Jake Epstein
Jake Epstein
Jake Epstein is a Canadian actor and singer who played Craig Manning, a bipolar musician, on Degrassi: The Next Generation. He also played Will in the First National Tour of American Idiot and created the role of Gerry Goffin in the Broadway production of Beautiful: The Carole King Musical...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionTV Actor
Date of Birth16 January 1987
CityToronto, Canada
CountryCanada
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If you'd ever told me that my Broadway debut would be playing Spider-Man, I would have laughed in your face.
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I grew up in Canada and was a huge Spider-Man fan, and never thought of Spider-Man as an American hero.
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I really love young Tom Hanks. He's just one of my favorites. He's a great, quirky every-man. I also love Zach Braff. I really love actors that are quirky and interesting, that sort of try to portray 'normal' people.
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I grew up reading comics. I was primarily an 'X-Men' fan, but I definitely dressed up as Spider-Man for Halloween when I was, like, 12 years old. Maybe younger than that.
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What's cool about Spider-Man is that it's everybody - anyone, you put on the suit, anyone believes that you're Spider-Man. That's what's charming about the character. He's anyone. He's a huge nerd that ends up being this huge superhero.
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The very first concert I ever went to was a Green Day concert when I was 12 years old, at the Hershey Centre in Mississauga, Ont., and I remember right after seeing them perform I started a band, and I wanted to get up in front of people and start performing. Ten years later, to be on the Green Day 'American Idiot' tour is really awesome.
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There's just nothing funnier or crazier than that - doing your Broadway debut as Spider-Man in 'Spider-Man' the musical. It was, like, the last thing I could have ever possibly imagined happening. I mean, I would tell people I was playing Spider-Man, and people would just break out laughing because it was so ridiculous!
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I was obsessed with X-Men as a kid, and I would have to go and play every last one of them. My sister was obsessed with Barbies. So we would create these X-Men-Barbie combos and perform weird musicals where they interacted with each other.
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When I was 9, I auditioned for an arts school in Toronto with a few of my friends. The sole reason we auditioned was that we found out you got to miss a couple days of school to do the audition. Without actually wanting to go to arts school, I accidentally got in. My parents encouraged me to try it, and I ended falling in love with performing.
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Obviously, doing TV and doing theater are completely different because they're two totally different mediums. On stage, you worry about your voice and how you move physically. On TV, something like an eye twitch is what they could be looking for from you because it's so contained.
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My dad is a huge folk music fan, so growing up, there were always records playing in my house. Carole King, James Taylor, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles - I grew up with this music, and I was aware of how special this music was to a lot of people.
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I'm a pretty upbeat person. I think I sometimes get cast as these brooding types because I bring light and joy, which hopefully makes them more likable.
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I did 'Degrassi' for five years in Toronto, and I made the decision to quit the show to go to theatre school, which a lot of people thought I was really crazy to do, but it was one of those major decisions in my life that I haven't regretted - hopefully I won't! I really wanted to go to school.
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When I was 12, I played the Artful Dodger in Cameron McKintosh's production of 'Oliver!' when it came to Toronto. Just getting the role shocked my whole family, and I don't think I realized until then just how much I loved getting up in front of people and performing.