A self proclaimed humanist, child of the 80’s, Tom was born and grew up in the countryside of Canguçu, a small town in the southernmost part of Brazil.
Electricity powered houses in this rural area is just now becoming widespread. Around the age of five, Tom no longer has to travel to the city to watch TV, a 16-inch B&W tube arrives at his home. Beyond exciting, this milestone signals toward the future. From cartoons for an hour in the morning to soon getting to accompany his sister in watching the prime time soap operas, he marvels at Globo TV’s productions. Their studios are in Rio de Janeiro, from where they record and export their soaps to every corner of the world. Even to China Tom hears. Upon noticing different soaps featuring some of the same people he’d seen before, Tom learns those people are “making believe” they are somebody else, and the term that describes what they do is ‘acting’. A tangible dream is born.
A few years later in the capital of his state, Porto Alegre, Tom finally attends a professional theatrical performance. That’s it, he concludes, “I’ll be on the stage”. On the way toward it though, two adjacent doors open up: One, on account of his newly found young baritone voice, leads into FM radio.
In days when podcasts and web based content were an idea for the future, radio lays the ground for the long-term voiceover work ahead, something he’s cherishes up to today.. The other door gets Tom into modeling.
Getting him to work on photoshoots and catwalks, as well as getting to interact with people who had travelled the world, listening to their stories, get him to dream of getting on a plane to fly to some of those places, and who knows, maybe even live abroad one day.
Now in the late 90’s, in the big Sao Paulo, Tom takes classes in acting and singing, and soon is thrilled to join a theater company under director Jose Ferro, where he gets to work on Brazilian classics as well as world classics such as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Playing Romeo is beyond exciting. Soon, Tom gets cast in the popular teenage national TV series Sandy & Junior, protagonized by the famous singer/actor siblings.
By mid 2005, having professionally worked on stage, film and TV between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, it’s time to fly north. On September 7 he lands in New York, which doesn’t feel like such a huge shock since moving from his little town to bigger and bigger metropolises had been going on for the last decade. Initially intending to visit, he then becomes a student, enrolling in a full-time acting program at the HB Studio in the West Village. Tom’s first professional acting job took place at he Society of the Educational Arts (SEA), an arts-in-education theater company in the Lower East Side run by artistic director Manuel Moran and executive director Richard Marino. The company embraced Tom, even sponsoring his artist visa, which allowed him to finally act professionally in the US.
Having been raised not far from the Uruguayan border in Brazil, his Spanish speaking skills has room for development, to put it mildly, but he is a quick study, and the people in the company are gracious enough to help him get on his feet. The shows, mostly adaptations of popular fairytales, are bilingual, posing a challenge to quickly switch back and forth between English and Spanish, neither of them his native language. His head throbs with the amount of “words, palabras, palavras” at the end of a study, rehearsal or performing day in these first years, he fears smoke will literally come out of his ears from all the mental effort. Acting in your own language is challenging enough, let alone in two new ones. Nevertheless, the artistry and camaraderie that surrounds him in the company carry him through. Getting to perform for young audiences, bringing a first theatrical experience to many kids, means the world to him.
Now, after having been a student at HB for a while, getting to study under some of the greatest acting teachers in town, such the three-time tony award winning Hellen Gallagher, as well as Austin Pendleton, whose direction of Elizabeth Taylor and Maureen Stapleton in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes on Broadway garnered him a Tony Award nomination in 1981, Tom gets to be directed by Mr. Pendleton on the HB Playwrights Foundation’s production of Maxim Gorky’s Summerfolk.
As part of the ensemble of actors that were cast to be on the stage at the Playwrights Foundation, Tom meets Aleksey Burago, an internationally acclaimed director with whom a long-term and most fulfilling professional collaboration starts.
Beyond acting, Tom is passionate about many things, the study of languages surely ranking high among the other diverse interests. An enthusiastic explorer of music, photography, painting, chemistry, cosmology, philosophy, psychology, metaphysics, etc, Tom becomes a justice of peace, having power vested on him by City Hall lower courts to officiate marriages. He’s been thrilled to have united in matrimony some of his favorite people in the world. Also certified to work on the state of NY as a personal care aid, the experience gathered by caring for people has been profoundly formative to his personal growth toward a modest but ever growing understanding of the human condition. Conditions that inform his work on stage, screen or behind the microphone.