Colleen Bement: Hello fellow Denverite. I understand that you grew up in the Mile High City. I’m actually in Littleton! Before COVID took over our lives, did you get a chance to come back and visit often?
June Carryl: Hey Colleen! DENVER!!!!!!!!!! I did! I grew up in Montbello. In the time before, I hadn’t gotten back as much. I love my home town. It was a beautiful place to grow up. My brother still lives there, in fact. But life kinda took me to the West Coast and I got to working steadily the past several years, so. I miss it.
CB: Tell our readers about “Helstrom.” You have such an amazing role and the show looks fascinating.
JC: HEE HEE! The show is so cool! It’s about siblings Daimon and Anna who are the children of a serial killer. They also happen to have supernatural powers. Daimon has gone on to become a professor and exorcist while Anna has become a dealer in rare artifacts. I play Dr. Hastings who is sort of Daimon’s surrogate mom, as his real mom, Victoria, has been institutionalized in my facility, St. Theresa’s, where I watch over her. Dr. Hastings has seen a thing or two and is not easily dissuaded from her mission. I love the character and the way she’s written. She’s funny in a dry way, pragmatic, mission-driven, and compassionate.
CB: Many people recognize you from “Mindhunter”, “Dead To Me”, “Bosch”, “American Crime Story”, “NCIS”, “Grey’s Anatomy”, “Scandal” and so many more roles. Has there been a particular role that you enjoyed playing the most?
JC: I loved getting to play Camille Bell on “Mindhunter.” She’s an amazing human–I wanted very much to get her right and I was in incredible hands. I was asked to be more honest and braver than I think I’ve ever had to be in a television show. It was an honor.
CB: By chance do you have any other projects in the works that you’re allowed to talk about?
JC: I’m co-directing a small feature next year written by Michal Sinnot and Mary M. Parr. It’s a beautiful story about healing and rebuilding. I am also working toward production of a play I wrote that we’re hoping to perform in Zimbabwe. Means a lot. I got to be part of Coeurage Theatre Company’s Nomad Project, a series of short audio plays about Los Angeles.
June Carryl. Photo credit Ryan West
CB: I hope you don’t mind me saying this but I am just so impressed by your accomplishments! You started out in Political Science at Brown, wanted to be a lawyer then went for your Ph.D. in English Literature, and wrote plays. Then a Masters Degree, and you are an incredible playwright. Leading up to my question now, what inspired you to change career paths?
JC: I think I was panicked about not being able to live truthfully. I loved the theory of Politics, I loved the concept of the law, but not the math of it. I was horrible at it. I didn’t talk about the world in those terms. I was just at sea. I’d said I wanted to be a lawyer, but never went for internships; slept through the last round of LSATs, plus all my classmates who went to law school came back miserable. The last straw, though, was getting an A+++ on a mock legal brief in a Products Liability course. I’d seen an episode of “LA Law” and decided to create a legal brief about faulty bull semen. I hated that there was no such thing as objective truth. There was just who spun the better story. I didn’t want to be good at lying that way–not if it meant someone could get hurt. When I got to English Lit, particularly literary criticism, I found my language, my way of talking about the world, and my place. I took a drama survey course and wrote a play for my midterm; my professor invited me to join her playwriting class and I suddenly found a way to talk about the world that let me heal myself.
CB: Last question: What advice do you have for some of my readers who are pursuing a career in show business?
JC: Sydney Poitier said, “Don’t have a fallback plan because you will fall back.” And he’s right. What we do is REALLY heartbreaking; you spend most of your time hearing ‘no’. You have to get inured to it and–if it is truly what you love (and you do have to LOVE it)–you have to be willing to be in it for the long haul. Success will look different for different people–it took me decades to figure that out, to not want what I saw others get, to understand that my path is and will be different. Count every single opportunity as a blessing and enjoy it. There’s no point otherwise.
