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How GH'S Nicholas Chavez Discovered That He Was Fit For A Prince.

- Mara Levinsky

Nicholas Chavez didn't grow up with his heart set on an acting career — in fact, discovering that he loved performing happened “kind of by accident," as he puts it. In high school, he explains, “I had a mentor who was the speech and debate coach, Matt Murphy. I was playing football and Matt took over the theater department and for his first play, he put on To Kill a Mockingbird. The kid cast to play Atticus Finch got really sick and he came to me and said, “Look, Nick, I've asked about six people, and you are literally my last option. Will you please do this and try to learn the lines? It doesn't even have to be good.'”After quitting the football team to work on the show, the acting bug hit fast and hard — and his raw talent was apparent enough that people around him encouraged him to think about doing it professionally. “I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do with my life at that point, so to know that that existed as a career option was incredible and absolutely changed my life," he says.

Post-high school, Chavez enrolled in the BFA/ MFA program at the Mason Gross acting conservatory at Rutgers University in New Jersey, which he describes as "an up-and-down, really intense experience. Just due to the intensity of the program, it created a lot of drama, a lot of friction between some of the actors there, but I look back on that time in my life very favorably.” He dropped out after his sophomore year ("right before I was slated to move to London and do Shakespeare at the Old Globe Theatre for a year”) to give Los Angeles a shot, but when the pandemic hit and the entertainment industry shut down, he moved in with family in Florida to save money, with his sights set on returning to California eventually.