Chris Carmack

Age: 25. Carmack adds, “I’ll turn 26 during the run”.

Currently: Making his West End debut in Adrian Noble’s revival of Tennessee Williams’ 1948 play Summer and Smoke, co-starring Rosamund Pike. “I play John Buchanan Junior, the drunken and dissolute son of the town’s respected doctor, who is rebelling against society and his father and everything he’s supposed to do in life,” Carmack explains. “The play centres on his next door neighbour, Miss Alma [played by Pike], the daughter of the local reverend, and their love affair that’s not to be. They are such different people that they can’t come together, but they love each other so much that it breaks both of their hearts.”

Hometown: Rockville, Maryland. “I didn’t come from the smallest town in the world,” Carmack says, “but I didn’t come from the big city, either. I grew up around farms and cows and horses. Magruder High School, which I attended, was in a cornfield.” He moved to New York City at the age of 18 to attend New York University’s Tisch School for the Performing Arts. The transition was “quite a shock.” After two years of school—he left without completing the course—he relocated to Los Angeles, where he has lived since 2001.

Model Moment: Though Carmack studied theatre and acting at university, he is perhaps most famous for being an Abercrombie and Fitch model. The job came about through serendipity. He was working in the computer labs at college to earn some money, and a friend of his showed him an ad for an open casting for models. “She said I’d be crazy if I didn’t go for this,” he recalls. “They sent me to an agent, who booked other jobs for me. I didn’t have to work at it. And it paid more than the computer labs did, so it was a no-brainer.” He worked for the legendary photographer Bruce Weber on the Abercrombie campaign, and it led to lots of others. But it turned out to be a “no-brainer” in every sense. “You’re treated like a coat hanger,” Carmack notes. So he fought for a way to get out: “If you’re as turned off by it as I was, it was not hard to break out of—I was constantly trying to run away from it. I only did it until I was making enough money as an actor, so I no longer had to do it again.”

Rosamund Pike & Chris Carmack in Summer and Smoke

In the Deep End: Carmack credits his high school teacher with first getting him started as an actor. “I did theatre all the way through high school,” he says, “and had a wonderful drama instructor, Michael D’anna, who was very dedicated to the theatre programme there and really encouraged me all the way through to stay involved.” He remembers that one of the first shows he did as the David Ives play All in the Timing. And it’s all been in the timing for him since in terms of forging an acting career. After leaving university, he followed one of his favourite teachers, Milton Justice, from there to L.A., where he’d relocated. “I worked with him on a production of Kevin Elyot’s The Day I Stood Still,” he recalls and adds, “I did a little bit of theatre every year. I was always finding a reason to get on stage. I think the stage is the greatest challenge for an actor, because nobody can save you but you. You’re in the deep end.” It was there, in a tiny theatre, that he also did a show called The Compiled Poetry of Tennessee Williams. “It was a well-conceived but poorly executed idea, but it allowed me the joy of getting to know Williams’ poetry and speaking it out loud for an extended period of time. Of course, we do a lot of Williams in drama classes all the time—he’s our Shakespeare, so I have a pretty strong familiarity with his work.”

Bread and Butter: Before his current re-acquaintance with Williams, Carmack found himself in television, appearing as Luke in the cult series The OC and earning a whole new set of. Television, he says, has “been my bread and butter, but I’m hoping to break into film. I starred in one that never came out, and I’ve had small roles in a few others—and I want to do more theatre.”

Rosamund Pike & Chris Carmack in Summer and Smoke

Entertaining Debut: He’s already fulfilled one ambition: to appear on the New York stage, which he did earlier this year when he starred as Mr. Sloane in Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Entertaining Mr. Sloane off-Broadway. “Making your stage debut in New York also comes with a lot of butterflies, especially for someone like me who wants to be considered as an actor but only had lightweight credits under my belt,” Carmack notes. “I had to prove to myself that I was worthy, too—that was the biggest hurdle.” He leapt over it with reviews that were universally smitten with his chiselled chest, as were the brother and sister played by Alec Baldwin and Jan Maxwell, respectively, who both try to seduce him. “It was a wonderful show and a wonderful experience but it wasn’t the smoothest sailing,” he says diplomatically (Maxwell departed the production early following a reported dispute with Baldwin).

Skill Building: This isn’t the first time Carmack has been to our grand city. The last time, however, he was only a tourist: “I believe it was 2000,” he says. “I was in Italy, studying Italian renaissance art and cinema history for a semester, and I took a five-day trip to London. So until now I’d visited only as a tourist, never living or working here.” How did this job come about now? After the run of Entertaining Mr. Sloane, he says, “I was talking to my manager about what I’d like to do next, and I said that if something came up like a Tennessee Williams play, I’d be eager to do it. I auditioned for this on tape from New York, and then got it.” He’s keen on building up his acting portfolio right now. “The theatre experiences I’m looking for are not so much to build a career as to build my craft as an actor,” Carmack claims. “The better I become as an actor, the less crafty I have to be in putting together a career, and if I’m a really good actor, they can’t take that away from me.”