A majority of those reading this recently finished watching Gabriel Luna’s action-packed performance in Season 2 of HBO’s The Last of Us. Meanwhile, the Austin-native has been in Toronto since May filming The Terminal List with Chris Pratt where he portrays a former Navy Seal currently in the CIA. It’s a long way from Crockett High School, where Gabriel excelled at football, making the varsity team as a sophomore, but having his athletic scholarship dreams dashed by an injury his senior year. A series of events, including a VHS tape of his father, would lead him to audition for a play that consequently led to a theatre scholarship close to home at St. Edward’s University instead.
Today Gabriel’s career keeps him from ever being in one place for a long time and though he now also has a foot in Los Angeles, his heart is still here in Austin. It’s the place where he met his wife Smaranda Ciceu while they did a play together in Austin while she was getting a graduate degree at The University of Texas, the still calls home and returns several times a year.
Austin Lifestyle had a chat with Gabriel where he rehashed the past, discussed the present and gave us all his Austin recommedations. We also learned his high school girlfriend was someone who’s also been in these pages. It was….well, keep reading.
How did you get into acting being from Austin?
I was born and raised in Austin and went to Crockett High School.
My mother was very young when she had me, and my father passed before I was born. My mother was a 15-year-old widow, so my primary focus was to work really hard so that when it came time to go to college so that it would be as free as possible.
I was a very strong athlete and football was my specialty and an avenue for me to possibly get a free education. In my senior year I was offered a few scholarships to some lesser D1 programs and I was kind of compromising a little bit with schools that weren’t the greatest academic institutions, but it was a free education, so I was going do it. Then I dislocated my shoulder twice my senior year, I couldn’t play football and I lost my scholarships. Thankfully, at the time I was in a tech theater class building sets to get my fine arts credit. When they told me I could swing a hammer to get my fine arts credit I thought it was great. I love to sing and draw and I did all those things, but at the time, I didn’t want anyone telling me how, or seeing me do any of those things, so this was a great fit for me and a lot of other jocks were in the class.
We read a play to study how set design could help the actors tell the story by what we built and our teacher, Mr.Sharp, heard me read, thought I was really good and asked if I wanted to try out for the play they were doing at the time. I respectfully declined and said I had to go to practice. He asked why I was investing the time when I was injured.
After I declined, I went to my grandmother’s, and she had a box of items that belonged to my father. I was very excited because I always tried to gather as much information as I could about who was and what he was like. So I went there, recovered the box, and there was a bunch of trophies he had won and yearbooks, which were really cool because I could see him through the eyes of his peers and the messages in the back of the yearbook. And then, there was a VHS of my father from a play that he wrote, starred in and directed from church for Easter. It felt like kind of a sense of inheritance, and as I collected myself and stop crying, I decided I would go tell Mr. Sharp I was going to try out. So, I went to the theater room to do it and was the only weird outsider there in my Crockett Cougars football jacket amongst all the theater kids who were really, really cool and self-assured, and who could just be themselves, which is what I first clocked about these folks. I clock this other really pretty girl in the corner, who would become kind of my high school sweetheart at the end of my high school tenure, another Austinite, Adriene Mishler, who you may know as Yoga with Adriene. We went to high school together and in the scene the main character stands next to a woman asking which one of the two unmarked graves at his feet belongs to his father. I remember thinking, to this day it was probably the most profound lessons I've ever learned about acting, which is to live a full life so when you get there, you don't have to fake it. So I stood there and thought to myself, I've done this hundreds of times, been to my father’s grave, so all the fear and all the worry just dissipated and it felt very easy and long story long, I got the part and Adriene played my wife and her mother was the artistic director and the artistic director at St. Edwards University at the time and she came to the show and basically told my mom if I go to the audition for St. Edwards I could get a full ride. So I went to the audition, did a scene from Romeo and Juliet and it went great. The only caveat was that I had to be an actor, and they’d teach me how to do it.
I learned a lot at St. Edwards and I've learned a lot throughout my career, but I always say there's nothing more profound the lesson of just running towards the things you're afraid of and doing as much as you can in your life, so that when you arrive on the day, you know you're not a phony, just speaking from truth. So, that's how I started.
Is theater something you aspire to do more of?
I started doing films right out of college and returned to the theater in 2008 and did a bunch of shows in Austin. Speaking on Broadway, Yvonne Boudreaux, who was the production designer on a film I did called Dance with the One, which I did in conjunction with the UTFI program at The University of Texas, now does the production design for Yellowstone. Back then she was a student at UT and she introduced me to a person named Dustin Mills who became one of my best friends and my colleague, the two of us and some others started a company called Paper Chairs in Austin. We did a few shows, won nine Austin Critics Table Awards and did a show called Black Snow where I met my wife Smaranda .We’ve been now been married 14 years.
Dustin Mills, who was our director, is actually directing on Broadway right now and we were all going to do a show in Williamstown this summer, Tennessee Williams’s one act play Camina Real, but I booked Terminal List. That would have been the reunion of Dustin, myself and my wife. My wife is actually going to be in the play.
And you split time in Austin? Yeah, I get back as often as I can. I come every April for my grandma's birthday, if I can, and every September for my mother’s birthday and sometimes I secretly catch a flight and pop in to surprise everybody. I’m there at least three or four times a year and it changes so much every time I'm there, but south of Ben White, where I'm from in South Austin, it seems to be the same as it ever was, and that's really comforting. When I come to town I usually try to a low profile and just stay at my grandma's house and spend as much time as possible as I can with her. She's 92 years old, but she's doing really, really well. She was still cutting her own grass until four years ago when we had to step in and put the kibosh on that because it gets too hot in the summer for her to be cutting her grass.
We recently had Matthew McConaughey’s mom on the cover and she’s 93-years-old and still very spry.
I did a picture called Bernie right before I left to Los Angeles directed by Richard Linklater that Matthew McConaughey and Jack Black starred in and Matthew’s mama was in that movie. She was great in it. We shot it in 2010, it premiered late 2011 in LA and it was really cool because it was my first taste of a big LA premiere when it premiered at the LA Film Festival. I was sitting next to Jon Lithgow then, who I just saw recently at an Oscar party.
Lots of full circle moments. It’s like my grandpa used to say, when this kind of stuff happens, when you keep bumping into the same people, you see somebody that you grew up with in Paris or on a random street or something, it's where you're supposed to be, exactly supposed to be.
You moved to LA in 2011? Yes, shortly after we did the premier for Bernie, and I worked as a flower delivery man, the same job I did when I was in Austin for a few years until I popped off and got my first leading role on television for Robert Rodriguez in a show called Matador. It was great to work with a hometown boy, and that was kind of it. I quit my flower delivery job and have been doing this ever since.
So many actors have moved to Austin the last few years and everyone's rallying for new tax credits. Do you think if it were easy to work here, you'd move back full-time?
It's a globalized world now, so there's really no specific place you have to be, so I could live in Austin, and I would love that, but I think my wife likes the big city hustle and bustle. I'm a little bit more quiet, and of course I love home, but I get it back often enough that I don't feel that I'm completely detached. And I’ve been primarily in Canada the last three years and prior to that, it was Rome and Guatemala and Budapest and all these other place we're shooting.
All the homes in my family in Austin are paid off thanks to this work, so would I ever go back to settle down? It's possible.
This issue is out June 1, just after the finale of the second season of The Last of Us. They've already confirmed there will be a season 3, can you confirm you're in that one?
I can't confirm or deny, but for those who know the trajectory of the game, not to say that Craig won't change it and the way things play out, but I feel comfortable I'll be going back.
In Terminal List you play a former Navy Seal? Are you doing any special training for that?
I’ve been doing parts where I’ve had to train and get shredded, like True Detective. In fact, in True Detective I worked with the Navy Seals, Mark Semos and Ray Mendoza and Ray Mendoza is our military advisor on the Terminal List. He’s a fantastic person and incredible resource and an asset for anybody who works with them. He currently has a fantastic film in theaters called Warfare that he directed with Alex Garland. So, I have all of that in my back pocket from years of doing this.
Just yesterday, I went down to Camp Pendleton and was really appreciative of a young Marine named Oscar Castro, who now works as a talent liaison trying to mesh together the military and entertainment business to get authenticity. I embedded with the infantry immersion training session, where they take young Marines out in what almost looks like a Hollywood backlot. It's a fully functional city with all the buildings that you would see in some local street in Afghanistan or Iraq and at present there's a large ISIS presence in the Philippines so they had 50 role players who spoke Filipino and local food and they pipe in the smells and they create all these scenarios and it was really incredible to watch and be able to absorb whatever I could.
You also play music, do you think there’s an album in your future?
I have a handful of songs on Spotify that I wrote and want to re-record, but I don't know. I mostly play music to free my mind and I don't know if I’d want to make it a job per se. But, I do play music quite a bit at work. I do it to set the stage a little bit each day. There might be a tune that aligns with the work or the scenes that we're going to be doing and I use it as a way in a lot of times. It also helps to keep a nice little melody in the air when everybody's wound up because a movie set can become a very stressful place and I've been told that it's a positive distraction. Over the years I've learned the ebbs and flows in the way a movie set breathes and when is a good time break up the time and make everyone happy.
If you could have a superpower, what would it be?
Teleportation
GABRIEL’S AUSTIN RECS
Restaurants For Barbecue I like to go to Lockhart to The Original Blacks, Southside Barbecue in Elgin. If I want Tex-Mex we go to Matt’s El Rancho quite a bit. But, when I think of home, I think of Dan’s Hamburgers and biscuits and gravy in the morning with my grandpa, who’s not around anymore, but I still go with my grandma. For burgers. Casino El Camino. Pizza probably a greasy slice from Roppolo’s after partying all night on 6th Street or if I’m being better Home Slice or 313 is really good, Detroit-style. You can’t go wrong with Whataburger. And Jim-Jim’s Water Ice for Italian ices. It’s a tiny hole in the wall, if you blink you’ll miss it, but it’s 6th Street on the west side of I-35 right before you get to the highway.
Music and Bars Go to Antone’s, one of my best friends Gary Clark Jr. owns it. Broken Spoke of course, a honky tonk that’s still standing, The Continental Club, C-Boys, Whisler’s and the little mezcal bar upstairs, Don’s Depot, of course, it’s fantastic.
Coffee Cherrywood Coffeehouse, near my old place. My wife used to live over there when she was getting her masters at UT and we used to go there all the time when we first met. Radio Coffee is also great down south.
Also go to Barton Springs, hike The Greenbelt, all the good stuff.