Alex MacNicoll became an actor because he knows firsthand the power that art has to touch and impact lives. That love for the craft developed while Alex studied it in high school and college and eventually led him to Hollywood, where he began earning his stripes. When he wasn’t auditioning, Alex worked odd jobs to make ends meet and learned the importance of embracing the struggle and of hard work.
Since then, he’s quickly established himself as a leading man in Hollywood to watch and has dozens of credits under his belt, including projects like 13 Reasons Why, Transparent, and The Society. Currently, he can be seen living out a childhood dream as the sword-wielding Maksim in The Rising Hawk (out now on VOD).
Pop Culturalist had the pleasure of speaking with Alex about his journey as an artist, The Rising Hawk, and his love for theater.
PC: How did you discover your passion for acting?
Alex: My parents were involved in community theater. My dad was an opera singer. So they were always trying to get me to do plays with them over the summers, but I was just into playing sports and video games. I got into TV/film in high school because I had an English teacher that let me record little student films rather than book reports. She was very kind and knew I wasn’t a good writer. So that’s where I think my interest probably sparked: in high school.
It wasn’t until college when I took an acting class for fun that I really fell in love with it. Then I decided, “Well, maybe I’ll try to do that.” I actually enjoyed going to the acting class and doing the work outside of the classroom. All my other classes, I didn’t enjoy. I had this epiphany where I was like, “I should probably do something that I enjoy doing or try to do something that I enjoy doing. If it doesn’t work out, at least I tried.” So I think it was a little later: high school, college age.
PC: Who or what has had the biggest influence on your career?
Alex: Going back to my parents, they’ve just been so supportive. I’ve never come to them and said, “Hey, I want to try to do this,” and they’ve been like, “Oh, that’s unrealistic.” You know what I mean? They’ve always been like, “Go for it!” and supported me the whole way. I think they probably are the two biggest ones and the main one. But aside from that, I wanted to do something where I could connect to people—a job that I felt fulfilled me and gave me purpose and also touched other people’s lives. All forms of art do that for me, so I’d like to be able to do it and to get paid for it. I can’t really ask for anything more.
I know that movies, theater, music have touched my life and made me think about who I am, what I do, and who I want to be. Also, I see myself in certain roles and that’s just what I’ve also wanted to do as well. Overall, the culture of cinema, art, and the world at large with all the stories that we’re living out on a daily basis and that we’re creating within our own homes—even our own relationships and stuff.
But there have been so many, many people—too many to list—that have been incredible sources of positivity, support, and mentors to me, from managers to agents to other actors, musicians, and family members. That might be a little vague, but it’s really everything. Everything is everything. I heard a great quote the other day from my girlfriend, Darby. She was like, “Everything is everything always. We’re all connected and everything is connected.” It’s true, but it makes everything vague. [laughs]
PC: You’ve had a lot of success already in your young career. When you look back, is there a particular moment that sticks out to you?
Alex: I’ve been very fortunate. It’s been fun. The very first SAG job I got was an amazing welcome-to-Hollywood moment because I was playing this high school football player, which I tend to do. I got a cleat—a foam football cleat—thrown at my face by Kevin Costner in the scene. That was my very first professional SAG gig. That will always stick out to me. I can always replay the whole day in my head because I grew up watching Kevin Costner and Niki Caro was the director. She’s done a bunch of amazing things. It was just this one fascinating moment where I was like, “This is really happening.” The one guy, Vincent [Martella] was also in it. He was the voice of Phineas and Ferb, which was a big cartoon at the time. It was this dream moment that I was like, “I’m doing it. All this work that I put in—all the years of college and whatnot and the hard work that I’ve put in.” Moving to LA and working a bunch of jobs and grinding and all that, I was like, “It’s working.” It was like seeing my garden—seeing the first tree sprouting up or something.
PC: You’ve been really open about the challenges you faced when you were starting out in the industry. During those more challenging times, how were you able to persevere? What’s one thing you know now that you wish you knew when you started?
Alex: It was always told to me, “There’s no ‘one plus one equals two.’ There’s no straight-up formula.” So keeping in mind that there were going to be challenges, and whenever I was frustrated, challenged, and going through whatever, whether it was worrying if I was going to be able to pay rent or whether it was being rejected after auditions, I would always try to keep in my mind that this too shall pass, type of deal.
Not to be dramatic, but there are times when career, life, rejection—whatever’s happening—loneliness—will get us down. I would write little post-it notes or keep little reminders on my phone. I would set a reminder for a week or two in advance. This is going to sound corny, but I would put a message like, “Believe in yourself. You can do it.” That type of thing. All of my alarms when I would wake up in the morning wouldn’t just be alarms. They would say, “Let’s go. Drink more water. Have fun today. Be productive. Stretch more.” All these things.
So during those times, it was also exciting to me living in Hollywood and working at a restaurant from 8:00 p.m. till 3:00 a.m. I remember one time I was just cleaning up throw-up at this bar that I was working at. Somebody had puked. It was a big tequila night and whatnot. I was cleaning it up and it was disgusting, but at the same time, I was like, “Cool. I’m earning my stripes. I’m doing it.” It made me feel more satisfied. I was a middle-class kid. I didn’t ever struggle for money or anything with my parents. But this was a way for me to remind myself and to feel actually fulfilled like I wasn’t getting handed everything.
To answer your question, in a somewhat shorter form, enjoy the struggle and enjoy the tough moments. Not that it’s a hundred percent necessary. I also think it can be dangerous for people to be like, “Well, I have to be a struggling artist or I have to go through a lot of pain and struggle in order to succeed or in order to do something.” Enjoy the hard work. I had to get out of my head—get into my body—and be in the present moment. Times seem to go by differently too when that happens. I can be doing a tedious job and rather than it dragging on forever and feeling like it’s sucking my soul out, I’m doing it. But also I’m in my head and I’m dreaming and I’m thinking about what I want to do and who I want to be and being present with whoever’s around me and making those connections and friendships.
It’s funny. It’s all exciting to me. I think it’s the glass is half full versus the glass is half empty type of thing. But I definitely—if I could do one thing over, I would have invested a thousand or two thousand bucks in a decent car. I probably would have tried to do Uber, Lyft because you can make your own schedule because the night shift was hard. I was nocturnal for a while, pretty much, from doing those bar shifts and everything. Then the other thing too, just a constant thing that I’ve found has been really helpful to me, is getting out of my own way and being kind. Whenever negative thoughts come up, not to suppress negativity, or if I feel something about somebody, just to understand that maybe that person is going through something. Don’t let my judgement or projection of them be off these one or two interactions.
Kindness is never wasted. I’ve found that the people that work a lot and have these successful careers, there are a couple of them that are the divas that you hear about or the jerks and stuff in Hollywood, but for the most part, they’re really nice people. It blew me away. These professionals that have these thirty- or forty-year careers are the kindest people I’ve ever met. So that goes a long way. People want to work with positive and kind people.
So that’s another thing too. Know that whatever struggle or hardship you’re going through, it’ll pass and just to enjoy the hard work in the moment. Then by doing that, it’s just amazing. It changes the whole environment. It’s like flipping the light switch on and people will see that. Then the next thing you know, these random synchronicities come through. You know what I mean? A famous director would come into the restaurant and I’m working hard and I’m positive. It would be something that was exciting, almost like in Super Mario when you get a coin or something. Enjoy the hard work and take pride in the hard work.
PC: Speaking of hard work, you’ve got a new film out now. Tell us about The Rising Hawk, your character, and what drew you to this project.
Alex: The Rising Hawk was a ton of fun to shoot because it was almost three months of shooting in Ukraine. That was cool: going to a foreign country and getting paid to work over there. I had to ride horses and do a bunch of stunt training, fight choreography, and all that. It was exciting because I grew up watching Braveheart and Gladiator. I got to work with Tommy Flanagan, who’s in it, who’s in both of those. The overall message of the film was powerful because at its core it’s about standing up against a scary evil force, this force that’s coming to try to—I guess not to put it so bleakly—but to murder your village because it was just this incredibly powerful force back in the day of the Mongol Horde.
It was a ton of fun because in all the downtime, we would be training for other things. When we’d have scenes where we were doing acting scenes, the stunt guys from Stunt A Lot would be on set with us. In between camera setups, we’d go over and we’d work on the fight choreography. We really maximized all of our time over there because it was such a low-budget shoot, all things considered, to pull off the grandness of everything, and the production value was out of this world. Everything that they built over there, you could use. The village they built, you could literally live in those houses and climb on the walls. The costumes were a hundred percent authentic. They were all handmade. We had these beautiful leather costumes and sheepskin. Tommy Flanagan had this sixty-pound chain-mail armor thing that he had to wear. It was fun.
It was fun to be in that world and to go back and take in the landscape because the Carpathian Mountains are just gorgeous. They’re these huge, huge mountains, and they’re beautiful. The story itself is a tale that kids are taught at a young age. It’s this historical fiction of their country, before it was what it is today. It’s one of those things where it was a childhood dream to pretend to be running around with swords and to act out all that. But to be able to act it out and exercise all those inner feelings of rage and courage, it was interesting. That’s what drew me to it.
Robert Patrick played my dad. I’ve gotten to work with him before. He’s this crazy old nut. [laughs] He’s super talented and professional, so it was super fun. When he told me that he had referred me for the job, I was very thankful and excited to work with him again because he’s always a blast. We always have a lot of fun. Then the rest of the cast, it was this incredible, international cast, so that was a fun opportunity. I’ve never worked on anything like it where I got to work with Tserenbold Tsegmid from Mongolia. He’s the biggest actor in Mongolia. And this guy, Erzhan [Nurymbet], who’s just an incredible actor. And Ukrainian actors and Andrey [Isaenko] and Alina Kovalenko. It was just fun.
I was working with somebody from Ireland, England, Scotland, and Mongolia. There was a stunt team from Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia: nomad stunts who are incredible. I’m pretty sure they were one of the stunt teams in the latest Mulan remake. Just wonderful stunt teams, the whole crew, stunt team, the horse team, the Ukrainian Cossacks. It was one of those “holy shit, I’m learning how to ride with a top international-caliber stunt team.” That was super exciting. Obviously, I love to travel too. So to get paid to go travel and act, I love that. I could do that forever.
PC: Like you were just saying, all the actors went through intense combat, horse, and weapon training, and you have an athletic background. How beneficial was that as you prepared to embark on this journey?
Alex: Yeah, it’s funny. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a professional athlete. I was always playing all the sports. As I got older, I got a little more lazy. Then I realized it would take a lot of work, effort, and total dedication to be a professional athlete as well as skill that I just didn’t possess. But the good news is that it has paid off for my acting career because I can fake it till I make it with certain things, especially on the long-shoot days when we were shooting for eight to ten hours and running for four basically on and off whenever they changed cameras. We were constantly doing the scene over and over, running through the woods or jumping over things.
The fight choreography was amazing because I feel like people say it’s like a dance. It is because it has all these steps and you have your partners or whoever you’re fighting against. It’s a total skill. It was an incredible experience learning it because the first day or two was so frustrating. It wasn’t clicking in my brain. It was like learning a new language almost. But after a couple of days, it started getting more and more familiar in my body. Then by the end of it, we were doing all types of different things. They were giving us all different weapons. We were learning all these new skills.
Dema and Pasha, the guys from Stunt A Lot, were so patient with us. They had to do so much. It was really fun. We would shoot little movies of the fight scenes before we did the training of it so that we could see where the camera setups would be. That helped a lot with the whole overfall film because it was like a storyboard for the scene, since we had limited time and budget. It was super helpful. But the athletic part of it, I think I was in the best shape of my life.
PC: Speaking of the limited budget and these intricate fight scenes, as an actor, did you feel pressure to nail it in one take?
Alex: Yeah, constantly. Also because I’m very hypercritical of myself. But fortunately everyone was so good. Poppy [Drayton], Rocky [Myers], Oliver [Trevena], Robert [Patrick], Tommy [Flanagan]—everyone that had to do fight stuff—were so good. I think a few of them had previous fight experience, fight training, and all that. But for the most part, they just picked it up and were really good. Rocky became so good at it that they started giving him two swords instead of one. They were teaching him all these amazing martial arts moves, in addition to the sword stuff that he was able to incorporate. John [Wynn] and Akhtem [Seitablaev], our two directors, were super enthusiastic too.
So I felt the pressure to try to knock it out because of the time constraints, the budget, but also I knew that it was all for the greater good. They were always super excited and supportive. We had a few bloopers that I hope get on the DVD at some point with everybody. But for the most part, we were able to knock it out pretty quickly because of all the training and the prep that we had throughout the whole process.
PC: Your character has a really dramatic transformation throughout the film. Did you draw any personal experiences when building this character?
Alex: Yeah. When I was a kid, my hometown of Frenchtown was invaded by pirates. [laughs] Nah, nah, nah. At its core, it’s about the Mongolian Horde, who back in the day were these bad, bad dudes. They were really ruthless pirates of the land, kind of like Vikings in a way. Mongolian Vikings who were ravaging and destroying villages and taking over and conquering. As far as drawing on previous experiences, I was all in my head and I was all in my mind. I was pretty fortunate, maybe unfortunate for acting purposes, but I didn’t experience a whole lot of death when I was a kid. I experienced a couple of family members passing, but I was much younger and they were much older. So when it came to family members passing and all that stuff, that was a little difficult for me to draw on.
But then we have these side stories—the love and romance—[where I drew on] young love, falling in love, and what it’s like being in love with somebody that’s out of reach or unavailable. There’s a lot of human things to draw from. It was one of those things where everything that needed to be there was there because it was so authentic. We would have fires burning around us. The horse team would be riding and doing their amazing stunts while the battles were going on. Everything was in your face and real. There was a lot of practical stunts and things, so it was easy to be present and to draw from what was happening in the moment.
PC: Besides The Rising Hawk, you have a ton of other upcoming projects coming out soon. Are there any that you can talk about at this time?
Alex: Yeah, I would love to. On the 25th of September, All Roads to Pearla came out. That was really fun, and that’s by Van Ditthavong. We filmed that a couple of years ago too. It’s finally now seeing the light of day, given the circumstances and everything, with the state of cinema and all that. It’s a coming-of-age thriller about a high school wrestler who gets dragged into a little bit of the underbelly of a small town and some crazy things happen. That’s on VOD.
Unpregnant is out on HBO Max. That’s a really, really interesting movie. It revolves around a central theme of abortion and teenage pregnancy. It does a really good job navigating through and showing both sides of it. It doesn’t really shame either side. It shows both sides with a light touch to it in a very, very good way and a very sophisticated way. It pulls a lot of good points. I hope people talk about that issue more and see it from both sides.
Then The Society on Netflix. If anybody’s still watching that, we were super bummed that we got canceled. But we had a really fun time shooting that, and we feel like we didn’t get closure for that. We feel bad for all the fans.
PC: Guilty pleasure TV show?
Alex: Breaking Bad. I binged the crap out of that.
PC: Guilty pleasure movie?
Alex: The Grinch with Jim Carrey. I feel like that’s probably one of the films that I’ve seen over and over like Shrek and stuff. I used to watch Ice Age all the time, back in the day. I like those animated, silly movies.
PC: Favorite book?
Alex: Definitely up there is The Alchemist. The Alchemist is an incredible book. It’s a simple read and it’s beautiful. It’s almost like a bingey TV show where you can just zip right through it. Beyond that, speaking of The Society before, Lord of the Flies really hit me when I was a kid. So that’s always been something that’s been in my mind. Then fantasies like The Hobbit. I really loved reading The Hobbit. Those are probably a couple of my favorite books.
PC: Favorite play or musical?
Alex: Last year, I was very fortunate because I was living in New York. I got to see a bunch of plays and musicals. The musical that really floored me, in a good way, was The Band’s Visit. That was incredible. It was so beautiful. It was so sweet. It wasn’t drawn out. It was very tight and really well done.
Then a play. Last year there were a couple. I saw Fairview, which was completely mind blowing and ground shaking. It really completely opened up anybody who came to see that show. It opened everybody in the audience, especially the White audience. It was such a mirror and a reflection to the state of the times and what’s been going on and what’s happening. I would say Fairview.
Another great one last year that I saw was Ain’t No Mo’ at the Public. I hope that gets a Broadway run because that was another similar one. It was about gentrification. Basically, it was almost a fantasy opera style in a way. It was done in such a lucid dreamlike way. It was powerful.
Then Grief is the Thing with Feathers. I saw so many shows last year. Grief is the Thing with Feathers was amazing. Cillian Murphy was in it. I don’t know if you know him from Peaky Blinders and all those other films, but he was fantastic. I loved him as a TV actor and a film actor, but when I saw him do that, I was like, “Man, this guy is an incredible stage actor.”
So I don’t know. I guess my favorite play was Ain’t No Mo’ by Jordan E. Cooper and Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury. She’s an amazing playwright.
PC: Do you think we’ll ever see you do any theater productions?
Alex: I would love to. For sure! So I moved to New York last year wanting to do that and I auditioned for—it was mostly just TV though—while I was there. But I got to train with some really amazing teachers, like Patsy Rodenburg and Joan Lader and these really, really incredible teachers. I would love to, for sure.
PC: A band or artist that fans would be surprised to learn is on your playlist?
Alex: Papa Roach.
To keep up with Alex, follow him Instagram. Stream or purchase The Rising Haw today.
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Watching The Rising Hawk on Tubi and am impressed at the level of the actors in what I thought would be a throw-away movie. The sets, the stunts and fighting are all top-knotch as Alex said. Good movie and glad to find it.