Exclusive Interview: Pop Culturalist Chats with After’s Joshua Schubart

Joshua Schubart is a gifted creative who’s made it his mission as an artist to push inclusive storytelling forward.

His latest project, After, follows a young widower who is forced to move back home, and with the help of his family and friends, tries to get back into the dating game. It’s a story of love, life, and rebirth.

Pop Culturalist was lucky enough to speak with Joshua about his multifaceted career, After, and more!

PC: How did you discover your passion for the arts?
Josh: I discovered acting when I was about fourteen years old. I had just come off the streets from being homeless and had just gotten into foster care. My parents put me into a Catholic school, which was as you can imagine a huge change from where I had come from. I was basically an after-school special. I was hanging out with all the wrong people. I was heavily into drugs and making a lot of poor life choices.

I heard the announcement for the school play. For whatever reason, I went in and I auditioned. At the time, I also had a really awful trauma-induced speech impediment. I had a horrible stutter and I could barely speak more than two or three words at a time. When I began to perform, I could speak in complete sentences for the first time. I knew immediately what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It was like I was hit with a lightning bolt, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

PC: Who or what has had the biggest influence on your career?
Josh: That’s an interesting question. I’ve been heavily influenced the most by animation and comic books. Even before I knew that I wanted to go into this field, I knew that there were things that I liked and things that spoke to me. There were arcs and certain types of stories that I really, really liked. Basically, it was anything that could pull me out of my own life, which was largely awful at the time.

As I moved on, I really came to love classical theater. That’s honestly what I thought I would be doing with my entire career. That’s not what I’m doing now. I love Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. These are actors who were heavily involved in the Shakespeare scene and were very influential to me because that’s what I wanted to do. I’m now able to apply that type of craft to my own work.

PC: In addition to acting, you’re also a writer and producer. How has your work behind the scenes made you a stronger actor and vice versa?
Josh: I will say that once I began to make my own work and do my own writing, it calmed me down a lot as an actor. It made me realize that what is happening behind the scenes largely has nothing to do with you or your talent. It made me realize that you need to have a good time in the room when you’re auditioning and do work that you like. That’s really all that you can control because it could come down to something like your hair color or height or you might look like a producer’s ex-husband. Once you realize that much of this has nothing to do with you as a person or an artist, it becomes so much easier to lock into why you’re here—which is to do the art that you love to do.

I began to make my own work for a very specific reason. I’m a very large person. In the entertainment industry, larger people are portrayed as really stupid or ultra violent. It’s not that I’m unhappy with that work because I’m happy to do any kind of work. But I never saw myself in a positive way on screen. It was always being made fun of or being lampooned. I wanted to make work for people that are larger that would show them as complete human beings.

PC: Tell us about After, your character, and the inspiration behind the show.
Josh: After is an eight-episode TV show about a guy who goes through a terrible loss. His wife passes away and he has to move back home. His parents and closest friends try to get him back out in the world of romance.

It’s a dramedy. It’s a mixture of both comedy and incredible drama. The idea came to me on my wedding day when I said, “I do.” I was holding my wife’s hand. I was like, “Holy shit. What would I do if you died?”—not in a weird, awful way. When you make this commitment to a person, you realize how important that actually is. Then what happens when this person is no longer there anymore? The thought wouldn’t leave my head. It was just there. I was like, “I should probably write this down.”

I also wanted to show a person moving through mental illness in a positive way. That’s another thing that we don’t see a lot in entertainment or on screen. It’s changing now, but it’s never been talked about the way that it should. I have my own history with mental illness. A large reason for that is because I was homeless and because of my parents’ own mental illness. It wasn’t a thing that was spoken about for a long, long time. But I wanted to write about it and hope people connect with it.

PC: You’re wearing multiple hats for this project. How early on did you know that you were not only going to write it but also star in it? How challenging was that?
Josh: That was very, very challenging. I asked my two producing partners, Olivia Baptista and Teegan Curitz, maybe half a year before we started pulling everything together. I had this idea and I’d had it for a while. I was like, “It’s time for me to turn this into a script.” I had particular people in mind. Everybody that’s in the show apart from one person, I wrote their role specifically for them. That was great. I was like, “I made this for you. I want you to be in it. Will you be in it with me?” Then everyone but one person said, “Yes.” Not because they didn’t want to—they just had an issue with their schedule.

But it was challenging and hard working with people in a situation where you’re technically their boss because you’ve hired them. But you also need them to work with you in a creative way while you’re the lead in the show. You need to constantly be morphing and moving around. I leaned heavily on Teegan and Olivia when I was acting so that they would handle admin things. Whenever we weren’t in acting scenes, we changed hats and we moved around. I was very, very fortunate that I had two other powerhouse women there to make it all happen with me.

To keep up with Joshua, follow him on Twitter and Instagram.