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10/25/2017 08:30 AMSometimes things work out the way you plan—and then sometimes they don’t. First to the positive: Josh Caras, who grew up in Essex, has the biggest role in his acting career in the current hit movie The Glass Castle.
Now for the more awkward: Going on a run, Josh had locked himself out, so he and reporter chatted on Face Time while he sat in the hall outside his apartment door. He couldn’t get inside until his partner Stefanny Caceres, who works as a paralegal, got home.
Josh and Steffany, classmates at Valley Regional High School, now live in Ditmas Park in Brooklyn. Though his parents have moved to other communities, you still may spot Josh walking his dog in the South Cove neighborhood where he once lived when he gets back to Essex on occasion.
In The Glass Castle, based on the best selling novel of the same name by Jeannette Walls, Josh plays Brian, Jeanette’s only brother. The cast includes Oscar Winner Brie Larson as Jeanette and Oscar nominees Woody Harrelson and Naomi Watts as the children’s father and mother. Knowing he would be working with such a prominent trio, Josh admitted, was an intimidating thought, but the reality was different.
“They made me feel at ease. The story is about a family and we became a family. They made a real effort to reach out,” he said.
The biggest challenge of the film for Josh came even before he met the prominent actors. His audition video for the part went well, but he knew that there was something that was still troubling the producers about his portrayal.
“Finally I just had to come out and say it. I don’t look 15 years old,” he recalled.
Josh, who is 30, had the solution: He lost 20 pounds.
“I ate less and ran four miles every day,” he said, adding his route was a loop around Prospect Park in Brooklyn.
“Teens are thin. The kids in this movie were really skinny,” he said of the Walls children. “It was about how they were living, not getting enough food, eating trash from the school cafeteria.”
Josh’s first brush with theater came when he was 12 and appeared at the Ivoryton Playhouse in On Golden Pond, playing Billy, the young son of one of the main characters.
Even then, there was already a family theater tradition. Josh’s grandfather was Roger Caras, a longtime television and radio commentator specializing in wildlife, animals, and environmental issues. In his later years, Roger Caras was also well known as the voice of the annual Westminster Kennel Club dog show. Roger Caras, who died in 2001, saw Josh in On Golden Pond and had a bit of advice for him.
“He told me my voice was a little thin,” Josh recalls.
When he was 15, Josh went to a summer arts camp in Suffield and his work impressed a director of the camp who encouraged him to audition for a New York agent.
The result was that by the time he was a senior at Valley Regional, Josh was leaving school early and going to auditions in New York. Now, he explained auditions are no longer live encounters. He films himself doing the requested material and sends it to producers and directors electronically.
“It’s a smartphone thing,” he said.
Josh’s first film came in 2006, a short called Bugcrush that he describes as a moody, dark horror movie.
“It was really low budget, he recalled of the 36-minute long film.
Still, Bugcrush won an award for short filmmaking at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Josh added that when strangers recognize him today, it is more often for Bugcrush than any of his later work.
He has had parts in a number of in television series, including Law & Order and Boardwalk Empire, as well roles both in other short films and in feature length movies, most notably Definitely, Maybe in 2008. Josh also performed live in 2011 in The Dream of the Burning Boy, at Roundabout Theatre Company’s Underground stage in New York.
Whether he appears in live theater, television, or film, where he works in is less important to Josh than the parts he gets.
“I just want to do interesting work, the fun of being handed a challenge,” he said. “What I like is things that are strongly written, about complicated, contradictory human beings.”
While starting an acting career, Josh also finished college, majoring in liberal arts at the New School in New York. Sometimes he attended part time; once while doing a movie called Gracie about a girl who wanted to play competitive soccer, he took the entire semester off.
“It was always a balancing act,” he said of keeping a career and academics going at the same time.
He has not taken many formal acting classes, since his summer camp experience.
“A few here and there,” he said. “But with every job, you learn and relearn. I’ve had more than a decade of experience now and I hope I am a better actor for it.”
When he is not acting, Josh works as a freelance commercial prop man.
“It’s about lifting things and moving them, but there’s some skill to it,” he said. “When there’s work in the film world, all I have to say is that I’m not available.”
While working on Glass Castle, he talked to Brian Walls, the man he portrays in the film on the telephone.
“I really wanted to get the things about his life right,” he said.
As it turned out, Walls had just as many questions for Josh.
“He wanted to know what it was like to be an actor, what books and movies I liked. He was funny, smart. It was an amazing experience,” he said.
The two met in person for the first time at the premiere of the film.
Josh said that Glass Castle, while a career boost, has so far not led to offers of more parts.
“I’ve yet to see the fruits of Glass Castle, but I’m not worried. This is all about incremental progress,” he said. “I’ve been doing this long enough that I know something will pay off in the long run. There are ups and downs in this business. You learn patience.”
And speaking of patience, always a virtue, its even more so when Josh finished his conversation with a reporter: Steffany still was not home and the apartment door was still locked.