Read Part 1 of Andy Wisne's story at http://www.southbendtribune.com/apps/pbcs.
dll/article?AID=/20070701/NDSports02/70701015/-1/NDSports/CAT=NDSports02 At Jenks High School in Tulsa, Okla., football coach Allan Trimble walks toward his weight room.
Trimble's program is a well-oiled, state-title machine, often sending players on to major college football. The school's arts program is strong, too. So when Trimble, for example, looked up one day on a visit to New York City and saw former player Brian Presley on a movie billboard, he was surprised, but then again he wasn't.
He'll be surprised on this day, though. When Trimble enters the weight room, a face he can't quite place stands there. Trimble greets him cheerfully, and the voice that returns his salutation suddenly gives it away.
"Oh, my God," Trimble says to himself. Though he liked him, Trimble had observed Wisne the player as quiet but prone to flares of emotion. Now, when this latter-day Andy tells his old coach that he's just passing through on his way back to Hollywood, Trimble's memory flashes back to a state playoff game during Andy's senior year.
The introvert penetrated the opponent's backfield in a key situation and stuffed the running back for a huge loss. Suddenly, he was transformed, breaking out a choreographed mock martial arts routine, then bowing to the crowd and stunning everyone who knew him. Trimble calls it Wisne's "first acting job.
" "I think maybe Andy was searching," says Trimble, "and always looking for something he was going to be passionate about." When the former Notre Dame defensive tackle Wisne visited his old high school, he was home after a zigzag around the map that had climaxed with a brief-but-emotional visit to a familiar place. After a promising beginning on the L.
A. acting scene, Wisne's roles had dried up. He was suffocating under his drive to succeed.
So on an impulse, he climbed into his Jeep and started driving east toward Notre Dame. He stayed in South Bend for just a few hours, arriving while the team was practicing and stopping by to say hello to some old teammates. "I could smell the grass and look up and see the dome after being in L.
A. for a year," he says. "It was like that had been a dream, and I had to prove to myself that it wasn't a dream.
" By this time, Wisne says he was in the grip of clinical depression. During his football days at Notre Dame, he had taken losses extremely hard but thought everyone did. And when he or the team did something good, it did more than just put him in a good mood.
It made him euphoric. The pattern had followed him into his post-football life, and whether it was the concussion that triggered a descent or something else, Wisne was struggling with the transition, as many athletes do. "I wasn't going to kill myself," he says, "but I felt that bad.
" Wisne saw a psychiatrist in Florida, where his parents live, and found out that his wild mood swings had a name -- bipolar disorder. He was prescribed some medication and thought himself fit to return to L.A.
A short time after being back, finding Hollywood no easier this time around,Wisne contemplated the direction of his life while sitting on a beach. Then he dipped his toe in the water and watched the sun set. Then he got in his car.
He recalls blinking hard and his thinking becoming cloudy. But he doesn't remember what happened next. When Wisne comes to in this memory, he is in a hospital, his front teeth gone, his leg broken.
He believes he had a seizure, another potential post-concussion syndrome danger, while driving on L.A. He doesn't remember his car driving over and into the back of a semi truck, which had pulled to the side of the road.
In subsequent surgery, he had a cow cadaver's bone implanted into his upper gums to prevent a permanent dental disaster. After the accident, Wisne's psychiatrist changed his prescription, placing him on the antidepressant lithium. Again thinking himself cured -- bipolar disorder is characterized by alternating bouts of crippling depression and periods of near-euphoric well-being -- he returned to Los Angeles yet again.
Surviving what happened next, he says, "was a miracle." Nearly two years had passed since his first serious accident. This time, in the summer of 2005, Wisne had embarked on yet another cross-country drive without a destination.
On a highway stop at a gas station, he purchased several tall Heineken beers. Wisne thinks he had downed about five or six of them when he found himself looking up to re-focus on the terrain after a momentary distraction. Perhaps he misinterpreted the curve of the road, the moonlight and pavement conspiring to play cruel tricks on someone who didn't have his full wits about him anyway.
"If it was (a suicide attempt)," he says, "it was a subconscious one." Before he could react, Wisne's Jeep hopped off the road. This was it, he thought in those terrifying moments, he was going to die here.
Wisne somehow escaped a drunk driving charge, though the ordeal would land him in Alcoholics Anonymous. More importantly, he somehow escaped a one-car accident that left three-quarters of his vehicle collapsed like a crushed can of Budweiser. The driver's side was about all that remained relatively intact after several 360-degree rolls between two sections of Texas highway.
But Wisne was fine physically. Emotionally, he was completely shattered. The concoction of a football concussion, pre-existing mental demons and the realization that minor acting roles -- let alone stardom -- were difficult to come by had proven nearly lethal -- twice.
Get his demons under control. Or risk, at worst, death before age 30 or, at best, a life spent in inescapable misery. Ryan Litzinger had the script written.
And he had the medium to bring his vision to life, his own nonprofit Hollywood Arts Society. Now came the tough part -- casting "Shakespeare's Punk Rock." He began scouring the Internet for actors.
In particular, he needed someone to play the lead role, a character named Mac Daddy. On Now Casting.com, he ran across a r sum for an unknown actor named Andy Wisne.
He was young, eager and attractive enough to be convincing as a leading man. And Litzinger was intrigued by his background as a former Notre Dame football player. The two exchanged phone calls, and Litzinger e-mailed Wisne his script.
Within 24 hours, they met in person at Litzinger's office on Vine Street in Hollywood. Litzinger asked Wisne to read him a line from the script, and the actor obliged. "Are you playing me right?
" Wisne said. "Or am I going down wrong, baby?" "And that was it.
" Eventually, Wisne would put his own stamp on the role, a stamp that came after and, in many ways, via years of mental anguish. Looking at where he is now, and comparing it to the lows he's been through since that fateful afternoon at Boston College, Wisne knows he is fortunate just to be alive. He says he is "broke, but happy.
" Like many depression and bipolar disorder sufferers, he had to experiment with a series of antidepressant medications and dosages before finding something that worked for him. Beyond pharmaceuticals, though, Wisne said he had to develop a new outlook. His passion, he says, remains film.
But with roles not coming along like he had hoped they would, he turned to standup comedy. "Stand Up With HAS," another Hollywood Arts Society project, stars, among others, former "Incredible Hulk" star Lou Ferrigno and is also being shopped around. Wisne also stars in the improv sketch comedy "Knuckles Gym," which is available at MySpace.
com. The producer, Spencer Stander, who previously worked with former "Saturday Night Live" comic Chris Kattan on an in-production MTV reality comedy, is currently working to find a studio to take on the program. "I don't want to pigeonhole him, (but) I use him for physical comedy," Stander says.
"He always takes it one step further, which is good. It gives you something to play with and then you take it from there." None of these projects are guarantees, of course, but Wisne says that, for once, that's OK.
"I literally went into a period of insanity," he says, looking back. "It took a long period of counseling and getting on the right medicine and just sitting through lonely nights in a bedroom writing notes to myself and trying to figure out who I was, what I wanted to do, how I felt about my past. "I've already been to the bottom and I can handle it.
When I was at the crossroads, I think it was a battle over my soul, man. You can lose yourself out here. A lot of people have.
" The biggest source of his anguish, he believes, was something that probably affects a lot of ex-athletes turned loose into the real world. "I took an athlete's point of view where I'm on the front lines going against this guy and I've got to beat him out," Wisne says. "I felt every rejection I got was like getting blown off the line.
"It felt like a lover's quarrel, an epic challenge, a battle. I'm not going to give up. I got the acting bug, and I'm not going to get past it.
" His personal life is in order now, too. On one of his trips to find himself, Wisne also found the future love of his life. He met Nicole Magnusson at a video store in, of all places, his hometown of Tulsa.
They are engaged to be married, and she works as a model in Los Angeles. "He always is the light of the room," Magnusson says. Wisne's acting craft used to be one of the primary triggers of Wisne's anguish.
Today, it instead seems to be therapeutic. Like his role in "Shakespeare's Punk Rock." Litzinger wrote the role straight.
But Wisne spun a little bit of his two favorite influences into it and, in the process, a bit of his own dark past. "He's got kind of this silly Jim Carrey personality," the director explains. "And then kind of this Elvis serious intensity.
We just kind of merged those two characteristics together." Manic and depressive. High and low.
These days, the contrasts exist in the alternate universes of the stage and screen only for Wisne. "I'm happier," he says, "than I've been in a very long time." Read Part 1 of Andy Wisne's story at http://www.
southbendtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?
News RSS