Hell Hath No Fury Like Holtz Scorned an Exclusive Spotlight on Keith Szarabajka

The gate to the Quor'Toth has been reopened! While Angel Investigations has had their hands full with The Beast this season, they would be hard pressed to forget the one man who single handedly turned their world asunder. Last season the show was dominated by one of Angel's greatest adversaries: Daniel Holtz. Once an ordinary man, in the late 1700's Holtz was driven to obsessive vengeance after Angelus murdered his family and maliciously turned his youngest daughter into a vampire. His lust for revenge was so vigorous, even the restrictions of time could not hinder him. In a rage, he reappeared in the present time in an effort to wreak his punishment on Angelus. He spent the season terrorizing the souled Angel and culminating in the ultimate act of retribution: the stealing of Angel's beloved son, Connor. The massive impact Holtz created in Angel's world is due to the acting talents of one man: Keith Szarabajka (sara-bike-ah). While Holtz may have met his end, we recently had the opportunity to talk with Keith, learning about the man, the creative actor, and about what it takes to portray a character obsessed with vengeance. THEATRE, TV, AND DARK COMEDY Edward Woodward with Szarabajka as Mickey Kostmayer in The Equalizer A Chicago area native, Keith has pursued acting for nearly thirty years. He has done extensive work in theatre (both on and off Broadway), film, and television. Acting has always been the driving force for his direction in life. "When I was younger, people wanted to be in theatre and the movies, that was pretty much it," he began. However, he feels that today the roads actors have been taking, which often includes television, are quite different from when he started out. "Television was kind of a secondary medium for what young actors my age wanted to do, but now I think that has changed to a great extent. I think that now they really want to do TV for its own sake. A TV career can be a career in itself. I think that's the major difference amongst actors that are good actors. I'm not talking about people that can just play one note and aren't very talented. I'm talking about people who really have some depth, some intelligence, and creativity as performers," he explained. Keith feels that television has become an integral part in many actors' careers, "For the lucky few, a good television career had been the way to a movie career. I think it's even more so now. It used to be that you pretty much had to go straight from whatever your theatre background in New York was to being picked up in the movies by someone like Martin Scorcese or Francis Ford Coppola. I think that's still the case, but that now it's legitimate and almost necessary to go through television because you have to build an audience. You have to build a demand for yourself out there." The skills Keith developed in his extensive theatre work proved to be very beneficial as he moved onto television and film. "I learned how to memorize lines, take direction, block, and how to make something as interesting as you possibly can," he described. "I think that theatre is a much more...it's more languorous. You can take more time at it. You can take four weeks of rehearsals and a couple weeks of previews to develop a character. You don't really have to have that character done until the audiences start seeing you. Although in television, and pretty much the same extent in movies, if you are not just doing one episode you have more time in which to develop a character, so it's more like theatre in that regard." Still, working in television posed many new obstacles around which Keith has had to hone his talents. Szarabajka visits the Trekkies as Damrus on Enterprise "On that day you are shooting, you are not having four weeks of rehearsals and two weeks of previews to get ready, you have to make that choice and make that choice right then and there in conjuncture with the cameraman and the director and whatever the writers have given you because the writers usually aren't there either. A lot of times in the theatre, you can alter what you've said, especially if it's a new play, and you can mold it more. Whereas on a TV set, it's pretty much carved in stone when you get there and you just have to figure out how you're going to fill it," he explained. Keith has tackled a wide variety of character roles including an old janitor in Stephen King's The Golden Years, more recently a biker on ER, and of course, a scorned father and vampire hunter on Angel. He has also appeared on shows such as Crossing Jordan and The Wild Thornberry's. While his guest appearances have also included The X-Files and Roswell, Keith prefers material that has the dark comedic aspects that the series, Profit embraced. "Profit was a black comedy. I find myself drawn to that, to be honest," he confessed. "I like things that are kind of nasty, satirical, and a little black in their humor. I think that Angel had a great deal of that. It sort of combined both genres. It was written kind of tongue in cheek, but not really because you can play it all seriously. It poked fun at itself, a lot, which I find is usually a sign of intelligence." On Angel, Keith felt the writers utilized a wide variety of styles, including some delicious, film noir, "It's all there. I think Angel is kind of a black comedy, or it has black comedic aspects to it, not unlike Profit. But I think Profit was more deliberately black and comedic, and was always pulling the rug out from under itself because it was satirizing the corporate world, whereas I don't really believe that Angel is necessarily satirizing science fiction and fantasy. It gently pokes fun at itself, and at the serious nature at times, but there are limitation," Keith admitted. "He will die if he goes into sunlight, and these are things that you have to accept, the parameters. If you accept the fact that there is the evil world in there, you can have fun within the context of it." A VOICE FIT FOR ANGEL Szarabajka narrates the Dean Koontz novel, Fear Nothing One of the most distinguishing characteristics of Holtz was his powerful, dominating voice. It was an invaluable addition in creating the overall creepy, Holtz-ian presence. Keith, who in fact does not have an English accent, has always been aware of using his voice as a professional tool. "People said I had a good voice so they started hiring me. That's what did it," he said with a laugh. "The way I really, really got into doing a lot of voice-overs...well, I even did them in high school. My drama teacher would have me do these radio plays for WNUR in Evanston. They did these old time classics and we would do radio plays. I did a couple of them and they were fun. But I didn't have it as a steady thing in my life until I was in New York. A neighbor at the building I lived in, Isaiah Sheffer, ran Symphony Space. They have a program there called Selected Shorts in which you read short stories in front of live audiences that are then taped for the radio and played at NPR [National Public Radio]. Many of them are still out there. On the CD this year from Selected Shorts, I read a story called the 'The H Street Sledding Record' by Ron Carlson," he recounted. "Isaiah knew I was an actor. They came to me and said, 'Would you like to do a short story for me?' I agreed, but I didn't really know what it entailed. They said, 'Just read it in front of an audience. Come in and show up at 6:30 for a sound check. The show starts at 7:30.' "So I went in and did the sound check. It was a rainy night. There was nobody there. It was in February and very cold. I go back out, get a bite to eat and come back. I only lived a couple of blocks from the theatre, and when I came back people were hanging from the rooftops! There were over a thousand people in this old theatre! It was thrilling! The warmth of the audience was overwhelming. I got up there and I was so nervous I almost couldn't stop my knee from shaking," Keith confessed. "I got into the story, the audience got into the story with me, and it just took me places. I flew with it. I soared and my spirit soared with it. It was just so much fun." While many people would shy away from using only the power of their voice to convey a story, Keith embraced the opportunity. "Well you just don't move around," he joked. " When I came back people were hanging from the rooftops! It was thrilling. The warmth of the audience was overwhelming." "You just sit there and let your voice carry the action and your energy. It's all your voice that's doing it so you have to convey it all through your voice whereas on screen there are visual images and action that does what you do. I've done well over a dozen, maybe fifteen [readings] between Selected Shorts and the Bloomsday Reading (on Bloomsday June 16th) where they read 'Finnegan's Wake' by James Joyce. I've done Walt Whitman days with them. I wish I were there because I would be doing them all the time. They still have me do it because they come out here and do it at the Getty Center in spring." Keith's work at Symphony Space proved to be only one of many avenues for his vocal talents. "People started hearing me do readings. It was big in the advertising world for people to go listen to Selected Shorts. So people started calling me up and asking me if I would do voice-overs. People like Random House Publishing or Bantam Doubleday Dell would ask me to do a book on tape," Keith recalled. "I remember the first book on tape I had to do was 'Blue Highways' by William Least-Heat Moon. I had just read it a couple of years before, and it was an abridged version that they presented me with. I had read it while I was traveling from Wilmington, North Carolina to Nashua, Tennessee one Thanksgiving weekend. I was shooting this movie Marie, a true story with Sissy Spasek, Morgan Freeman, and Jeff Daniels. I really got into the book. They called me and sent me the script. I said I wanted to do it and was very interested. I read it, read it, read it, and said 'Ok this is great.' I noticed it was written with characters like it was a script: you would have a character name and a bit of dialogue. So I figured maybe I should ask them what part I was playing. I called up the producer and said, 'This is great, I really love this, but what part am I supposed to play in this?' There's a silence, and she goes, 'All of them,'" Keith stated with a burst of laughter. "The proof is in the pudding," he continued. "I did just about every regional accent in the United States. I had a secret resource that I used, and it worked very well. I still remember the silence and then her saying, 'All of them.'" Keith has gone on to do an extensive amount of voice over work including the role of Psycho on the popular Saturday morning CGI cartoon Max Steel, and the role of Gripes of Wrath on Duckman. Go to Next Page

Return to Behind the Scenes Main Page