“You’re interesting until you become the character, and then you lose who you are.”
I had the pleasure of talking with Nate Bynum, an actor who remembers his first television acting job for a mistake rather than a triumph. On the set of In the Heat of the Night, Bynum stumbled over a line. Carroll O’Connor, the show’s star, approached, put his arms around him, and said, “Now, Nate, you can do this. I chose you. We’re all ready to go home now. Just do it, and I trust you.” Bynum completed the scene without another mistake. What stayed with him was the realization that O’Connor had personally chosen him for the role and was willing to trust his judgment.
For someone who would go on to appear in Iron Man 3, Outer Banks, and Grey’s Anatomy, that lesson was deceptively difficult. Bynum had trained to be precise, and he would spend much of his career teaching aspiring performers to prepare meticulously. Yet he eventually discovered that his pursuit of perfection could become the very thing preventing him from doing his best work.
In Columbia, South Carolina, where Bynum grew up, five people shared a two-room house with one large bedroom. Raised by his grandparents and an aunt, he remembers the household as loving despite its modest circumstances. Neither grandparent had finished elementary school, but both insisted that he receive an education. His aunt, a high school band member and homecoming queen, introduced him to another world. She made sure he played the clarinet, attended theatrical productions, and encountered people working in the arts. Boy Scouts and civic organizations broadened his experiences further. He remembers being “the only little Black kid in the neighborhood doing all that.”
His introduction to performance came almost accidentally. Older cousins, teenagers who babysat him during summer vacations, entertained themselves by playing teacher. They taught Bynum to read before he entered elementary school. His teachers noticed his ability and invited him to read the lunch menu over the school intercom. Soon he was reciting poetry, introducing visiting artists, and performing in school productions. Leading roles and scholarships followed. Bynum still credits those teenage cousins for setting everything in motion, recognizing how a childhood game opened opportunities nobody could have anticipated.
He eventually earned a Master of Fine Arts in acting from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he was a Graduate Deans Fellow, and built parallel careers in entertainment and higher education. He taught at Mississippi State University before joining the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he established the acting-for-the-camera program and developed its curriculum. His professional biography records several institutional firsts, including becoming the first Black tenured professor in both Mississippi State’s and UNLV’s theatre department, and the first Black tenured professor in the College of Fine Arts at UNLV, as well. He has also received the Nevada System of Higher Education’s Regents’ Creative Activity Award and recognition for his screenwriting.
Yet his early experience as a professor revealed an uncomfortable contradiction. Bynum believed that being an authority figure meant appearing impeccable. He wore a suit and tie, monitored every word, and felt obligated to have the correct answer to every question. “It made life miserable because I wasn’t having fun,” he recalls. His students found him difficult to approach, and he was equally uncomfortable. Eventually, he discovered that admitting “I don’t know, I’ll find out” could be more valuable than pretending to know everything. Humor, spontaneity, and ordinary conversation became part of his teaching.
The same adjustment proved essential to his acting career. His theatrical training had emphasized precise diction and carefully articulated speech, qualities that could seem artificial on camera. One casting director told him, “You’ve got to release the language. You’ve got to just talk.” Another delivered an even more revealing assessment: “You’re interesting until you become the character, and then you lose who you are.” For a professionally trained actor, it was a peculiar problem. He had become so concerned with creating convincing characters that he sometimes concealed the qualities casting directors found interesting about him.
Other performers helped reshape his understanding of the profession. During a film production alongside Bernie Casey, Phylicia Rashad, Isaac Hayes, and Richard Roundtree, Bynum expressed how honored he felt to work with actors he had admired growing up. Casey reminded him, “You’re one of us now,” and urged him to extend the same generosity to others. The exchange echoed O’Connor’s encouragement years earlier and offered a model for the respect Bynum would bring to his own work with students.
His recent experience filming Benny Safdie’s Lizard Music, starring Dwayne Johnson, brought those lessons into sharper focus. Cast by the Oscar-nominated, Jennifer Venditti, Bynum spent approximately forty days working in Atlanta and New York on a physically demanding production that sometimes required improvisation. The experience pushed him beyond familiar techniques, but he noticed something important about his audition: this time, he had brought “me” into the room. The actor who once struggled to appear natural before casting directors now felt comfortable relying on his own instincts, even while confronting unfamiliar demands.
Away from the camera and classroom, Bynum finds pleasure in quieter routines. He walks to clear his thoughts, enjoys watching wildlife, and cooks meals he cheerfully suspects nobody else would particularly appreciate. His wife, children, and grandchildren provide the grounding that makes his professional travel worthwhile. He also retains his grandmother’s insistence that people treat others with the consideration they would want for themselves, although his generosity comes with boundaries. “I’ll take three steps to be your friend before I ask you to take one,” he explains.
There is something fitting about an actor who has spent decades inhabiting other people’s lives discovering that his most valuable professional skill may be the ability to remain himself. Bynum continues to pursue demanding roles, develop stories, and teach younger performers, without suggesting that experience has eliminated uncertainty. The boy who once read lunch menus over a school intercom has traveled a remarkable distance. Yet the lesson he keeps returning to is surprisingly simple: he no longer has to pretend to have every answer before he can begin.
Yitzi Weiner: Nate Bynum, it’s such an honor to meet you. Before we dive in deep and talk about your great work, our readers would love to learn about Nate Bynum’s personal origin story. Can you share with us the story of your childhood and how you grew up, and particularly the seeds and the genesis of all the amazing creativity that’s come since then?
Nate Bynum: I live in Las Vegas now, but I grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. I was raised by my grandparents and an aunt. It was a two-room house, five people, one big bedroom, everybody sleeping where they can, that kind of thing. But it was a very loving house. Neither my grandmother nor my grandfather finished elementary school, but they were very committed to me getting an education for sure. And there were a lot of teachers who lived in the community, so educators and supporters of education were always around me.
My aunt was in high school at the time, and she was in the band, and she was also voted Miss Homecoming. She was very much involved in the arts. So those two worlds clashed for me. She made sure I played the clarinet. She made sure I saw theatrical productions and engaged with people who were artistic, those kinds of things. And I look back on it and I realize it was a foundation for what has evolved in my life: the emphasis on education and, of course, the emphasis on the arts, and Boy Scouts, and civic organizations.. And to be honest with you, Yitzi, I was the only little Black kid in the neighborhood doing all that. So, it was a different world for me.
Yitzi Weiner: Well, that’s amazing. So, please tell us the next chapter. Tell us how you first started, your first entrée or first breaks. I’d love to hear about it.
Nate Bynum: Well, I had learned to read before I got to school, really, because my babysitters during the summer were my older cousins next door. They were teenagers and they wanted to play teacher. So yeah, they taught us how to read. When I got to school, the teachers, I think, were a little surprised at how well I read, and they let me read the lunch menu on the intercom at the elementary school, and they let me read it in the class.
And that evolved into whatever events we would have, they would let me do tongue twisters or read poems or introduce guest artists. And that evolved into getting into leads in plays in junior high and high school, and then scholarships and all that. So, I have to give my cousins who taught me how to read credit for that, because one thing led to another, and I didn’t know that at the time either.
Yitzi Weiner: Unbelievable. So you probably have some amazing stories from your career, and I’m sure this is difficult to single out, but can you share with our readers two stories that stand out in your mind from your entertainment career?
Nate Bynum: In my career as a performer, one I have told many of my students is when I got my first acting gig. It was on a show called In the Heat of the Night. And the lead actor for that show was a guy named Carroll O’Connor, who was made famous by All In The Family.
Carroll O’Connor, a New Yorker, was playing a Southerner in In the Heat of the Night. And there I was. When we started the take, I flubbed my line. And he came up to me, put his arms around me, and he said, “Now, Nate, you can do this. I chose you. We’re all ready to go home now. Just do it, and I trust you.” And he walked away. That’s all he did. It calmed me down. I did the scenes, no more flubs, and I realized he was saying, “I chose you. I trust you. You can do this. Don’t put pressure on yourself. I’ve already put the pressure on me to take it off you.” It meant a lot. That’s one, because I didn’t know him. I didn’t know that he personally had cast me, but he told me that.
A second one would be when I was doing a movie, a feature film, with a number of stars that I grew up watching. And here I am, just acting like a little kid, or feeling like a little kid, because I was around Bernie Casey. Phylicia Rashad was in this particular movie. Isaac Hayes, the singer, was in this particular movie. And Shaft, the original Shaft, Richard Roundtree, was in this movie.
There was a moment where we were between setups, and I said to them, “Guys, I’m just so happy to be here, so proud.” And Bernie Casey looked at me and he said, “Well, that’s good, but you’re one of us now. We’re not stars to you. You’re our scene partners, and there are people looking at you. So, if you appreciate what we’ve done, please pass it on and let others appreciate it as well for what you’ve done for them.” And again, it meant the world to me, because what he was saying was, “Don’t treat us like stars, treat us like equals.” Anyway, it meant a lot to me at the time.
Yitzi Weiner: That’s an amazing story. That’s so beautiful. There’s a saying that sometimes our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Do you have a story about a funny mistake that you made when you were first starting in acting?
Nate Bynum: Yeah. When I first started, I had to be the perfect teacher, man. I had to look the part, act the part, be the role model, something that they had to aspire to. So, I wore a suit. I had a tie. I could not be reproached. because I had to be perfect. I had to speak well and say the right things and have all the right answers. It made life miserable because I wasn’t having fun. I wasn’t enjoying them, they were not enjoying me, and I wasn’t enjoying myself.
And then I realized that I didn’t have to do all that. I was allowed to make a mistake. I was allowed to say, “I don’t know, I’ll find out,” or “I’m not sure,” or just have a conversation with them. Just be me. Tell jokes. Laugh. Be open to information as opposed to having everything planned out perfectly well and feeling like it had to happen that way or it wasn’t right. So that was the first mistake I made as a teacher that I learned from when I first started teaching.
In acting, I think my biggest mistake was the same thing: just trying to be too perfect. When you go from stage, which was my initial training, to screen, you learn a certain speech pattern. My program emphasized Standard American English, and focused on clear and precise pronunciation.
When you get to film, that doesn’t work as well. It can come across as fake.
And so, the first thing a casting director told me was, “You’ve got to release the language. You’ve got to just talk. We don’t need you to be word-perfect or sound perfect, just talk.” And that was the first thing, going from one medium to another, one genre to another. And the same thing with teaching: you don’t need to be perfect. You need to be real and effective
Yitzi Weiner: There’s another saying that’s related, that “no” is not rejection, it’s redirection. Do you have a story like that where you got a “no” to an opportunity that led to an even better opportunity?
Nate Bynum: Yeah. When I first came out West from New York and I was auditioning for some major dramas, there was a casting session where the assistant had called me in because she really liked my work. But the head casting director just didn’t think much of it. Still, she obviously thought something of me. So after the audition, she said, “Listen to me. This is what you did.” And she showed me on the tape
She said, “It just looks false. You’re not going to get cast this time, not because you can’t act, you’re not going to get cast because you’ve not learned how to be who you are on camera yet.” This was my second time hearing that. So, she was saying, “Go away. We’re going to bring you back another time, probably in the near future. We don’t know when.” And they did. But she was saying, “I just want you to just be you. You’re interesting until you become the character, and then you lose who you are.”
So, it wasn’t a “no” where they were rejecting me. It was a “no” where they were saying, “We just can’t accept the person that you brought in, because we thought you were bringing a different person: you. And you left you behind.” So, I learned, and it worked out in the end.
Yitzi Weiner: So please tell us about any exciting new projects you’re working on now. Anything you’re working on, we’d love to hear all about it. Please feel free to be as elaborate as you’d like.
Nate Bynum: Projects I’m working on now. So, I just wrapped a feature film with director Benny Safdie starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and I was cast by the Oscar-nominated Jennifer Venditti. For a career, that means a lot because you’re working with some of the top people in the industry. I can’t say a lot about the project because there’s an NDA, but it’s called Lizard Music. I can say that.
Working with Benny, who is one of those young directors who likes the gritty-style, improvisational, creative actors, I learned a lot again, and I realized that I was ready for it. I wasn’t intimidated, and he was easy to work with in that sense. And also, auditioning for Jennifer, from the earlier lessons I had learned which I talked about working with casting directors, I brought “me” in there. I’ve gotten to the point where I know how to be me in a casting session, and it worked, because Jennifer is also known for saying you have to be real — don’t bring in acting schools and all those lessons. So it was a great experience. Forty days on a set in Atlanta and in New York, and it should be a good film.
Yitzi Weiner: Sounds amazing. Okay, amazing. What’s been the most challenging project or role you’ve taken on so far, and why?
Nate Bynum: Well, I think this was it. I think this was it. Again, the NDA limits what I can say, but it was very physically challenging. It was improvisational at times; even though we did have the script, you had to create there in the moment. Physically, it was exhausting, and it challenged a part of my actor training that usually I don’t focus on as much for a role–my fitness.So to be able to go back to the foundation of what acting is, in front of these high-profile people in this high-profile situation, was educational for me in that respect. Acting is a whole-body art.
Yitzi Weiner: It’s great. Amazing. So, this is our signature question. You’ve been blessed with a lot of success now, and you must have learned a lot from your experiences. Looking back all the way to the beginning when you first started, can you share five things you’ve learned over the years that someone starting out today can really benefit from?
Nate Bynum: Five things. All right. Not in any particular order:
First, “to thine own self be true” is important, because depending on the people you meet and the situation you’re in, you can change to make them feel better or make the situation easier. But if you’re not happy with it at the end of the day, then it’s not right for you. So, to thine own self be true.
Second, treat people the way you want to be treated. I come from a Southern background, a small town, and I’ve traveled out of the United States, all over the world, that kind of thing. But still, the basics are: treat people like you expect to be treated. Most of the time you get that in return. But even if not, at least you go home knowing you’ve done what you think is the right thing.
Third, I guess the opposite of that is you can’t trust everybody. You can give everybody a chance, but sometimes you have to back off and realize that this isn’t worth it. It’s not working. That’s three things, right? I have two more to go.
Fourth, I think also what I have learned and what I try to live by is that things aren’t the most important things in your life. People are. My wife, kids, and grandkids motivate me. They keep me focused. They remind me of why I do what I do. Yes, I like doing it, but I realize I don’t have to do it. The pleasure I get from coming back and talking to them and seeing them makes it all worthwhile. Going away is fine. Coming back and knowing they’re there gives me the foundation to leave and come back again. I need the joy and happiness they give me.
And fifth, I will say: enjoy life. It’s a marathon; it’s not a sprint. You don’t have to do everything all in one day or one week or one year. You learn from the experiences that you have, and you keep moving forward. As long as you have a day, then you have another opportunity to correct a wrong that went bad the day prior or the hour prior. There’s a life to live.
Yitzi Weiner: Can you share some of the self-care routines, things you do to take care of yourself to help your body, mind, and heart to thrive?
Nate Bynum: Oh, yeah. Well, I try to be positive, and I try to be around positive people.
I love nature. If I can get to an ocean, then life is good, watching dolphins jump up and down, and the sound of the waves. I just shot in Atlanta where my hotel window opened to a forest, and in the morning, if I got up early enough, I could see the sun coming up, and I could also see the squirrels and the other animals walking around, starting their day or ending their day. There was also a lake and a creek by this particular hotel. So nature inspires me. It keeps me whole and healthy.
I like to walk. I like to walk and just think; it clears my head from the writing that I’m engaged in most of the time. I relax by reading certain authors that I follow. I cook — not well, but it satisfies me. I eat it, and I don’t think anybody else would care for it that much.
And also just basic things: I go to the gym. I have trainers who look at me and work on my body,. And I also believe that it’s okay sometimes to just lock yourself in or away and not do anything with anybody or talk to anybody. I believe in wholeness being what works for you, not necessarily what people say has to work for them.
Yitzi Weiner: Amazing answer. This is our final aspirational question. Nate, you’ve been blessed with a lot of success, and because of your great work, you’re a person, honestly, of great influence. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that will bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
Nate Bynum: I think I said it earlier: to treat people the way that you want to be treated. I live with that. My grandmother always said that. And even if it’s not you, treat them the way that you would want the person you love most to be treated. Because some people don’t mind being mistreated, but they don’t want the people they love to be mistreated. You know what I mean?
I try to do that, and I do have a rule: I’ll take three steps to be your friend before I ask you to take one, but when it goes south and I’ve retreated, I’m probably not coming back again. But yeah, I’m going to stick with that one. Treat people the way you or the people you most love want to be treated.
Yitzi Weiner: How can our readers continue to follow your work? How can they watch any of your films or shows? How can a reader support you in any way?
Nate Bynum: Well, they can follow me on social media at @natebynumactor (Nate Bynum Actor). That’s one way. I think with most things that we do, you can give a response some kind of way, if you want, on your own social media. If you appreciate what you’re seeing and want to support me some kind of way, then put on your own social media, “I enjoyed watching Nate Bynum,” or that kind of thing. But as long as they enjoy it, whether they do it publicly or not, I guess I can feel it through the love that emanates through the universe.
Yitzi Weiner: That’s great. I love that answer. Well, Nate, it’s been a joy to meet you. I wish you continued success and good health, and I’d love to do this again next year.
Nate Bynum: It’s my pleasure. I’ve enjoyed talking to you.
Nate Bynum: Drop the Act, Find Your Truth was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.