On The Verge: Alexander Pobutsky

Alexander Pobutsky is a late bloomer. The 30-year-old Detroit native didn’t know he wanted to be an actor until he was 20 and realized that his pre-med plan wasn’t for him. Then, rather than heading to drama school, he ended up in the famed Blue Man Group, which taught him how the value of specificity and, “all the micro things that go into storytelling.” After the pandemic hit and the group temporarily shut down operations, Pobutsky realized “my tapes sucked,” and set about fixing them. Once he did that, everything changed, and he pretty much hasn’t stopped working since. This month, he’ll appear in his biggest role, in the highly anticipated Justified: City Primeval, on FX and Hulu, in which he appears in five of eight episodes. He was staying at a buddy’s place in his home town when he chatted with us.

Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike.

How did you get into acting in the first place?

I wasn’t really interested in high school. I did okay, but my mom insisted I needed to do better. She forced me to watch this documentary on Bruce Lee, and it was a life changing moment. I remember watching that movie and thinking, I don’t have that desire. That sort of fire isn’t in me. I had never really experienced it before that. I didn’t have an outlet for it, and I realized, Oh, I gotta do something. Then I was doing pre-med and realized I didn’t care about that stuff at all. I think I was doing it because my mom wanted me to. I took an acting class, and was like, this is definitely what I want to do.

So you dove into acting?

I did this play when I was 20. I played this really physical character that was sort of like a Disney villain, and I asked my professor afterwards what he thought. He said, ‘Yeah, physically, it was great, and the energy was all great, but it felt like you were performing.’ I remember feeling that moment, Oh, if I want to do this, I have to actually take this seriously. It has to be real.

How did that lead you to Blue Man Group?

Out of college, I moved to LA, thinking I was gonna be famous in a week. (Laughs) I ended up doing a lot of jobs, working at a hotel, being a valet, all that. I was on Let’s Make a Deal with Wayne Brady in 2016 and won my car.

Seriously?

Yeah. (Laughs) I’m still driving it. Anyway, I did a lot of improv while I was there, I auditioned for the Han Solo movie, but I was in way over my head. Around then, I auditioned for Blue Man, just because, and I kept getting called back. Eventually, they invited me to train in New York, and after eight weeks, sent me to the show in Boston. It changed my life.

How so?

Blue Man teaches you so much about being in the moment. I did over 300 shows, and you get to a point where you’re thinking about what you’re doing at a single moment. It translates to acting. Sometimes it’s as simple as, do I look up at this moment? Do I smile? Do I say this line this way? It can be that microscopic, and technical, and it doesn’t take the soul out of it. If that makes sense. 

It absolutely does. So then how did you turn Blue Man into other acting work?

When the pandemic happened, I sat down and watched my tapes again, and I realized that I didn’t know if it was even good. I realized, Oh, that’s probably an issue. I asked my friend Sarah Catherine Hook, she’s an actress who was in a Conjuring movie, and the Netflix series First Kill, she’s doing really well for herself. She showed me hers, and I said, Okay, this is good, and I ended up taking an intensive class and asked my teacher about it. He said, you just keep working and, over time, you start to know. I found that to be true. It really is just, like, do it a million times until something starts to shift. About a year into COVID, I finally felt like I kind of know what I’m doing.

Was there a key to getting more work? I think a lot of actors figure it out, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to being hired.

I realized that my entry point was accents. I grew up speaking several languages. Polish was my first language. I went to school speaking Ukrainian. I speak fluent Portuguese, Spanish. So I got a new agent and they started sending me for Eastern European stuff. A French soldier. Things like that, where I would have to learn the accent, sometimes overnight, and it was working. So I think, knowing what your brand is is key.

And now you’re on Justified, your biggest role to date.

My character, Skender, is from Hamtramck, which is where I’m actually from. It’s a little 2.2 square mile city inside Detroit …

Like the Vatican?

Ha. Yeah, I’m the Pope of Michigan. (Laughs) But see the odds of my playing a guy from there are insane. I loved working on Justified. That was a magical summer for me. Tim Olyphant is the man. He called me just to say, ‘Hey, we’re really excited to have you on the show. We were stressed about casting this part, and then I saw your tapes. Now we aren’t worried about it.’ He was just so welcoming immediately and like working with it. I took that to heart, the way he treated people, so I wanted to do the same thing. I started talking to co-stars, people that had one line. I would talk to them all the time because it’s amazing to feel like, Okay, I’m worth something here. 

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