STEVE HAMM Actor on a Mission Introducing Steve Hamm... Handsome actor/model Steve Hamm has a unique story. He is a retired Army helicopter pilot who is now a “Lifeflight” pilot while also focusing on his acting and modeling career. After having served in the Army for over 23 years and being deployed to both Iraq and Afghanistan, Hamm was captured by the acting bug. Having ma jor experience in military linguistics, Hamm hopes to put that to good use during his acting career but is also intrigued by detective suspense roles. Hamm has appeared in “Deliver Us from Evil, “The Warriors”, “Law & Order” and the Bruce Willis project “Acts of Violence.” I spoke with Steve regarding his very interesting careers.....He authentically loves to help people and hopes to continue to do so no matter where his professions take him....
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My obvious question is after being in the army for so long, how did you catch the acting bug? It’s kind of a funny story actually. It was a spur of the moment decision. I was living in Tennessee at the time and I just happened to google acting schools. I found one that was in Nashville, so I emailed the owner and he invited me down for an open call to see if I liked it. So basically, I did a weekend workshop
with him. It was basically doing cold reads with other members of his class. After doing several of these with the other actors you could say that the acting bug kind of hit me. It was something I was interested in pursuing, however, as a beginning actor knows you can’t make a good living at first. I was actually in the process of leaving the army and moving to Ohio, so I had to get established with a new location, career, and surroundings. I happened to find another agency in the Cleveland area where I got picked up for representation and the rest is pretty much history. But it was just a spur the moment thought which kind of flourished from there. So during your Army days you never before thought of acting as a career? No, not really. I did do a play during my junior year in high school. It was fun to do, but it wasn’t something I was thinking of doing at the time. I’ve always enjoyed watching good TV shows and movies and seeing what good actors produce. I guess maybe subtly and indirectly I’ve always had the inclination to do it, but I never really had the time or the financial means. When you’re serving your 24/7 doing something with the army so I think that once I got out it enabled me to have the time to focus in that direction.
