Salem native Andrew Ghai's belief in himself has him acting and scoring movie roles
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You might remember Andrew Ghai from his appearances in such movies as "They Broke the Mold" and "Great Strides in Genetic Engineering."
You don’t?
Well, those movies are made up. The reality is you haven’t seen any movie or TV show that Andrew Ghai has been in. That’s because most of them haven’t been released. Some won’t ever be released.
That’s life as a struggling actor.
Ghai has gone from a latchkey kid of a single mother in Salem to making a living in Los Angeles without waiting tables at restaurants. At least, he doesn't do that anymore. He’s making a living in the entertainment industry and breaking into movie acting in his mid-30s.
He knows how fortunate he is to be working as a TV host. But finally finding his place as an actor is what motivates him the most.
"So for me ... it goes back to my passion and what I really want to do," Ghai said.
A starring role
Ghai’s latest movie, "Always, Lola," was one of those parts that took years to come to fruition.
In 2018, Ghai hosted a talk show with best friend Ben Bateman about action movies on AfterBuzz TV. It was there that he worked with Jeffrey Graham. Graham asked Ghai if he wanted to participate in a show called "Unproduced Table Read." On that show, a group of actors was brought together to read a script for a movie that had never been made and then discuss it.
One of the scripts they read was an early version of Graham’s script for "Always, Lola," which was released for purchase on Nov. 28 on video-on-demand platforms.
Then, in late 2020, Graham came to Ghai and said he was going to make the movie after all. But it didn't have a big budget.
Ghai was cast as Lee, an athlete with an interest in astronomy. Ghai’s character is one of five friends of the title Lola who go on a camping trip shortly after her death.
The athlete part wasn’t a stretch. But he was playing someone in his 20s; Ghai was in his 30s.
“Playing this character, I had to be in pretty good shape. I’m trying to look 10 years younger than I am,” Ghai said. “I’m trying to go on these runs in this 90-degree, humid Ohio heat and I remember stopping one day and sitting under a tree and looking at all these leaves around me. They weren’t leaves, they were like millions of dead cicadas.”
They filmed the movie over two weeks in July 2021 in Ohio.
The budget for the movie was tiny, but that helped Ghai in a way.
“I think what really made the movie work was everyone came, they showed up, they were ready to go,” Ghai said. “They had their lines, they made their choices.
“It was definitely a labor of love, man.”
Sports careers only last so long
Ghai’s love of movies came early.
He was born in Salem and raised by his mother, Soo Paik. He has three half-sisters, but they are significantly older and he was usually the only child in his home.
“I watched movies, man. I just loved watching movies, not even TV,” Ghai said. “We’re Asian. Asian families do not pay for cable, at least they didn’t back then. I would go to my friends’ houses to watch cable. But at home, I would just watch movies. I would watch movies and play video games. And then I got into sports.”
Sports gave Ghai a sense of belonging, something he craved.
He participated in taekwondo when he was young and found success. He traveled to national competitions and showed promise in the sport. He remembers a trip to Los Angeles when he was 8.
“I remember buying Oreos for dinner because I didn’t know how to spend my money because I was a kid,” Ghai said.
But he quit the sport and concentrated on team sports. He started playing football and basketball in middle school.
Then another pursuit started catching his interest: acting. Pretty soon, he was taking every acting and theater class he could at Sprague High School and was a teacher’s aide. When he had free time, he would help build sets.
“But when it came down to actually being in plays, it was a musical in the spring and the dramatic in the fall and I always chose to play sports over leaning into that,” Ghai said.
“I didn’t want to be seen as a theater kid. I think being brown in Salem, Oregon already, all I wanted to do is be accepted my whole life.”
Ghai developed into a pretty good high school football player.
As an offensive and defensive lineman, he played on Sprague’s 2004 state championship football team and as a senior in 2005 was a third-team all-Valley League player and made 44 tackles.
The coaching staff of those football teams gave him something he never had before.
“I had no male figures in my life,” Ghai said. “You talk about these guys and they were all like fill-in dads at certain points. Soren (Sorensen) was, Kary (Hadden) was, Robin (Hill) was. All those guys. All those coaches.”
But eventually, every football career ends. He remembers walking through the halls of Sprague one day and running into teammates Landis Provancha, Brad Kidd and Mike Espinoza. They were talking about how they were going to compete in football camps that weekend. Ghai wasn’t. He didn’t know those camps existed.
“It slowly started to be very obvious to me my football career was ending,” he said.
College leads back to acting
Ghai graduated from Sprague in 2006.
He enrolled at Oregon State University and barely lasted a year. He spent most of his time in his dorm room playing video games and quickly realized his pre-med major wasn’t going to work out.
“I had an Indian dad and a Korean mom and my mom was like, 'You can be a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer or a failure,’” Ghai said.
Because he wasn’t doing anything else for his sophomore year, he planned to follow his roommate to Eugene to take classes at the University of Oregon. His roommate instead moved to Wyoming at the last minute.
Ghai enrolled at Lane Community College instead. He took sociology and psychology classes and says those pushed him back into acting.
He won a scholarship after acting in the play "The Fear and Loathing in the Basement." He also played a lead in "Move Over Mrs. Markham." That’s when he knew what he wanted to do for a living.
“That’s when I had to have a really tough conversation with my mom that was like, ‘I’m not going to get a degree because if I get a degree, I know that when I move to L.A., I will give up on acting,’” he said.
So in 2012, he moved to Los Angeles.
He got a role as an extra in the Laura Prepon movie "The Kitchen" shortly after arriving. For the next five years, he couldn't get booked in a jail. But his aunt, Ellie Paik, owns restaurants around Los Angeles, so he consistently had work as a waiter. Then again, many waiters in Los Angeles are aspiring actors.
“You could walk through a restaurant and cast yourself a play,” Ghai said.
He said that dry spell caused him to lose his direction.
After five years in L.A., Ghai broke up with his girlfriend and was living on a friend’s couch and drinking heavily. One day, that friend insisted Ghai come with him to an improv class at the West Side Comedy Theater in Santa Monica and pretend he wasn't miserable for an hour or two a day.
That improvisation training worked. It led to Ghai booking TV hosting jobs like "Popcorn Talk" and hosting esports competitions. Then he became a regular on "Movie Trivia Schmoedown," a combination of a movie trivia competition where Ghai played the bad guy. And he booked a few small acting roles.
Things started looking up. And then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Hosting jobs provide safety net in tough times
His acting roles dried up, but Ghai and Bateman launched "Action Industries," an internet show where they talked about action movies.
Between the subscribers from that and his job hosting esports competitions, he was able to pay his bills when some of his friends were leaving town because they couldn’t eke out a living.
“It was tiring. It was exhausting because it’s not my passion to sit in front of a computer and livestream for an hour,” Ghai said.
Since filming "Always, Lola," Ghai has had more fortune in scoring roles.
He plays the lead in "A Bogata Trip" (filmed in Columbia in November 2021 and tentatively slated for release in 2024), a reporter in the Apple TV show "For All Mankind," series regular Varun Argarwal in the unreleased "The Twisted Doll," a scam artist in the upcoming Lifetime movie "Deadly Neighbor" and a role in "V/H/S/85," which was released in October.
And then the industry came to a halt again after strikes by the WGA and SAG-AFRTA shut down movies and television production.
Ghai doesn’t belong to the actor’s union because he hasn't been a series regular or the star of a major motion picture.
During the strike, Ghai still had his work as a host for the Tennis Channel and Clash Royale. Ghai knows he’s good at being a host for those kinds of programs, but what he loves to do is act. And during those strikes, he didn't know when he would get to do it again.
But he'll keep at it. He still carries his "I Believe" card around from his days as a Sprague football player. That attitude has kept him going this long in Hollywood.
“Last year I did over 100 auditions, between acting, hosting and commercials,” Ghai said. “And I booked three jobs last year. That’s it, three of them. And that’s not a bad rate.”
Contact reporter Bill Poehler at bpoehler@StatesmanJournal.com
This article originally appeared on Salem Statesman Journal: Andrew Ghai's belief in himself has him scoring movie roles
