That’s the power of the quintessential story, a story like The Odyssey, which is the story of humanity itself. It asks the essential questions. The question of whether or not we are still wandering. Whether we are finally ready to go home.

If you’ve heard or seen me talk about the show online, I’ve used the words “this one’s special” several times. I’d like to tell you why I specifically feel that way in this specific season.

As much as I love the act of performing and creating, I often find the obstacles and red tape of the business of it all to be disheartening, if not downright defeating. The bureaucracy, the networking, the constant need to elevate one’s social status in order to desperately keep up with relevancy both online and in creative circles to justify your value to be able to get hired to do the thing you’ve spent your life training to do. The rat race of it all can be soul crushing. After fifteen years of pursuing creativity professionally, I’ve had the wind knocked out of me more times than I can count. I have contemplated just about every other form of work I could possibly endure to make a living. But here’s where they always come up short.

I go and make a show with my friends. I remember the why. And I remember that this is the thing I love to do and engage with more than just about anything. And I keep going.

To me, this is the DNA of Tomb Quest. Five jaded friends come back together in the basement where they fell in love with storytelling to rekindle that magic that seems so far away. After the heartbreaks, the creative blocks, the betrayals and dust of broken dreams has settled, and in the wake of their friend’s passing, they begin to explore the world they found so much joy in all those years ago.

And they find that love again. Sure, there are other things they could choose to do. But they are choosing to do this with each other. To create, simply because they can.

And I should be clear. This is a Starkid show. Which means alongside all of that heart and meaning and rediscovery of magic… there are also dick jokes.

The show is goofy, crass, delightfully unhinged, and full of the kind of whimsy that makes you simultaneously groan and laugh your butt off. Starkid has always understood that the best way to sneak something true past your defenses is to make you laugh first. The fusion of silliness and sincerity is the point.

Time and again, when I have been on the brink of quitting, the act of creating with my friends brings me back to that place of magic and discovery, where anything is possible. Not because there are jobs or money or status on the line, but simply because the purest form of human expression is to create and imagine. Getting to do that with people you love? That’s the real magic.

The last few years have been some of the most challenging of my life, testing me in ways I never imagined. Through it all, creativity, that spark of magic, has been the fire that has continued to blaze. It’s been a lifeline.

So do I think this show is special? Yes. But maybe because I needed the reminder the most.

“Whatever story we spin, you can always count me in, because I know where we’ve been. Let’s begin.”

You can see Tomb Quest LIVE starting July 30th.

For tickets, visit: https://www.teamstarkid.com

For all its violence and horror, the moment that has stuck with me the most in Curry Barker’s Obsession is a quiet one. Nikki softly cries out to Bear to end her suffering. He hears her. He understands her. And his only response is:

“What’s so bad about being with me?”

And in that moment, I understood that the real monster of Obsession is Bear.

On the surface, it’s easy to read Obsession as a possession film about romance gone wrong. Nikki becomes irrational, volatile, dangerous, and Bear seems to be the helpless target of whatever dark force he accidentally unleashed.

I love a movie that takes a simple idea and yes-ands its way to an absolutely bonkers conclusion. The classic Monkey’s Paw conundrum of be careful what you wish for. We know it, we love it, it works.

It would be easy to walk out of Obsession thinking “man, that Nikki girl was crazy” and leave it at that.

But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this film. And it’s not because of “crazy Nikki”.

The setup is deceptively simple. Bear makes a wish. A seemingly innocent one. That the girl of his dreams would finally love him back.

And on the surface that feels almost sympathetic. Who hasn’t wanted that? Who hasn’t sat with feelings for someone and wished, even quietly, that they would just feel the same way?

Bear didn’t wish for love. He wished for compliance. There’s a version of this story where Bear tells Nikki how he feels, gets rejected, and has to sit with that. That version never happens because Bear was never willing to risk the answer.

The wish isn’t where the problem starts. It all started with Bear on a fundamental, core level of what he believed he was entitled to.

I see Bear everywhere right now.

He’s in every corner of the internet telling young, lonely, vulnerable men that the reason nobody loves them is simply because the world hasn’t recognized their value yet. That if they just optimize themselves enough, raise their status to “high value,” become the right kind of man (magnetic, commanding, irresistible) then love, respect, desire will follow as a direct correlation to their leveling up in society.

My takeaway from the film is that Bear already believes this about himself. Deeply. Completely. Delusionally. In his eyes, he IS the good guy! He is sensitive. He is patient. He has waited. And the fact that Nikki hasn’t noticed is not a reflection of his behavior or his choices, it’s a failure of her perception (according to him).

Instead of being honest and giving her the chance to turn him down, he sits in the misery of his own making. Self-inflicted.

So when the shortcut presents itself, he takes it. Without hesitation. Because in his mind he isn’t doing anything wrong. He’s just finally getting what he always deserved. After all, he’s a NICE GUY. If only she could see it!

A valid critique of the film is the fact that we never see the world from Nikki’s POV and therefore do not have access to the interiority of everything she is experiencing, due to her own agency being stripped away from her. We see glimpses, we have flashes. But ultimately we are stuck in Bear’s POV.

I had a few reactions to this. First, Inde Navarrette as Nikki delivers, in my opinion, the performance of the year so far, allowing us to see this duality in such an effective way. Was she scary? Sure. She nails that part. But what is even more effective are the moments of confusion, terror, and deep pain of a woman who has been stripped of choice. It’s gut-wrenching and visceral.

Is there a version of the film that goes deeper into her perspective and allows us more interiority? Yes, perhaps. But all I can do is engage with what the film I saw presented. And the result of that distance from her by keeping me squarely in Bear’s POV, leads to what I found to be the crux of the entire film.

Bear knows she is helpless and he continues on anyway.

The film forces you to sit inside that choice with him. You can’t look away from it because you’re in his head. For me, that’s not a flaw. That was the whole point.

Ultimately, Bear’s journey is a stark reminder that nice is a platitude.

Honesty and a willingness to hear it in return is true courage. The people you claim to care about deserve the truth more than they deserve your comfortable silence. And believing you deserve what isn’t yours to have, even when you think you’re the nicest person in the world, only leads to the suffering of those you claim to care about.

Which means you never did.

Obsession reminds me firsthand that putting yourself out there and embracing rejection in a healthy and empathic way might be the harder thing. But it’s the right thing.

Not even romantically, but in the opportunities you seek out professionally, the friendships you seek to make, even just the energy you put out into the world. Are you doing it because you want to make the world a better place around you? Or are you doing it because you feel like you’re building up a cache of favors and debts owed to you?

I think about this a lot working in the industry that I do. You want to be loved by everyone. You want to be on everyone’s mind. You want people, in theory, to be obsessed with you.

So what do you do? You do every favor you can. You work for free. You take on more than you can handle. And you do it because you think…

“I’m gonna show them I work harder and I’m nicer than anyone!”

And in the end, you either burn yourself out or you grow so resentful it crushes your spirit.

The solution is to build actual community by being willing to be vulnerable and honest about what you feel, what you want, and who you are. And that means you might get rejected. That means people might say no thanks.

What you do in that moment of rejection is where your character is truly revealed.

This movie made me want to check in with myself. To make sure I’m not guilty of thinking it’s enough to be nice. It’s easy to be nice before rejection. True character is established by practicing empathy and respect in the face of hearing no.

Bear never learned that. And everyone around him that he claimed to care about paid the price.

The film offers no easy answers or logical explanations to dig into. No moment where someone stops and tells you what everything means. You can feel the larger mythology pressing against the edges of the frame, and it’s obvious that Kane Parsons has spent years thinking through the logic of this world. But one of my favorite things about the film is that none of that homework is required.

The exposition lives in the details. The world feels complete even when you’re only glimpsing fragments of it through a crack in the door.

This might leave some people feeling deeply dissatisfied by the experience? Me? I live for this stuff. Truthfully, I am an easy mark for this sort of thing, so I am wildly unbiased here.

With each passing year of film watching, I have grown to crave surrealism, dream logic, and existential dread, so this movie felt like it crawled directly into my brain and scratched it in all the right places.

What surprised me is that beneath all the abstraction, I found something unexpectedly emotional. Parsons seems fascinated by loneliness, dead ends, abandoned ambitions, and the strange ways we can become trapped inside structures of our own making, wandering through endless stagnation of a future that never arrived.

As someone who constantly wrestles with unrealized ambitions and the ghosts of abandoned dreams, I found myself connecting to that feeling more than I expected. There is a strange comfort in imagined realities and wandering the endless hallways of who you thought you might become.

What struck me is that the film doesn’t treat that space as entirely frightening. There’s safety in the Backrooms. It’s nostalgic, comforting even. But there’s also aggressive stagnation and isolating loneliness. You risk becoming trapped inside old versions of yourself, endlessly revisiting paths you could have taken but didn’t.

For all its monsters and abstractions, I left the film feeling like I had been given a sobering reminder: eventually, you have to leave the damn maze. You have to return to the world as it is, not the world you imagined it would be.

I certainly wasn’t expecting a 20-year-old director to call me out on such a personal level, yet here we are.

Our central character, Clark, aspires to be an architect. Those dreams and ambitions have not panned out. He blames everyone but himself. In lieu of building new things, he sells cheap, bargain basement accoutrements of the buildings he so desperately desires to create.

Maybe the metaphor is a little on the nose, but I saw myself in it fully. That feeling of standing in the shadow of the thing you hope to create, spending all your time and energy making cheap imitations and abstractions of it — it feels like such a clear representation of the artist who lives adjacent to their dream but never actually doing it. The barista sweeping the floors of the coffee shop surrounded by the writers they dream of working with. The musician teaching lessons to children while their childhood bandmate tours the country. The actor who pays to play while the real work happens in rooms they could never dream of being invited into.

Sometimes, rather than face the reality of the situation, we choose to return to the nostalgia of the dream. What could have been. It’s a comforting, unreal fantasy.

There are stretches where the movie abandons conventional storytelling almost entirely and just commits to pure audiovisual nightmare logic. Those sequences are extraordinary. I found myself cackling at the sheer audacity of the swing.

If you’re looking for a film that delivers traditional scares or neatly packaged emotional catharsis, this may not be your movie.

But if you’ve ever revisited an old dream, remembered a version of yourself you thought you’d become, felt the sinking feeling of dreams lost to time, or found yourself haunted by ambitions that never fully materialized, Backrooms may hit with surprising force.

For my money, it’s one of the most exciting feature debuts in years.

More importantly, it made me want to go make something really freaking weird and personal. And that, in and of itself, is the solution to escaping the maze. You can wander endlessly in what could have been. Or you can face the day and do the best with what you have here and now.

This movie made me want to create with abandon.

I can’t think of a higher compliment than that.

Starkid is launching a new musical called Tomb Quest, and I get to join Lauren Lopez, Corey Dorris, AJ Holmes, Joey Richter, Kim Whalen and the rest of this incredible creative team in bringing it to life.

We kick off the Kickstarter tomorrow (Saturday, May 2nd at 1PM) with livestreams every Saturday through May.

If you’ve followed my work for a while, you know how much these shows mean to me. This one feels especially close to home.

Twenty years ago, six friends abandoned their TTRPG, dungeon-crawling campaign. When tragedy reunites the group, they set out to finally finish the game. Now they’ll need to rekindle friendships and confront their personal demons if they ever hope to defeat the foe they never could as kids: Terrazon.

TOMB QUEST is a new musical comedy written by Matt Lang & Eric Kahn Gale, with music by Clark Baxtresser and lyrics by Clark Baxtresser & Eric Kahn Gale. If funded, the show will premiere live this summer at the Colony Theatre in Los Angeles, then hit YouTube shortly after.

What Is It About?

This show is about friendship, community, and the power of imagination.

The escape of play. Creativity. Making something you care about with your friends.

But more than that, it’s about what happens when you come back to something unfinished.

How a story can become a space where people actually see each other again. Where you say the things you didn’t say. Where you process grief, distance, time.

That idea - using story as a way in - is kind of at the center of everything I’m interested in right now. It’s why I make the podcast. It’s why I write here.

This show just happens to do it out loud, with absolute banger tunes, amazing characters, and a genuinely touching and hilarious script.

Meet Luke (AKA Lucian Heartstring)

I’m playing Luke (and his in-game character, Lucian Heartstring).

Luke is… a little stuck. He overthinks, hesitates, says the wrong thing or nothing at all. Still carrying feelings he never really dealt with.

Lucian is the opposite.

He’s confident, romantic, completely unfiltered. Makes bold choices. Falls in love effortlessly, passionately, wildly. Always has a song in his heart.

But he is cursed… and that curse might be the very thing that keeps him from ever holding onto any of it.

Also, I get to play opposite Kim Whalen, which is really fun. It’s the first time we’ve been cast opposite each other in a stage show since before we were even dating.

Why This Story Means So Much To Me

This show mirrors a lot of where I’m at creatively right now.

The version of me that wanted to be a storyteller when I was a teenager has taken a few hits over the years. Life does that.

But lately I’ve found my way back to it - not through chasing outcomes, but by falling back in love with the process. With play.

When I first read this script, it felt like it was speaking directly to that.

It’s about holding onto your imagination through all of it - the failures, the wins, the heartbreak, even loss.

This one feels special.

I hope you’ll join us in our quest.

-Curt

I try to do it three or four times a week.

Not in real life. At the movies. Like Nicole.

Nicole understands. And that is why she is our Queen.

Here’s what’s been happening to me lately.

I’ll read a headline about something genuinely devastating. Something that, if I really sat with it, should completely wreck me. A tragedy. A crisis. Something real, happening to real people, right now.

And my reaction is just…

“Man, that’s awful.”

And then I scroll on. Before I know it, that horrible, painful thing is an afterthought.

And I want to be clear about something. It’s not that I don’t care about the tragedies that come into the feed. It’s that the way I’m encountering this information is specifically designed to prevent me from caring fully as a human being.

A notification. A fifteen second clip. A headline between two memes. The format tells my brain this is content to be consumed, not a human story to be felt.

And when everything arrives the same way, wars, political corruption, celebrity gossip, natural disasters, sports scores, Kalshi predictions on whether or not we’re gonna drop a nuke and also if Timothée Chalamet will win the Oscar… it all starts to flatten. Not because the tragedies aren’t real. But because the delivery system treats them like they aren’t.

It’s like every channel on the mixer is pushed all the way up. And instead of feeling more, you just get noise. Flat. Constant. Background.

And somewhere along the way, your emotional response doesn’t disappear.

It just dulls.

And then I go to the movies.

I sit in a dark room. I watch something I know isn’t real.

And it destroys me.

I’m crying over people who don’t exist. Situations that never happened. A completely constructed emotional experience.

And somehow, that hits harder than the real thing. Why? Why does something fictional feel more real than reality?

I don’t think it’s because stories are more powerful than real life. I think it’s because real life, the way we experience it now, isn’t built to be felt. It’s built to be processed.

You skim it. You categorize it. You move on.

Stories don’t let you do that. They inherently slow you down. They give pain, joy, loss, tragedy, victory, love, heartache and hope a shape, a face, a beginning, a middle, and an end. They don’t let you scroll past it.

They make you stay.

The problem isn’t that the news isn’t real. It’s that it arrives in fragments. A headline. A clip. A scroll. Nothing has a beginning or an end. Nothing asks you to stay.

A story does.

In a story, your attention is locked. There’s no next tab. No notification. No algorithm pulling you somewhere else. You’re just there. And when your attention is actually there, your emotions follow.

And there’s something else going on too.

Stories give you proximity to pain without responsibility.

You don’t have to fix it. You don’t have to respond to it. You don’t have to do anything except feel it. Fully. Without guilt. Without the pressure to act immediately.

And that’s something most of us don’t give ourselves permission to do anymore.

So it’s not that stories make you feel more than reality.

It’s that they don’t let you look away.

And the more I sit with that, the more I think this isn’t just entertainment.

It’s maintenance.

Here’s the analogy I keep coming back to.

When you go to the gym, you’re not lifting weights because lifting weights is the point. You’re lifting weights in a controlled, artificial environment so that your body is strong enough to handle the demands of the real world outside the gym. The workout isn’t the destination. It’s the preparation.

I think stories work the same way.

When I sit in a dark room and let something wreck me, when I feel grief for people who don’t exist, fear for situations that never happened, I’m doing reps. I’m exercising something.

Empathy.

The capacity to feel what someone else feels. To imagine a life that isn’t mine and care about what happens to it.

And like any muscle, if you don’t use it, it atrophies.

If you only ever engage with things that are comfortable and easy and safe, you slowly lose access to everything else. The range of motion closes down. The sensitivity fades.

But here’s the thing about the gym.

You don’t go to the gym and never leave.

The workout only means something if you take the body somewhere. If you do nothing with the strength you’ve built, the reps were just reps. The point was never the lifting. The point was what the lifting makes possible.

Same thing here.

I don’t want to mistake feeling a lot of emotion for a fictional character for meaningful action in the real world. Crying at a movie is not the same as showing up for someone. Being moved is not the same as moving.

But I do think one leads to the other, if you let it.

The practice of feeling something fully and of not looking away, of staying in the room with someone else’s pain even when it’s uncomfortable… that’s not the destination. It’s the training. It’s building the muscle memory of care so that when the real moment comes, you’re not starting from zero.

So feel it. Let it wreck you. And then take that somewhere.

So when I hear someone say “I don’t want to watch something sad right now”, I get it. I really do.

But I also think that instinct, taken too far, leads somewhere worse.

Because the world is not going to stop being hard. The headlines are not going to stop coming. The noise is not going to quiet down on its own.

And if you spend enough time avoiding the things that might hurt, you wake up one day and realize you’ve gone numb. Not because you’re broken. Because you adapted. Because the alternative felt like too much.

But here’s what I know.

When I let a story wreck me, when I sit in the dark and feel something all the way through, I can feel my chest open back up. I can feel the electricity of empathy moving through me again. It reminds me what I’m capable of feeling. It reminds me what it actually means to be a person paying attention.

The world needs people who are paying attention.

So yeah. Get your heart broken.

On purpose. Regularly. As often as you can manage.

Not because it’s fun. Not because it’s cathartic, exactly.

But because it’s one of the only places left where you can feel something all the way through without being asked to immediately do something about it.

And if the world starts to feel like noise… and the only place you remember how to feel is inside a story?

That’s not weakness.

That might be exactly the point.

I made a video about this too, including two specific films that broke me open in ways I didn’t expect. You can watch it here:

- Curt

It’s the kind of job where you walk onto set and immediately feel how dialed-in everything is. The machine is running, everyone knows their role, and your job is to step into that world and make your piece of it feel specific and real.

The episode centers on a Navy lieutenant played by Yael Grobglas (Jane the Virgin, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Matlock) who resurfaces after being presumed lost in a plane disappearance, and the team has to piece together what actually happened. I play her field producer, Michael Bell, who’s right there by her side, doting on her recovery but more deeply connected to the situation than it might initially seem.

It’s a classic procedural structure, but what stood out to me was how much room there still was to make things specific and alive inside that framework.

Rocky Carroll directed the episode, and he created a set that felt genuinely creative.

The show runs like a machine, but he still made space for exploration and play, which made a big difference.

I got to work opposite Yael Grobglas, and watching her work up close was a highlight. She brings a ton of presence and gravitas to what she’s doing, and it was an honor to share scenes with her.

Getting to step into a world with legendary actors like Sean Murray and Gary Cole, was an actor’s dream. You can feel how solid the show is because of them and how easily and deftly they command the screen.

The whole cast and crew were incredibly welcoming, which made walking into an established set like that feel easy and collaborative.

It airs this week on CBS and streams on Paramount+. If you catch it, I hope you enjoy it!

You can watch a sneak peek here:

-Curt

Why? I think because it feels productive. It feels like momentum.

But the more I make things, the more I’m starting to think it’s the fastest way to kill something before it has a chance to become what it actually is.

Some ideas need privacy. Not in a precious, gatekeeping way. Just long enough to figure out what they are without outside noise shaping them too early.

Because once you say something out loud, especially to the internet, it changes. It becomes something people can react to, label, misunderstand, or try to fix. And suddenly you’re responding to feedback instead of discovering the thing.

We talked about this on my podcast So What Are You Into?! this week with Ali Gordon, author of the novel We Have Reached the End of Our Show.

A lot of what we circled was this instinct to explain something before it’s ready. To make sure people “get it.” To soften it or frame it or justify it before it even has a shape.

But the impact of the work doesn’t come from explaining it. It comes from experiencing it in its most complete form.

Sitting with something that isn’t finished feels uniquely anti-modern. We’re constantly being pushed to share, to document, to turn everything into content. Sitting in silence with something until it’s actually formed feels outdated. But maybe that’s exactly the antidote to the grind of content culture.

We’ve gotten so used to performing our process that we’ve forgotten how to actually be in it.

Not everything needs to be shared while it’s still forming.

Not everything needs feedback.

Not everything needs to be understood immediately.

Some things just need time to become what they are.

We get into all of this on this week’s episode of So, What Are You Into?! if you want to hear the full conversation.

-Curt Mega

People poking at the logic, people not vibing with the millennial, Reddit-coded humor. That’s all taste and preference and fine with me.

But the one I can’t really get behind is the idea that the film is inherently happy or naive or that it lacks weight. Because I don’t think that’s what the film is doing at all.

And on a second viewing, the thing that really brought it into focus for me is Sandra Hüller’s Eva Stratt, the person put in charge of humanity’s last-ditch attempt to save itself.

She’s not hopeful in any conventional sense. She’s carrying the full weight of inevitability.

When Grace asks, “Do you believe in God?” and she responds, “It’s better than the alternative,” it doesn’t land as faith. It lands as necessity. She’s choosing the only framework that allows her to keep moving forward, because the alternative would be to simply give up and wait for the darkness to come.

And then there’s the party on board the ship.

A room full of people celebrating what is, in reality, a suicide mission. Grace doesn’t understand it. It strikes him as strange and surreal that we should be celebrating what we know is inevitable demise. Then Stratt takes the mic and starts singing Sign of the Times.

There’s a bittersweet resolve to this moment. As the camera pushes in close on Hüller’s face, you can feel her broken spirit, her unwavering resolve, and the understanding that survival is most assuredly a pipedream. And yet she sings:

“Just stop your crying, it’ll be alright…

They told me that the end is near…”

She’s putting her faith in a future that likely won’t come to pass, and asking everyone else to do the same. Believe in hope even when it’s impossible. What other choice is there?

The cost of doing nothing is everything.

The moment we find ourselves in, culturally, geopolitically, and economically, is bleak. To deny that, to look away and pretend the tidal wave isn’t at our door, would be ignorance. But does that mean we give up? That we resign ourselves to the inevitable darkness?

Stratt’s and the film’s answer is no.

You bring the best of yourself to the task at hand. You use whatever skills and gifts you have. You launch yourself into the darkness and face the problem.

And somewhere out there, all alone, Rocky is doing the same.

Why? Because it’s better than the alternative.

Riker Lynch joins my podcast with James Tolbert to talk about making his first feature and what it took to actually start before everything was in place. We get into collaborating with friends, not waiting for creative permission, and how the process of making the film showed up at a moment when he really needed it.

Riker brings:

• Directing his first feature Stakeout, skydiving, Old Dominion’s Barbara

Riker talks about being drawn to things that require full engagement, directing a feature, skydiving, putting yourself in situations where you have to be all in. We get into what it means to commit before you feel ready and how that mindset carried into making Stakeout with his friends.

He also talks about how Old Dominion’s Barbara found him at the exact right time after a difficult season, and how certain pieces of art seem to show up when you need them. Not in an abstract way, but in a way that actually helps you process what you’re going through and keep moving forward.

James brings:

• Jungle’s visual album

James talks about the choreography and visual storytelling across Jungle’s music videos, how it’s directly inspiring two projects he’s working on, and why storytelling through dance in music videos feels like a bit of a lost art.

Curt brings:

• Project Hail Mary

Curt talks about why the book stuck with him and how it frames scientific and emotional curiosity as something that can actually move us forward, and the idea that a better future is possible if we’re willing to stay curious enough to build it.

Along the way the conversation keeps circling back to a bigger idea: what it means to just start, to make something with the people around you, and to trust the process even before you feel ready.

We talk about:

• Starting before you feel ready

• Making things with your friends

• Not waiting for creative permission

• Storytelling through choreography

• Curiosity as a creative engine

So… what are you into right now?

That kind of belief now feels distant. Like a fading image of a younger, more certain version of yourself.

It’s hard to take hope at face value right now. Hard to buy into it as something actionable. Most of life feels like mitigating disaster instead of pursuing meaningful change.

Nihilism starts to feel like the default setting. Cost of living rises. Job options wither. Wars continue. We scroll through all of it in real time. And somewhere in the background, there’s this growing sense that the work you care about might not need you much longer.

So when a movie comes along and asks, “what if we fought back against the literal darkness and believed there was a chance,” it can feel hollow.

That was the mindset I had going into Project Hail Mary, the newest film from Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, starring Ryan Gosling as microbiologist Ryland Grace and James Ortiz as his alien counterpart, Rocky.

I walked into the theater excited for the craft. The scale. The handmade puppet work. Still, I didn’t trust what it was offering. I expected something fleeting. A brief lift, then the familiar return to baseline.

I’m very happy to say I was wrong

What actually carries the film isn’t belief in some abstract greater good.

It’s curiosity.

The willingness to keep asking questions. To try to understand something completely outside your frame of reference. To stay with something unfamiliar instead of shutting it out. That alone feels almost radical right now, in a moment defined by tribalism, cynicism, and a kind of ambient nihilism.

Curiosity asks more of you. It asks you to risk being wrong. To admit you don’t fully understand what you’re looking at. And to keep moving toward a solution even when you’re not sure you’re the one equipped to find it.

It asks a simple question:

What if things could get better?

That’s a question I’ve had a hard time asking out loud.

Project Hail Mary builds itself around that question. Not “everything will work out,” but something much more nuanced and intangible. The idea that something might be worth understanding before you reject it.

I could feel my own resistance starting to break.

The film doesn’t argue that hope is justified. It doesn’t pretend the odds aren’t terrible. It doesn’t clean up the cost of trying.

It just keeps choosing to engage. Work the problem. Collaborate. Continue.

I’ve gotten used to keeping some distance from anything that asks me to believe in a larger collective effort. It’s easier that way. You don’t have to be disappointed. You don’t have to invest in something that might fail.

So when something leans the other way, my instinct is to reject it. Call it naive, cloying, maybe even twee.

But watching characters choose to stay curious in the face of literal imminent darkness, even when it would be easier not to, I felt that cynical instinct give way to real openness. The sense that curiosity, competence, and collaboration might be our only shot at salvation.

Not replaced with blind belief, but something more deliberate than that.

And right now, that kind of optimism feels radical.

Maybe that’s where something like hope actually starts.

Maybe. That would be amaze.

James and I have worked together as a pair for years, onstage and off. We have built shows together. We have toured together. We have had long conversations about art in dressing rooms and living rooms and coffee shops. Turning on the microphones felt inevitable.

The show is called So, What Are You Into?

Each episode, we bring one thing we have genuinely been engaging with lately. Movies. Shows. Books. Ideas. We talk about why it is sticking.

Not reviews. Not news. Not homework.

Just conversation about the things that will not leave us alone.

In our first episode, we kept circling the same idea from different directions. Ordinary characters. Not chosen ones. Just people trying to do their jobs well in systems that do not reward decency.

If you enjoy conversations about art, media, and how it shapes the way we see the world, this show is for you.

We are excited to keep sharing what we are into, and to bring on friends, artists, and collaborators to nerd out about the work that is moving them.

Watch on YouTube

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

Watch on Spotify:

-Curt

It wrecked me.

Does it hold up? Yes. Is it still one of the greatest films ever made? Also, yes.

But what wrecked me this time had nothing to do with scale or craft.

At its core, this is a story about failure.

And it took me 25 years to fully understand that.

In fact, failure is the recurring theme of the entire trilogy.

You can see it everywhere once you start looking. Boromir’s failure in Fellowship fractures the group and proves that good intentions don’t make you immune to temptation.

Théoden’s failure to act sooner in The Two Towers costs him his son and leaves his people exposed.

Gandalf fails to see Saruman’s betrayal until it’s too late, trusting wisdom and rank where he shouldn’t have.

Time and again, strength, authority, supernatural ability, even ancient wisdom prove insufficient. The story keeps reminding us that being good, or brave, or well-intentioned is never enough on its own.

Without our friends, the weight of it all is impossible to carry.

Our heroes fall prey to greed, weakness, misinformation, lies, deceit, and the crushing weight of an evil so vast that it feels pointless to even try to fight back.

But they do fight back. Even in the face of hopelessness.

Frodo cannot will himself up the mountain. His strength simply runs out. The Ring does not care how brave he has been so far. His body gives up before his mission does.

Sam cannot carry the Ring. He never pretends he can. But he can carry Frodo.

“I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you.”

I didn’t understand that line as a kid. I think I thought it was about loyalty and not giving up. As an adult it feels like an admission of limitation. I cannot take your pain from you. I cannot fix the thing you are carrying. But I can stand close enough that you don’t have to collapse alone.

It hits deeper once you’ve watched people you love break under weight you can’t lift for them.

Aragorn’s last stand at the Black Gate is not heroic in the way movies usually sell heroism. There is no strategy that ends in victory. They are surrounded. Outnumbered. They are supposed to lose.

The entire plan is a lie. A distraction. A desperate gamble meant to buy Frodo a little time on the fool’s hope that he can do the impossible. Which he can’t. He never could.

Aragorn is not fighting to win. He is fighting to stall.

There is no glory in it. Just responsibility. Show up. Hold the line. Die if you have to. Hope someone else finishes the job.

And Frodo doesn’t.

Frodo fails.

He reaches the edge of the fire and cannot do the one thing the entire world depends on him doing. He claims the Ring. He chooses it. It overtakes him.

The quest itself fails at the finish line. Until Gollum intervenes.

Middle-earth is saved not because Frodo is stronger than temptation, but because Gollum is weaker than greed. Gollum fails too. And in that failure, the Ring is destroyed.

The world is saved by accident. By collision. By faith. By weakness intersecting with friendship, again and again.

Éowyn cannot defeat the Witch-king alone.

Merry saves her. A hobbit. Overlooked. Small. In the wrong place. But without both of them, the battle is lost.

Merry and Pippin make key mistakes at every turn. And somehow their wrongness wakes the Ents, splits Isengard, pulls armies out of position. Their failure to be great heroes triggers a revolution.

Even Sam fails his mission. He is by Frodo’s side to the end, but in the final moments of the Ring’s existence, he is powerless to help his friend.

No one is sufficient on their own. Not one of them.

What saves the world is that when they fail, someone else is close enough to notice.

That feels like the real thesis of these stories. Not destiny. Not kingship. Not courage in isolation. Fellowship. Proximity. Staying when it would be easier to turn away.

Watching it now, here in 2026, I cannot help but feel a great peril at our gates.

It’s different, obviously. Less literal. But the feeling is the same. The weight of an all-seeing eye. The sense that we are being watched, measured, judged. That every individual is expected to be strong enough on their own, clear enough on their own, resilient enough on their own.

We’re told to be strong, to be right, to be self-sufficient. To carry everything privately while the world burns publicly. The result is isolation. Fragmentation. Everyone carrying something too heavy while pretending they’ve got it handled.

Left to our own strength and our own private journeys, we are going to stumble. We already are.

The lie is that we are supposed to do this alone.

Tolkien’s story and Jackson’s film don’t argue for individual greatness. They argue for showing up until you can’t. For staying close. For trusting that when you fall, someone else will pick you up.

We will walk until we collapse. And then, if we’re lucky, if we’ve built something real with the people around us, our friends will be there.

They won’t carry the burden for us.

But they might carry us the rest of the way up the mountain.

It’s almost a cliché at this point. But as artists and creators, we still build our lives around chasing peak moments. The show, the project, the stage, the red carpet, the video going viral. We put these benchmarks out in front of us like they are the whole point. Then we organize our sense of meaning around pursuing them, even when we know that this kind of day in and day out “success” is unrealistic and unsustainable.

Those peaks are a fraction of the experience. The ordinary is the actual life.

And if you do not learn to love the ordinary, you will never feel satisfied when the extraordinary shows up, because the extraordinary is rare by definition. It is never going to be most of your days.

WAITING FOR THE BIG MOMENT

I used to think my life would start when the big thing happened.

When I first moved to Los Angeles, my days were monotonous. I was working at Starbucks. I was beating the pavement. I was doing the thing a lot of people do when they move to a big city with a big dream, living in that waiting room energy, hoping something would happen.

Then something did.

I booked Glee, and it felt like I got shot out of a cannon. I went from a very ordinary existence to suddenly being inside a world I had only dreamed of. And I remember thinking, “This is my life now. This is what it’s always going to be.”

For a couple years it really did feel like that. There were slow stretches, sure, but every few weeks something would happen. New opportunity. New door. Then a freaking world tour! It was an ongoing sense of: “I cannot believe I am here.”

That period changed my life and it still opens doors to this day.

But that peak ended, and by 2014, things went back to ordinary very quickly and I fell into a deep depression. I felt like I failed to sustain this new normal. I failed to continue operating at the heights. I went back to my normal life and, in that time, it felt like failure.

It took a long stretch of time to unlearn this way of viewing what is the BULK of my life.

THE GIFT OF THE VALLEY

For a long time, I treated the valley like a place you are supposed to escape. Like being “in between” meant I was failing, stalled, or doing something wrong.

In 2025, I got something I have not had much of in recent years. Time. Time to build habits and routines. Time for quiet. Time to think. Time to experience life as a daily rhythm.

Not hustle culture. Not some toxic grind. Just the truth that most days are repetitive. Most days are not glamorous. Most days are not proof of anything.

But that monotony gave me something I did not realize I needed. It gave me the chance to rebuild my baseline, reorient myself, and get mentally and physically healthier. It also prepared me, not just for the next opportunity, but for the life that has to exist underneath any opportunity.

THE PEAK IS NOT MEANT TO BE SUSTAINABLE

As artists, we attach meaning to rare moments. We look at other creators and we see the highlight reel, and we think they must feel the fullness of all their effort paying off in this one shining moment.

Even when we know social media is curated, we still make this quiet mistake.

“Yeah, yeah, I know it is a highlight reel. But if that were me, I would appreciate it. I would really own it.”

And to some extent, sure. When I get to work on awesome things, I am genuinely stoked. I love it. I do appreciate it. I get to live the dream.

But here’s the truth that’s hard to swallow as artists.

Extraordinary things become ordinary very quickly.

That is not a cynical thought. It is just how humans work. The dream becomes normal if you live it long enough.

The thing your past self would lose their mind over becomes the most normal Tuesday you can imagine.

So if I cannot love the ordinary now, I will not love it later. I will just keep moving the goalposts.

THE RESET MOMENT

I had a moment recently where I was sitting at home. My cat was next to me. My wife was on the couch. We were watching a movie. Nothing was happening. But there was a profound sense of peace and belonging.

I remember thinking…

“I am living in Los Angeles with someone I love, with pets I love, with friends and community I love and creating every single day.

We are watching a movie and we are at peace. So much of the world does not get peace, and I have it in this moment.”

I felt overwhelmed by gratitude, and it made me ask a question I do not think I was asking before.

How can I find this every day?

How can I appreciate the process?

How can I bring that gratitude to the ordinary?

You are not going to walk into every mundane task and feel bliss. You are not going to do laundry and suddenly become enlightened.

But if you treat 95 percent of your life like a waiting room, the 5 percent will not fix it.

If you are not present in the ordinary, the extraordinary cannot make up for it.

For years, I kept trying to punctuate my life with peaks, and I did not realize I was accidentally making the in-between feel like life was not happening yet.

But the valley is where I live. It is home. And it is good.

I don’t want my life to be a waiting room anymore.

If you’d like to watch this in video form, check out my newest YouTube video here:

1. I Don’t Love Vlogging… And That’s Okay

In theory, I love the idea of capturing moments of my life and creating stories from them. In practice, vlogging pulled me out of the moment. I love photography, love capturing things, love documenting projects but I realized I thrive with intentionality.

2. Consuming Without Reflecting Doesn’t Make Me Better

I consumed a ton this year, intentionally so. Films, books, performances, all in the effort of rekindling a creative spark. Turns out, it doesn’t mean anything unless I actually sit with it. Write something down. Infer meaning. Input without reflection is just noise that my brain quickly discards. Art is too precious to be discarded into the content heap. I want to take the time to let the stories I engage with actually resonate.

3. My Body Wasn’t Broken. It Was Burned Out

Years of bad sleep, stress, and “grind” disguised as momentum finally caught up with me. I had to rebuild my physical health from the ground up. And what shocked me was how fast my body responded once I stopped punishing it and started listening. I feel better than I have in a decade and it wasn’t because I achieved anything. It was because I stopped trying to do everything and focused on giving myself what I needed. Proper nutrition, exercise, rest, sleep and creative play.

4. Consistency Beats Inspiration

The unsexy truth is that showing up and doing the freaking thing is 90% of the game. The boring stuff usually has the largest ROI. You may not feel it for a long time, but even mediocre consistency over time will be bouts of genius.

5. Saying Yes to Everything is a Form of Self-Abandonment

Trying to be everything, on every platform, in every project, left me fragmented. I had to start saying no to find my voice again. And in doing so, I remembered what I actually love to make.

6. Photography Made Me More Present

Photography helped me see again. Not just aesthetically, but emotionally. It reshaped how I think as a filmmaker, as an actor, as a storyteller. It’s not about monetizing or content. It’s about presence and the power of telling a story in one single frame.

7. Sleep is the Foundation

Sleep wasn’t optional. It was the missing piece. For years I told myself I didn’t need it because I am able to function on a very little of it. But functioning isn’t the same as thriving. Once I started prioritizing real rest, everything changed. Focus. Energy. Creativity. All of it. I’m the very last person to learn this very obvious lesson but hey, I got here eventually.

8. Pursue Creative Authenticity

I am letting go of the desire to be seen and replacing it with the intent to go deep. I want to talk about creativity, about characters, about stories. If fewer people care, so be it. I’d rather be honest than optimized and know that I can stand by what I put put out there.

9. I Thought I Was Done But I Was Just Running on Empty

There were moments this year I truly thought the spark was gone. But what I needed wasn’t a breakthrough, it was a better fuel source. I didn’t need to quit. I needed to recharge.

10. I’m More Alive, Creative, and Lit Up Than I’ve Been in Years

I don’t know exactly what’s coming in 2026. But I feel clear. Present. Focused. Alive. Recommitted to the path and genuinely loving the idea of what it means to be an artist and live the creative life day in and day out. Not because it’s easy, but because it matters deeply to me. And I’m freaking lucky to be doing it.

As part of this reset, I’m doing a 30-day creative shift series over on TikTok, IG, and YouTube. One small video a day, each focused on a tiny perspective shift that’s helped me get unstuck.

No heavy lifting. Just simple, doable resets that might help you reconnect with your own spark.

If that sounds like something you need right now, it’s all up on my socials.

If you’d rather watch than read or listen, there’s a video version of this here:

👉

This past year was one of the most difficult, challenging, and formative years of my life so far. Burnout was real. I realized I had been running on nearly a decade of unsustainable output and an empty tank, and at some point, that kind of pace catches up with you.

On the surface, the year was full in a lot of meaningful ways. I shared Space Baby with the world. I stepped in for Paul in The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals: Reprised. I traveled to New York for Kim’s premiere of The Black Dagger Brotherhood. I got to watch my buddy Darren’s Tony Award–winning turn in Maybe Happy Ending and witness the ferocious talent that is Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray, both of which have stayed with me many months later. I booked a few national commercials and got very close on a handful of major on-camera projects which gives me the courage to keep going.

I also grew as an actor in deep and specific ways that are difficult to translate on social media, but are felt in the work and in my own understanding of the craft. We expanded our production company and officially launched a brick-and-mortar studio in Los Angeles. Alongside that, I spent a huge amount of time working with artists through Story Matters Studios: dozens upon dozens of coaching sessions, film camps with over forty actors, directing and producing projects, and collaborating with artists all over the country.

We traveled for weddings, projects, and events. It was a full year in every sense of the word.

Those things mattered, and I’m proud of them.

But what most people didn’t see was the work happening underneath all of that.

The quieter, harder work. The kind that forces you to question your values, your identity, your systems, and your habits. The work of realizing that momentum isn’t the same thing as sustainability. The work of noticing how much of my sense of worth had become tangled up in output, availability, and always being “on.”

In a lot of ways, this year stripped things down to their essentials. I was given the chance and the privilege to rebuild how I approach life, creativity, and work in a healthier, more intentional way. I reshaped some core parts of my life in ways that are difficult to fully articulate in a post like this, but they’ve been deep, meaningful, and necessary.

What I can say is that I’m entering this new year in a healthier, more energetic, and more focused place than I’ve been in a long time. That doesn’t mean everything is resolved or easy, but it does feel like a new lease on life. I feel motivated to protect my time, my energy, and my curiosity, and to put them toward work that actually matters to me.

As part of recalibrating, I’ve also been paying close attention to the stories that stayed with me this year. The ones that challenged me, moved me, unsettled me, or reminded me why I fell in love with this work in the first place.

Below are a few snapshots of what shaped me creatively this year. This definitely isn’t an exhaustive list. These are just the films and shows that resonated the most and reminded me why I love this work, and why I still want to be making stories like this.

Films That Stayed With Me in 2025

• One Battle After Another

• Sinners

• Warfare

• Friendship

• Eddington

• Weapons

• Marty Supreme

• Companion

• Sorry, Baby

• Jay Kelly

TV That Stayed With Me in 2025

1. Pluribus

   Phenomenal. Funny, wacky, heartbreaking sci-fi that’s female-focused and exquisitely made.

2. Task

   A devastating, taut procedural that avoids the usual clichés and instead digs into found family, purpose, and the weight of mistakes we can’t undo. It understands how small we are in a much larger system. Mark Ruffalo and Tom Pelphrey are remarkable.

3. Severance

   Still breaking new ground, but what impressed me most was how firmly it kept character front and center despite the sci-fi premise. Season two absolutely ruled.

4. Hacks

   Possibly the funniest show on television, but the comedy never oversteps the interpersonal dynamics. It’s an extremely inside-baseball Hollywood show that somehow feels made for me while still being rich, tense, and deeply character-driven.

5. Adolescence

   A masterpiece of the medium. A hard watch, but one of the most poignant and humane examinations of the “how did we get here?” question we’re facing. It offers no easy answers, and that’s exactly why it works.

6. The Studio

   Audacious, biting, and hilarious. If you love movies, this is a show for you.

7. The Pitt

   Despite my usual allergy to procedural emergency dramas, everything about this worked for me. The filmmaking, the performances, the constant momentum. It honestly feels closer to great theater than television.

8. Andor

   The best thing to ever come out of Star Wars. A defining work of this moment that speaks powerfully, intelligently, and thrillingly to a world staring fascism in the face. I still can’t believe this show exists.

As I head into this next chapter, my focus is on daily discipline, sustainable creativity, and building work with intention. I’m excited to document and share that process as it unfolds, and to keep having conversations about the stories that shape us and the ones we feel compelled to tell in return.

If you’re reading this, thank you for being here.

— Curt

So this article (and video) is about that feeling. Tell me if this thought process has ever infiltrated your mind.

WE ALL KNOW THE TRAP

“Everyone else is doing something really cool besides me. Everyone else is doing something meaningful, purposeful, fulfilling. But me? I’m just sitting here on the couch, scrolling through other people’s successes. They’re out there impacting lives, making deals, making their dreams come true. And me? Still just sitting here. Wasting my life.”

If you’re like me, you probably feel that way more often than you’d like to. It’s kind of the default setting for artists and creators who live online. You’ve probably heard the phrase “comparison is the thief of joy.” We all know this, right? Comparing your day-to-day life to other people’s highlights never leads to peace or contentment.

Social media is part of the trap. And yet, despite knowing that, I fall into it time and time again. I want to rewire my brain and approach creativity from a place that doesn’t make me feel like I’m the only one not doing anything meaningful.

Maybe the problem isn’t that I’m not doing enough. Maybe it’s thinking of creativity like a popularity contest instead of a scientific experiment.

THINKING LIKE A SCIENTIST

What if creative life worked more like the scientific method? It’s not about proving your brilliance. It’s about testing your assumptions. In science, you don’t try to prove yourself right, you try to prove yourself wrong. If, after numerous tests, you can’t prove it wrong, you might be onto something. It assumes humility from the start.

You don’t set out to win a Nobel Prize. You set out to test your ideas and see if they hold up to scrutiny. You stay open to feedback that might change what you know. You don’t experiment to get a specific result, you experiment to eliminate possibilities. And through testing, you get closer to the truth. That’s what moves things forward.

Sometimes I treat my creative life like a thesis I want validated and praised. No wonder I feel paralyzed. There’s no room for error. No room for discovery. When I see someone else’s work getting praise, I lose focus on my own experiment and fixate on their results instead of remembering how much trial and error got them there.

It always comes back to chasing results instead of focusing on process.

CHASING RESULTS TAKES YOU OUT OF THE PRESENT

As an actor, if I’m trying to achieve a certain emotional result, I’m blocking the very thing that could make the moment real. Because I’m not available to what’s happening. I’m performing for validation. That outward gaze robs you of the chance to make something of real value.

When creativity works, we praise it. We hand out awards, money, trophies. But the act of making something worth creating is messy. It’s full of false starts, self-doubt, and failure. You get lost, and then you dig your way out. That’s where the truth usually lives.

RUN THE EXPERIMENT AGAIN

Maybe the “everyone else is doing something cool besides you” feeling is just a signal to run the experiment again. Turn off the receiver that’s craving validation. Go inward. Focus on what actually excites you about the story you’re trying to tell.

Try it wrong. Mess it up. Stop trying to prove you’re worthy and start chasing what’s true. Start smaller than you think you should. Make something just for you. Don’t try to win the blue ribbon. Just start experimenting.

A lot of people who are successful can’t tell you exactly why what they made worked. Sometimes it just does. Trying to copy someone else’s plan won’t work. You’re a different artist. A different storyteller. Their process won’t give you their results. And you’ll miss the chance to bring yourself to the work. You are the variant that cannot be accounted for in someone else’s experiment.

So, yeah, a lot of people are doing cool stuff. But so are you. You’re making something cool right now.

All you have to do is finish it.

-Curt

🎥 I go into a deeper dive on this topic here in my newest YouTube video:

Let The Dream Die

Lately, I’ve been thinking about what it means to let go. Not in a poetic or inspirational way, but in the kind of way that feels like a quiet death. The kind where you realize you’re grieving the alternate versions of yourself you thought you were still supposed to become.

For a long time, I’ve wanted to do it all. Write, act, direct, make films, be on Broadway, run a production studio, teach, make videos for the internet, be a brilliant photographer, cinematographer, editor, colorist, sound designer, AND connect with people online in a meaningful and impactful way.

Every time I added something new, it felt like momentum. Like I was moving closer to the dream. But somewhere along the way, I started to realize that maybe I was just scattering my energy.

It’s that “jack of all trades” trap. For years, I convinced myself that being the most versatile artist under the sun would be my ultimate superpower. That if I could just do more things than anyone else, I’d gather enough momentum to bust down the steel doors that seemed locked tight. But now I can feel the cost. Because doing everything means I’m rarely doing anything deeply. And my hands are sore from pounding on the door. And nobody has come to open it.

I love the dreaming. I love that part of me that can see all the possibilities at once. But the work itself, the deep focused kind, costs something. It costs time. It costs attention. It costs saying no to everything else.

The Law of Large Numbers

There’s a concept from Dean Keith Simonton called the law of large numbers. Basically, the more you create, the more likely you are to make something great. But it’s a volume game. You have to stick to it and keep doing it. Most of what you come up with will kind of suck. Most ideas will be mediocre, unremarkable, and downright bad. But if you keep going, statistically speaking, something good will eventually emerge.

That takes patience and attentiveness. If you abandon the effort after the first few tries in hopes of finding another well to drill, you just keep hitting hard, cold dirt in a hundred different places. You never stay at one well long enough to hit oil. The great work doesn’t just come from volume. It comes from depth, from letting something mature over time and being willing to keep digging and digging and digging.

And I’ve been wondering if I’ve gone twenty miles wide at a hundred different drill sites and only one mile deep.

I saw a video recently that said your twenties are about dreaming and believing anything is possible, and your thirties are about letting some of those dreams go, about focusing in. That hit me hard. Because there are versions of myself I’ve been carrying that I still feel responsible to keep alive. The version that wanted to do every creative thing all at once. I know that’s simply impossible.

But maybe letting go isn’t failure. Maybe giving up on your old dreams is a kind of progress that makes room for the one or two things actually within your grasp.

Creative Compound Interest

Creativity compounds like interest. The longer you focus on one thing, the more powerful it becomes. Maybe that’s the real lesson I’ve been avoiding. Not that I can’t do it all, but that I shouldn’t.

I think part of why we cling to doing everything is fear. Fear that if we stop spinning all the plates, something essential will fall. But lately I’ve been realizing that some things need to fall, or you’ll never know what actually matters.

So yeah, I’m giving up. Not in a hopeless way. In a deliberate one.

I’m giving up on being everything so I can finally be something.

🎥 Here’s the companion video on YouTube where I unpack this in real time: