Catching Up With…Eyal Podell (ex-Adrian Korbel, Y&R, 2006-08)

Even though Eyal Podell has been working regularly in prime-time TV since leaving the role of Y&R’s charming college professor, Adrian Korbel, in 2008, the actor has also carved out a professional niche behind the camera as a screenplay writer and, just recently, an author.

-  Devin Owens

“I was writing even while I was on Y&R, whenever I had downtime in my dressing room,” he explains. “My writing partner, Jonathon [E.] Stewart, and I were just honing our craft and trying to get good at writing scripts.”

While searching for their next movie concept, inspiration came from the Ethernet. “We had gotten an email blast from Dartmouth that one of the professors had written a biography about Theodor Geisel, who is known to the world as Dr. Seuss,” Podell recalls. “Jonathon and I thought it was really interesting that no one had ever made a movie about his life. Everyone knows about his books but he also had a very interesting life. So we dove in headfirst, and it launched our writing career. In 2012, a screenplay we co-wrote together, which was a biography of Dr. Seuss, landed on Hollywood’s ‘blacklist’, which is sort of an internal list of the most liked, unproduced scripts of the year. Development producers and directors all vote and we were number two on the list out of hundreds of screenplays.”

The recognition attracted the right kind of attention. “That became a sort of calling card for us and we started taking meetings all over town, so we had to get agents and managers,” Podell relays. “A lot of doors opened and we got our first job writing for Paramount, which was an adaptation of a novel called Juliet, about a woman who finds out that she’s a descendant of the original Capulets.”