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By Brinlee Edger
Photos by James Weber
Actor Aaron Costa Ganis doesn’t sugarcoat it. The waiting. The grind. The endless audition rooms that smell like burnt coffee and deodorant you don’t quite trust. “You spend years in this business waiting for the phone to ring,” he says. “At some point you realize—that’s the job. The waiting is the life. You either make peace with it, or you get out.”
He didn’t come to that wisdom gently. In 2018, mid-rehearsal on Broadway, he was running a sword fight sequence over and over. Same move, same step, same swing. It caught up to him. A herniated disc pressed into his spinal cord and changed everything. He thought it was just a tweak. Then he couldn’t get out of bed. “One second I was in rehearsal,” he says. “Next I was in court trying to prove I was broken.”
Recovery wasn’t quick. It wasn’t even clean. It was long afternoons at doctors’ offices, physical therapy in bland white rooms that smelled of antiseptic, insurance hearings that dragged on forever. “You spend more time filling out forms than actually healing,” he says. Friends showed up at first. They checked in, brought food, sent texts. But slowly, they disappeared. “That’s the hardest part. When you stop moving, people stop with you.”
The silence left him restless. He picked up a pen. At first it was scraps—lines on receipts, half-scenes in spiral notebooks, notes tapped out on his phone while riding the subway to therapy. He wasn’t writing for an audience. He was writing to stay alive. Some fragments became short scripts, one turned into a film about Donald Trump’s mother, a Scottish immigrant in Queens. “It wasn’t political,” he says quickly, maybe too quickly. “I just wanted to see how shame and silence pass through families. That interests me more than a clean hero story.”
In mid-September, Ganis wrapped up a starring role opposite Elizabeth McGovern in Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations at the New York City Center in Midtown. Ganis played British journalist Peter Evans, whose book Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations was the basis for the play that McGovern adapted for the stage. She brought the play to New York City from London this past summer—July 29 to September 14—and after NYC it went to Chicago for a short run.
Not too long ago, Ganis would receive a very important phone call: Steven Spielberg’s agent. He called while Ganis was cooking chicken in a pan. “Spielberg watched your tape,” the agent said, “and he thought you were extraordinary.” Ganis froze. “I thought they had the wrong guy,” he says. “I just stared at the stove for a long time.”
Ganis will be in a soon-to-be-named Spielberg sci-fi film set for a 2026 release. The cast is rumored to include Emily Blunt, Colin Firth, Colman Domingo, Josh O’Connor, and Eve Hewson. The set was another world. Spielberg shot with surgical precision. No extra angles, no padding. “He shoots exactly what he needs,” Ganis says. “It’s terrifying and exhilarating. You can’t fake it. But he also makes you feel like you belong there. That’s rare. Especially when you’ve spent years convincing yourself you don’t.”
None of this was inevitable. He grew up in Concord, New Hampshire, an only child. His parents scraped together a living before opening a gift shop on Main Street. His mom had been a dancer; his dad was steady, quiet, practical. There was no blueprint for an actor. He tried law, even worked at a Manhattan firm. The fluorescent lights made him restless. “I realized in about three minutes we were the bad guys,” he says. Then came an acting class. Just one. It cracked something open. After years of failed auditions, NYU Grad Acting finally took him in on scholarship. “It wasn’t glamorous. I just didn’t stop applying.”
The pull had been there all along. As a kid he haunted the corner video store. His mom let him rent whatever he wanted, even when it was wildly inappropriate. He remembers taking home Apocalypse Now before he was old enough to shave. “I didn’t understand it,” he says, “but I felt it. The power of it. That stuck with me.”
Persistence carried him through the rejections, through the months where nothing happened. He learned not to expect momentum, only to keep moving. “Normalcy is underrated,” he says. “You don’t have to go to every party. You just have to keep showing up.”
These days he’s showing up differently. He’s back in auditions, slowly rebuilding the physical presence that once defined him. He’s writing a new screenplay, circling themes of memory and inheritance again. He talks about wanting roles that scare him a little. “I don’t want to get too comfortable,” he says. “Comfort is dangerous for an artist. You start repeating yourself.”
Aside from the Spielberg film, what’s next isn’t clear. He likes it that way. “I don’t want to map it all out,” he says. “That’s when you start trying to control it, and this business laughs at control.” He pauses, then adds, “The only thing I can promise myself is to keep evolving. Even if it means falling on my face sometimes.”
For Aaron Costa Ganis, that’s the whole point. Not the applause, not the premieres, not the noise. Just the work. The part that survives.
CREDITS:
Photographer: James Weber
Stylist: Alaye Alleyne
BTS Camera/ Videographer: Cris Pena
Grooming: Evilia Soleh (Eve), Eloria Michelle Cook