Profile: Joshuah Melnick

by Dawne Belloise

Josh Melnick was raised in Crested Butte from the time he was two years old by parents Richard Melnick and Alice Arnold. He was another free spirited, feral local kid, who was in the first graduating class at Little Red Schoolhouse and then from Crested Butte Community School (CBCS). As a teen he did the CB job shuffle, working at the rug store, Teocalli Tamale, Izzy’s, Canale Italian Ice, biking around through the streets with a cart of Drew’s homemade ices, giving pretty girls a free treat. “I was allowed to give two free a day, but sometimes I gave three,” he grins.

However, on the day we spoke, he was in London, on his way to the set of a major upcoming Netflix series in which he plays the main character, the young John F. Kennedy. He wears a familiar piece of home as he waits on the set for his scene to be filmed, a flannel overshirt. It was given to him by his brother Jackson, who got it from Pat O’Neill. And he wears it because, he smiles, “It makes me feel really grounded and comfortable. Pat taught us what storytelling was,” Josh says of his middle school English teacher. “I remember him drawing a line on the chalkboard, illustrating Plot Mountain,” which was essentially a definitive line showing story direction.

“Pat would tell us amazing stories from his childhood that were fun and exciting,” he says. “The aim is the same, which is to engage with the heart and mind of those listening or watching.”

Josh says he became seriously interested in filmmaking after taking Craig Lamar’s film class in middle school. “I started to feel the magic of how this medium could capture and share humanity. I just didn’t know which aspect to pursue.” He started filming shorts in high school with his buddies Oz Scott and Zane Wrisley because, he says, “They were fun to make.” They were using a Canon camera with a video setting, given to him by Bill Gallen. “A transformative part for me was meeting the guys at the CB Film Festival who made The Peanut Butter Falcon.” They became mentor friends to Josh and he had the opportunity to help them edit that film as well. After he graduated from CBCS, Josh enrolled at CU Boulder for a year before heading off to the bright lights of the Big Apple to attend the prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, a part of New York University (NYU).

At Tisch, Josh learned the ropes doing directing, editing, script writing and acting. His thesis was a short film which he wrote, directed and acted in. In his senior year, he had an agent who encouraged him to pursue acting. One week after graduation, Josh was booked in his first acting gig in a film called Tesla, as Tesla’s assistant, which was set in Colorado Springs. “Tesla did a lot of his experimentation in Colorado,” Josh explains. “And I got to work with Ethan Hawke. He’s an amazing actor. I felt like I was on top of the world,” but disappointingly, many of Josh’s scenes were edited out and then Covid hit temporarily halting his acting work.

Josh did lots of auditions and acted in many small parts, even traveling to the Dominican Republic to do a summer shoot for a Hulu TV show called Saint X. Then he shot a horror movie in Santa Fe called Please Don’t Feed the Children, directed by Destry Spielberg which premiered in Spain. He also did a couple of short films, one of which, The Dalles, went to Sundance. Last summer, he shot his first lead role in a feature film called Magazine. “It’s not out yet. It’s a dramedy, a coming-of-age story about the culture of a literary magazine in New York.”

For the past six months, Josh has been on the set in London shooting the eight-part Netflix series Kennedy. Set in the 1930 to 1940 era, it depicts the intimate lives of the Kennedy family. Josh says, “It’s a really big experience for me.” He continues, “A lot of the department writers, directors, cast and my colleagues who I’m working with have been celebrated by the Oscars, Tonys and Emmys, people like Michael Fassbender, Thomas Vinterberg, Tommy Schlamme and Jessica Hobbs. The caliber of the talent is elite, and I’ve tried to be on par with everyone’s work. Getting offered the part felt like getting a call from the big leagues,” he says, as well as stepping into his own leadership and talent. “It’s been really amazing.”

The audition process for Kennedy took three months. Josh had never been the lead of a project this size before, and he went through many auditions over a two-month period until they flew him to London for a screen test. And that’s when they booked him. He had studied a lot of his colleagues’ work in both high school and college. He’s since traveled to amazing sites for filming. “It’s been an amazing experience. It made me better understand my own relationship to power, service, responsibility and ultimately what it means to be an American. From the story and from playing this character, I learned a lot about the history of our country. I’m still processing the experience in real time.”

Josh is now back home in the Butte for the summer. “The last six months I’ve been working 14-to-16-hour days, six days a week. I’m ready to sleep for a while, ideally in a hammock or a blanket out by the Lower Loop,” he laughs. “I’m going home to catch my breath, get grounded, hike, play soccer and spend time with my friends. I don’t really know what my future looks like, but I’ll probably go back to New York. I like being there. It’s not even about the opportunities so much, it’s a fun place to be. So is CB. I have the best of both worlds.”

Josh is grateful for growing up in Crested Butte. “For the community I was raised in, for the encouragement from teachers and everyone. I’m so lucky to be in a place that I felt I could experiment with creative expression and failure,” he says. “I feel that there will be likely a lot of opportunities to come from the Kennedy series and I want to be sure to take the right ones.” Meanwhile he’ll be catching his breath back home and he smiles, “I expect to be humbled by my fellow Buttians.”