Hello,
Cole Cook is a professional actor, educator, director, and performance practitioner, residing in Los Angeles, CA.
Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Cole made his regional debut in Portland, Oregon at Artists Repertory Theatre being cast in the Portland premiere of The History Boys playing the role of Timms. A couple of months later Cole was cast in The History Boys again for ArtsWest in Seattle, WA this time playing the role of Rudge. Cole has also worked with Book-It Repertory Theatre in shows as A Confederacy of Dunces and Emma and with Idaho Repertory Theatre in The Mystery of Irma Vep and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Most recently, Cole played the Soothsayer in Julius Caesar for Shakespeare on the Bluff in Los Angeles. In 2023, catch Cole in Season two of Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty on HBO Max.
Cole is a Designated Meisner Teacher through the Meisner Institute, a teacher-in-training in the Principles and Technique of Stella Adler, and a Certified Instructor in Seven Pillars Acting out of Los Angeles and Orange County. Cole is also a Candidate of Fitzmaurice Voicework® and studied directly under Catherine Fitzmaurice in Los Angeles, CA.
As Cole continues working as an actor, he also has a passion for teaching and earned his M.F.A. in Performance Pedagogy from Loyola Marymount University in 2023 and is currently pursuing another master's degree in Secondary Teaching - Transformative Education (MA) and Secondary Single Subject Credential in Theatre. His research is focused on the specialization of performance methodologies outside the homogeneous norm and how they can be taught to a diverse population of students.
Cole is a member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA, respectively.
Cole's Artistic Statement 
I am the Jackson Pollock of the performing arts. I am messy, experimental and will always have you questioning if what I am doing is art. I have never been satisfied with the status quo and have pushed boundaries when it comes to my artistic journey.
As a queer kid growing up in a rural, conservative town, I quickly realized that I was not the norm. I was never going to find my voice in the “normative” ways such as sports, clubs, or popularity no matter how much I wished or pined for it. I was always, and somewhat still, outside the box and thus looking for a sense of belonging. I searched for the strange and the unusual such as drag performance and queer theatre. As I watched I saw myself and thus I found my tribe. I was lost, now I am found.
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I consider myself a storyteller – creating content for members of the audience who feel lost, undefined, and still in search of their tribe. Through collaboration, I seek to create work that provides a beacon for anyone who does not feel they fit into the mainstream. Through this I hope to create work that is so unexpected and surprising that it generates a brave space for people to make connections not through age, race, gender, ability, or religion, but by the universal experience of the unexpected. I consider myself an existentialist, living in the life of the absurd and finding meaning in a meaningless world. Hamlet instructs the players to hold the mirror up to nature: my mirror is a fun house mirror. I relish avant-garde works that bring together uncommon people. I am looking to tap into the work that sparks a discussion rather than a final product. My idea of commercial theatre is not to charge the price of admission to view a finished polished painting, but to buy a ticket to be part of the conversation.
I live by Uta Hagen's point of view that when we see theatre, there must be a human event on stage. There is never going to be a lack of new human experiences, from myself or others, to explore. We are constantly evolving as humans, and I look forward to recording those evolutions onstage in real time to keep us connected and conversing.