A New Direction

Actors take charge from the director’s seat

- Ryan Devlin

ASK AN ACTOR ABOUT career goals and you’ll likely get, “I’d love to direct.” And why not? The literal distance between where actors stand in front of the camera and where directors sit behind it is usually just a few feet. But any actor who’s left his or her mark for the director’s chair will tell you that the journey to becoming merely a competent director—forget about being the next Rob Reiner or George Clooney—is long.

“I’ve been in the business since I came out of the womb,” says Emmy winner Heather Tom, who had played Katie Logan on daytime’s The Bold and the Beautiful for over 1,000 episodes before she made the jump to the director’s chair in 2016. “I felt like I should know how to do this.” The transition has been humbling. “As actors, we’re taught to believe that we’re the most significant part of the process,” says Tom, who has entered the double digits of directing The Bold and the Beautiful episodes and has also directed a short film about the opioid epidemic, titled Serenity. “Directing made me go, ‘Actually, no.’”