Jonathan Kehoe

Jonathan Kehoe has been writing, acting and directing for 25 years and has been teaching at AMAW for 20 years. He has a BA with honors from the University of Miami and is a graduate of the Writer’s Bootcamp Professional Writers Program in Santa Monica, CA. Jonathan is an alumnus of the main company at the ACME comedy theater and accomplished standup. He has appeared in countless theatrical productions including the Anthony Meindl directed “Dead Eye Boy” in which Variety referred to him as an “astonishing actor.” On television, he has had small recurring roles on Ugly Betty and Conan and has appeared on shows such as The Mindy Project, Criminal Minds, Sam and Cat, Rules of Engagement and Modern Family as well film roles in “How We Met,” and “Sunken City.” In recent years Jonathan's focus has been on directing. He wrote and directed the pilot presentation “Welcome To Hollywood... Florida” https://vimeo.com/61999401 as well as the short “Pirate and Doctor” starring himself and Kyle Secor. He also directed the short films “Quitters” and “Scatter” and roughly 30 episodes of varying web-series including “The Upside of Down,” “Tequila Mockingbird,” and “Freeloaders” to name a few. Just this year Jonathan has spent/will be spending 2 months in Cuba playing an American General in the epic war film “El Mayor.” He will be returning to Havana in 2019 to portray 40-year-old Ernest Hemingway in an as yet untitled film recounting Hemingway’s at times fantastical involvement with a Cuban little league team. Teaching acting is one of Jonathan’s great joys in life and he loves doing it here in Los Angeles as well as sharing his passion with other students and AMAW studios around the world. Last but not least, he’s got two sons who are the best creatures ever. Why did you become an actor? I was an actor and a storyteller long before I knew I was an actor and very long before I knew it was a job. At eight years old my sister and I were re-enacting NBC’s Thursday night lineup. At 12 I got my first video camera and immediately created shot-for-shot remakes of my favorite shows and movies with my friends from the neighborhood. I found a justification to make every school project a short film. I went to the big movies with my friends on Fridays and Saturdays, and on Sundays, I went to the Ritz art house theater in Philadelphia with my mother to see the newest and boldest experimental and foreign films. I didn’t know it at the time but I had found my calling and a storytelling language that spoke to me. I was already having an internal dialogue about what made one performance more interesting or truthful, one film more moving or exciting. I didn’t do my first play until late in high school, it was invigorating but it still didn’t cross my mind that this was a profession of any kind. I started college on a scholarship in international finance. At the end of the first semester following a final exam in the “Honors Business Applied Calculus” class, I walked to my advisor’s office and changed my major to theater. I don’t know who was more surprised, him, my family, or myself but… from that moment on, all of my being has been engaged in an ever-deepening relationship with acting, writing, directing, and storytelling. My teaching is both an expression of that love and a desire to show up as the teacher that would have best served me along the way.