Nicholas Guilak

Nicholas Guilak is a Los Angeles based actor, writer, director, producer, theatre artist, professor, and lifelong storyteller whose work spans film, television, stage, and original creative development. Across more than three decades in the industry, his career has been shaped by a deep commitment to craft, emotional truth, psychological complexity, and the study of human behavior under pressure.

Early Life & Education

Born in Houston, Texas and raised in La Jolla, California, Nicholas moved to Los Angeles in 1991 to pursue a life in the arts. He earned his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Southern California, where he studied Theatre, Film, and Humanities, and later received his Master of Fine Arts in Acting from UCLA. That combination of cinematic training, classical theatre discipline, and humanistic study became the foundation for a career that moves fluidly between performance, directing, writing, producing, and teaching.

Screen Career

As an actor, Nicholas has built a long and varied screen career with more than 60 film and television credits across network television, cable, streaming, studio features, independent film, and television movies. His work includes appearances in The Gringo Hunters, United States of Al, Ray Donovan, NCIS: Los Angeles, Henry Danger, General Hospital, 24, Bones, CSI: Miami, NCIS, JAG, The Agency, Threat Matrix, Chuck, Las Vegas, Dark Blue, Hawthorne, The Lost Room, Saving Jessica Lynch, Homeland Security, and The Bold and the Beautiful. His film credits include Steven Soderbergh's The Laundromat, American Fighter, American Wrestler: The Wizard, Think Like a Man Too, Delta Farce, Cruel Intentions 2, Laleh, In Search of America, Inshallah, and numerous independent and dramatic projects.

Throughout his screen work, Nicholas has been drawn to characters who carry contradiction: men of intelligence, authority, danger, grief, humor, secrecy, vulnerability, and survival. His performances often live in the space between strength and fracture, where a character's public face collides with the private wound beneath it. Fluent in English and Farsi, with additional language and dialect experience, he has portrayed a wide range of international, cultural, dramatic, comedic, and psychologically layered roles. Whether playing a figure of power, a man in crisis, a dark comic presence, or someone caught between worlds, his work is grounded in specificity, restraint, and emotional truth.

Theatre

Before and alongside his screen career, Nicholas developed a deep body of work in the theatre. His stage life has included acting, directing, producing, and helping build creative communities rooted in ensemble work and serious theatrical craft. He was a co-founder of Big Dog Little Dog Productions, a Los Angeles based theatre company that became an important part of his artistic life and produced bold, actor-driven work during its run. His theatre background includes classical and contemporary productions such as The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, Glengarry Glen Ross, A Lie of the Mind, Hedda Gabler, Twelfth Night, The Rover, The Misanthrope, The Threepenny Opera, and Three Sisters.

That theatre foundation remains central to who he is. It informs the way he approaches the camera, the rehearsal room, the page, and the actor's process. For Nicholas, performance is not about display. It is about behavior. It is about listening. It is about what a person hides, what a person needs, what a person cannot say, and what finally breaks through despite their best efforts to contain it.

Guilco Productions & The Last Draft

In recent years, Nicholas has expanded his work as a filmmaker through Guilco Productions, Inc., his production company for original film, theatre, and story-driven creative development. His short film The Last Draft, which he wrote, directed, produced, and stars in, marks a powerful new chapter in his creative life. A psychological thriller about a reclusive novelist whose battle with writer's block becomes a terrifying collapse between fiction and reality, the film explores authorship, isolation, madness, legacy, self-destruction, and the dangerous intimacy between an artist and the world he creates.

The Last Draft has built festival momentum and serves as both a standalone short film and a proof of concept for a larger feature-length story. The film reflects Nicholas's larger artistic interests: wounded humanity, unreliable reality, moral consequence, creative obsession, and the thin line between imagination and self-annihilation. It also represents a natural evolution in his career, bringing together the actor, writer, director, producer, and storyteller into one unified creative voice.

Writer & Filmmaker

As a writer and filmmaker, Nicholas is drawn to stories about people at the edge of themselves. His work often examines identity, loneliness, power, cultural displacement, spiritual exhaustion, ambition, memory, guilt, and the private battles people carry behind controlled surfaces. Whether working in psychological thriller, drama, noir, dark comedy, or intimate character study, he is interested in the moment when a human being can no longer hide from the truth.

Teaching

In addition to his professional work in film, television, and theatre, Nicholas has spent decades as an educator, teaching theatre, acting, performance, and online asynchronous courses at Antelope Valley College and within the Los Angeles Community College District, including Pierce College, West Los Angeles College, and Southwest College. His teaching is an extension of his artistic life. He brings professional experience, academic rigor, and a deep respect for the actor's craft into the classroom, helping students understand performance not as imitation, but as investigation.

His approach to acting and teaching is rooted in preparation, imagination, discipline, emotional availability, and the courage to be truthful. He believes the best work comes from the place where craft and instinct meet. The actor must understand structure, objective, relationship, rhythm, behavior, and circumstance, but must also remain alive enough to be surprised. That belief continues to guide his work with students, actors, collaborators, and his own creative projects.

The Work

Across acting, directing, writing, producing, and teaching, Nicholas Guilak's work is unified by a lifelong fascination with the human condition. He is interested in what people reveal under pressure, what they conceal to survive, and what happens when the stories they tell themselves begin to fall apart. His career reflects the rare intersection of professional experience, artistic range, intellectual curiosity, and lived-in emotional depth.

Whether on screen, on stage, behind the camera, or in the classroom, Nicholas continues to build a body of work driven by story, craft, courage, and the search for what is most truthful beneath the surface.