Myles Bullock | Episode 010 |What They Don’t Tell You About Making It in Hollywood

An In Good Company Feature  |  By JermConnects

Myles Bullock on the 300 Nos, the Room That Was Bigger Than His Living Room, and Why He’s Not Stopping

There is a bedroom in Beverly Hills that is bigger than a living room in South Central Los Angeles. Myles Bullock knows this because he slept in it. He was maybe nine years old, spending the night at a classmate’s house, not yet understanding that the classmate’s father was Denzel Washington. Not yet understanding that the school his mother drove him to every morning, across town from their neighborhood, was quietly planting seeds that would take twenty years to bloom.

He didn’t clock it then. He was a kid. The status didn’t register. What registered was the size of the room and the fact that when he got home, his living room felt smaller than it used to.

That contrast, between where you come from and where you end up sitting, runs through everything Myles Bullock does. It runs through the roles he picks, the ones he turns down, the way he talks about the long stretches of silence between jobs, and the way he refuses to let those silences define him.

The Accident That Changed Everything

Most origin stories in Hollywood sound curated. Myles Bullock’s sounds like a scheduling error.

At Cal State Fresno, he was a kid who’d shown up thinking he might walk on to the football team. The athletic path didn’t work. The academic path wasn’t much better. His freshman year GPA put him on academic probation, which meant by the time he could register for classes, most were full. He needed three more credits to qualify as a full-time student and keep his financial aid.

A theater professor had an opening. Not in a class. In a play. An actor had dropped out. Three credits if Myles would step in.

He went to a rehearsal. He thought it seemed cool. He did the play. His family came. His friends came. Everyone asked why he was in a play. And something clicked that had never clicked before.

"I fell in love with it," he said on In Good Company. "The experience and the feeling that I had. I never felt anything like that before."

He changed his major. He won a regional American College Theatre Festival award. He earned a full ride to UNC Chapel Hill’s MFA program. And that’s where I met him.

I shot Myles’s grad photos at Carolina. I remember looking at him and thinking, this is a young Will Smith. There was something about the way he carried himself, the energy, the confidence without the performance of confidence. You could tell he was going somewhere.

Chapel Hill

At UNC, he became a company member at PlayMakers Repertory Company. He worked with Tony-nominated directors and Broadway veterans. He shared stages with actors who would go on to build their own names, including J. Alphonse Nicholson, who’s now flourishing on P-Valley. He performed in a production called We Are Proud to Present that he’s called the most influential play of his career for the way it forced him to reckon with race, identity, and the stories we tell about people who’ve been oppressed.

But something else happened at Chapel Hill that wouldn’t pay off for years. In his first play at UNC, Myles worked alongside a veteran actor named Roger Robinson. Roger had won a Tony for August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. He was a legend, deeply respected, and he took Myles under his wing.

Roger used to tell Myles stories about Samuel L. Jackson. Years later, when Myles walked onto the set of Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist and needed to break the ice with Sam Jackson, he led with Roger’s name.

"He was like, Roger? That’s my n***a," Myles recalled. Roger had passed by then. But the connection held. Sam understood that if Roger had mentored this young actor, he was worth paying attention to. And because Sam came from the theater too, there was a mutual respect already built into the relationship.

"I wouldn’t have been there had I not done UNC Chapel Hill," Myles said. "The ties, bro. It’s a beautiful thing."

Here is the part nobody tells you about.

The Waiting Season

Myles Bullock has appeared on BMF, White Men Can’t Jump, The Vince Staples Show, Dave, Marvel’s Runaways, Criminal Minds, S.W.A.T., and Fight Night. He’s about to be a series regular on the new Prison Break. His resume reads like momentum.

The reality is different.

"Between jobs, I’ve acted twice in the last eight or nine months," he said. "And both have been with J. Alphonse. One was a project that went to Sundance and another was a short that nobody will ever see."

He broke the math down plainly. If you’re auditioning two to three times a week, that’s 100 to 156 auditions in a year. If you book one, that’s one yes out of over a hundred nos. Go two years without booking? That’s 200 to 300 rejections before anything moves.

And when you do book something, it might be a year or two before the audience ever sees it. By that time, you might not have worked again. People see you on screen and assume you’re at a certain level. They don’t see the gap between the performance and the paycheck.

"Just because I shared a screen with Samuel Jackson and Don Cheadle and Taraji P. Henson and Kevin Hart," he said, "that does not mean that I have the same reality that they have. When the director says cut, we’re not going back to the same trailer. We’re not going back to the same hotel room. And we’re not going back to the same check."

Only one to two percent of actors can sustain a living solely from acting. Myles knows this number. He said it out loud. And then he kept talking about why he’s not stopping.

The Work Between the Work

What Myles does between roles is what separates him from the version of this story that ends in bitterness.

He teaches acting workshops. He’s done about a dozen in the last year and a half. He talks about it the way someone talks about a practice that keeps them alive, not a hustle that fills time.

"If you are pursuing this acting thing with your full self and good intentions," he said, "it will teach you a lot about yourself. It will make you a more empathetic person. But it will also maybe uncover some things that you didn’t know you needed to work on."

He keeps his body ready. He keeps his mind open. He prays. He stays close to people who are also building, also grinding, also refusing to let the in-between define them. His wife. His circle of creative friends who are all self-starters.

And he’s raising a four-year-old son. He just got married. The household keeps him grounded in a way that the industry, by design, cannot.

There are roles Myles Bullock has turned down.

Integrity Over Opportunity

He didn’t frame it as a flex. He framed it as a boundary. He knows that every time he’s filmed, it has a level of permanence he can’t take back. He doesn’t want to look back and see himself in something he wasn’t connected to. And he trusts that someone else is willing to tell the stories he’s not.

"I’ve always been clear with myself about what I was willing to do and what I was not willing to do," he said. "And I stand pat with that."

He acknowledged that holding that line might slow things down. The career might take longer. But at least, he said, you can sleep with yourself.

After Prison Break, he wants to shift. He’s played a lot of antagonists, a lot of characters on the wrong side of the law. Slick. Willie Black. Darius "Red" Lewis. He’s ready for something different. He wants more facility over his choices. He wants the Marvel call, or the DC call. He wants to work with Ryan Coogler, Jordan Peele, Spike Lee, Scorsese. He wants to act across from Viola Davis, Michael B. Jordan, Leonardo DiCaprio.

He said it without apology. He said it like someone who’s already decided it’s going to happen.

I ask every guest on In Good Company the same closing question. If you could ask the world one question and get an honest answer, what would it be?

Myles thought about it. Then he said he’d ask the world what they would do if they didn’t have to work, if they didn’t have to pay bills, if the machine we’ve all built our lives around just didn’t exist.

What Would You Do If You Didn’t Have To Work?

"I personally feel like we’re supposed to just be eating fruit on the beach and laying in some grass," he said. "Instead of figuring out how to make rent."

He wasn’t being flippant. He was pointing at something real. He said he knows people who don’t know how to dream because they’re so bound by their needs. People who’ve never given themselves permission to fantasize about what they’d actually do with their time if survival wasn’t the primary project.

And then, in almost the same breath, he talked about wanting Black youth to see beyond the pillars of athlete and entertainer. He wants them to see lawyers, doctors, hedge fund managers, judges, politicians. He wants them to understand that those are linear paths to the kind of change that actually reshapes communities.

It was the most honest ten minutes of the conversation. An actor telling young people they might not need to be actors. A man who chose the dream telling the next generation to also consider the blueprint.

Myles Bullock is not where he wants to be. He said so. He wants more consistency. He wants the phone to ring more. He wants the facility to choose.

But he is also not where he started. He is not the kid who didn’t know why Denzel’s bedroom was that big. He is not the freshman who tanked his GPA. He is not the guy who hadn’t acted in a year and didn’t know if it was coming back.

He’s the guy who walked onto a set with Kevin Hart and Samuel L. Jackson and broke the ice by talking about his late mentor from a play he did in grad school. He’s the guy who’s about to lead a Prison Break reboot. He’s the guy who teaches acting workshops because helping other people access something in themselves makes him feel like the work still matters even when the camera isn’t rolling.

Still Going

When I asked him what he’s working on, the last thing he said was: "The biggest project I’m working on is me."

That’s the whole thing. That’s the waiting season in a sentence. You work on the thing you can control, and you trust that the rest is coming.

Myles Bullock is still going. And if you’ve ever been in a season where nothing seems to move, where the work you’ve put in hasn’t shown up yet, where you know you’re good but the world hasn’t fully caught on, this conversation is for you.

He’s in good company. And so are you.