Falling back in love, for the right reasons

When he was a young man, Andy Buckley wanted to be an actor. After graduating from Stanford, he moved to New York City to try to make it. He appeared in a couple of music videos, but didn’t experience much initial success otherwise. Andy pivoted, spending much of his early career working as a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch. After a few years of not acting, he ran into Allison Jones at a farmer’s market. Allison was working as the casting director for The Office, and she did not want any recognizable celebrities. She found the perfect role for him: David Wallace, the CFO. Imagine that: it was as if Andy’s day job as a stockbroker did double duty as his research for the role. It created a special type of luck. One thing that stood out to me about Andy’s story, which he shares in the Office Deep Dive podcast, was how he described working with Nancy Parks, a prominent acting coach who he’s married to. He says this, “I had started to fall back in love with acting, and for the right reasons.”…