Where this was said
American Idol, Moving to LA, and the Path to Acting
At 41:38 · chapter starts 41:30
Dax pivots to a fact most people don't know: Alan was a Top 86 American Idol contestant who made it to Hollywood Week and got cut. What struck him wasn't the rejection — it was the person next to him doing a dead-cockroach wail at the news. Alan watched and thought: what is it like to want something that badly? He'd never felt that about anything. Rather than reassuring him, this worried him — maybe he wasn't really an artist if he didn't feel he'd die without it [1]. But that energy drew him to LA. He wanted to be in a city full of people that passionate, wanted to understand what it felt like to need something that much. His wife Catherine was on board — both had grown up in small Florida towns and knew they needed something bigger. The modeling world had already been giving him ways into acting rooms, and eventually, as Aquaman on Smallville, something clicked.
