Meet Alejandro Salinas | Actor & Filmmaker

We had the good fortune of connecting with Alejandro Salinas and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Alejandro, how do you think about risk?
To me, there’s two kinds of risk – calculated risk and dumb risk, and both have been instrumental in my growth as a man and an artist in the face of a challenge. Risk has always been an indicator that I’m chasing my own ambition through uncharted waters and I might fail beyond redemption… but there’s also a good chance I will succeed. I won’t know until I step up to the plate and swing for the fences.

For most of my life, I’ve had a tendency to try new things despite risk – whether it was skydiving, attempting difficult ski runs I was not ready for, or even with performative stunts – cliff diving or one handed rope swings. I love soliciting a reaction from friends and family after attempting something risky. And maybe even more than that, I love the feeling of success after conquering a stunt deemed too risky to attempt. That has always fueled my zealousness for life – either physical or mental.

I remember one time when I was 13 or 14, my friends and I had the idea to hold onto the escalator railing at the Regal Edward’s Cinema to see how high we could get before “chickening-out.” We all tried it out a few times only to let go a few feet above the ground. On a dare to myself, I said I’d make it at least 20-feet. Despite my friends’ protests, I grabbed a hold of the railing. I ascended past 6-feet, then 8-feet. 10-feet. Each step higher I could hear my friends yelling for me to drop. I must have made it to at least 14 feet before I finally looked down and realized how high I was. I let go and miraculously landed on my feet in a drop squat and fell backwards. I remember how electric I felt as my friends cheered me on after their initial shock whether I was okay or not. Incredibly, dumb, yes, and could have ended up tragically horrific, but if it weren’t for my childhood desire to perform in front of my friends or family to elicit a reaction, I wouldn’t have developed the confidence to face the possibility of failure with my head high. Now, nearly double that age, I believe that channeled stupidity was a monumental reason behind the success to co-write, co-produce, and star in my first feature film, Liquid Lady.

Inspired by our love of epics, my partner, Jim Wadkins and I, wrote a script about a small-town Texas musician spiraling out of control only to embark on a spiritual odyssey through the desert.

We had every reason to quit before we even got started.

For one, we wrote an incredibly ambitious script with no concrete plan for how to animate this vision. Secondly, I cast myself as the lead actor musician but couldn’t hold a tune and I barely knew how to play the guitar. And lastly, we had no money to fund this. Almost everyone we sent the script to turned it down. Two producers stepped down from the project in pre-production and during production and we had to recast the main actress three times before finding the perfect actor for the lead role.

There’s something to be said about perseverance in the face of failures and I believe I successfully tested myself to see how far I could go with this project as it literally and figuratively, took us to hell and back. In parallel with the script, we ended up embarking on own journey from Galveston, Texas across the Southwest desert to Death Valley, California for 5 weeks with a total crew of 3 people – Jim, Romario Solis (our co-star and self-proclaimed “lowly-grip”) and myself.

During an ambitious take, trekking across the sand dunes in 130 degree heat in the middle of summer, we walked nearly half a mile away from our car with the equipment and only water jugs we could carry for the journey so as to not weigh us down for the long walk. After a few hours of shooting and re-doing a walking take with the sun setting behind the dunes, Romario and I noticed that Jim was unresponsive to call “cut.” We rushed down the sand dune only to see he was on the brink of heat exhaustion, face as red as a sunset. I thank God, he was okay after taking a break, sitting down on the cooler side of the dune, and drinking some of our water. And even more miraculously, Jim got the shot.

The risk from the get-go was nearly insurmountable but if it wasn’t for the dream and utter ambition to take this film off the ground, then we never would have begun that journey that took us nearly 3 years to complete. And I believe it has paid off as we received a Silver award from the Houston WorldFest film festival.

Although, this doesn’t go without acknowledging the life lessons from my many failures in the past – all standing at the base of a risky endeavor.

At the start of my acting career, I turned down a paid commercial callback to act in an unpaid short film wherein most of my scenes were cut.

As a sophomore, in my first Varsity cross country race, I injured my foot badly enough to inadvertently end my highschool running career. After I failed to put my shoe back after the heel was stepped on, I acknowledged the risk of not stopping to adjust the heel as I was near the front of the pack and didn’t want to lose my position, so I let my shoe fly off. Unfortunately, the path leading outside of the grassy woods was about a quarter mile of dry, rocky, stones. I lost the race and my foot never fully recovered.

Most recently, on a short film I wrote and directed, I asked the cinematographer, Jim, to perform a risky camera maneuver that ate up nearly 30 minutes of our shoot when we only had the space for 5 hours. We ultimately failed. The short film didn’t suffer tremendously as a result of the magic of editing, but my confidence did for a portion of the shoot as we were behind schedule with no reward for the risk attempted under my guidance.

As I grow older, I recognize the importance of calculating my degree of certainty for success with each challenge. It would be foolish not to after the tremendous amount of risk I’ve taken with little scars to show for. I still press head-on to almost every encounter in my life, but I’ve learned to approach each situation with more caution than I have in the past. Pure luck has taken me this far and I plan to live a long time, so it’s best to save it for a challenge I can use simultaneously along with my own wits.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I grew up with a big love for movies, inspired by my mom. The only early childhood memories I can recall are from some of the first movies I ever watched with her – The Iron Giant, Starship Troopers, My Neighbor Totoro, Alien (my mom didn’t let me watch that. I snuck out of my room at night and watched it from behind the couch). My mom did, however, excuse me from kindergarten class the day Spiderman (2002) came out so we could go watch it together. That love of film stayed with me throughout adolescence and my teenage years – as every date I had was usually to the movie theaters…. I never actually thought movies were something I could do until much much later.

I stayed in Houston until I graduated high school – and left for LSU in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Aside from movies, I also really enjoyed math and physics so I studied engineering. It was only by chance that I ended up pursuing the arts after I was required to take an elective. So I took a theater elective because I thought it would be easy. And it was incredibly easy since all you had to do was show up, but I also discovered after the “final exam” which was a short scene from Death of an Anarchist, that I was absolutely enamored with performing. I loved the feeling of being someone else in front of other people, letting emotions free that I felt had to be contained for social constructs.

After class, I spoke with the professor. He mentioned I wasn’t bad and if I liked it then it should be worth pursuing. So I did. I auditioned for a few school plays and got some parts and ultimately went abroad to perform with the LSU theater group at the 2018 Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. I “lived” as an actor there for nearly 6 weeks, and it was one of the best summer experiences I’ve had until the summer of filming Liquid Lady just 4 years later.

I graduated engineering and took a job with a firm in Houston. I was still aching for acting roles so I sent my resume in to a couple theaters in Houston but didn’t hear any good news. I was fairly discouraged since everything happened so easily for me before so I took 6 months off from acting entirely. I ultimately rediscovered it after I took a spontaneous trip to Peru to ascend the mountains to see Machu Picchu and ultimately sat in an Ayahuasca circle in the Sacred Valley.

A lot of the visions I experienced were incredibly personal. I fought through what I believed (and felt) was a physical death only to realize through a symphony of angels in a choir that I was giving up on something that was a Personal Journey for me – film.

A lot of the visions I experienced inspired some of the writing and sequences in the film, Liquid Lady, actually. In one of them, I was a baby born in a desert in a teepee held by my mother. Purple, green, gold geometric shapes filled my peripherals. They fit together and intertwined like puzzle pieces. In the vision, my mom swaddled me in a cloth. She kissed me and brought me outside the teepee and a tribe of strange beings praised me and welcomed me coming home. It was a feeling like none other and I didn’t know what it meant until much later.

After that experience, back in Houston a few weeks later, I was driving around the Rice Village, and I saw the Next Actor Studio and then everything clicked like a key in a door. It was so clear what my visual experiences meant. I was coming back home to my own world of art.

From Summer 2019 until Summer 2021, I performed at Next Actor Studio where I met and worked with a lot of friends that I ended up casting in Liquid Lady. Todd (who played Mike), Romario (who played Miguel), Andrea (who played the Shaman), Lance (who played Jeff, the bartender), and Ally (who played Gena). In fact, we owe Liquid Lady’s origins to the studio’s director, Trisha Ray, who mentioned that if we really wanna get more parts then we should make our own reels and short films. “Just write out a scene and film it, there’s no excuse not to make your own stuff.” That sparked an idea for me to write out a scene and would be how I met my best friend and eventual collaborator, Jim Wadkins.

I have no basis of proof for what I’m about to say except citing blind faith and my own spiritual beliefs – but I wholeheartedly believe that life is alchemy. Every encounter, every decision is a rich opportunity to create the world of our dreams and desires beyond anything we could have conceived in only a few short years. All of it – only dependent on how attentive we are to look for the signs, and how risk averse we are to step outside our own comfort zones.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
The artechouse is one of the most contemporary exhibitions in town. The exhibits combines technology with art, often using lasers, mirrors, optical perceptions, and projections of the creation of the universe to tell emotional stories. I’d take any friend who loves to explore philosophy of our organic importance within an artificially intelligent world.

One of the best restaurants I’d take a friend to is the Traveler’s Table. I love cocktails, imported wines and shareables and this place features a culturally diverse spread of incredible foods.

When the River Oaks Cinema does open up, you better believe we’re gonna catch a movie there. Historically important to Houston, of course, but one of the only cinemas to still maintain the traditional style of cinema with red velvet seats. One of the last movies I saw there was Parasite, so this place holds a special place in my heart.

And lastly, aside from anything art related, I’m a big Houston sports fan. I’ve been a Texans fan since the dark days, so I’d proudly take a friend who hasn’t been to NRG to a game to hopefully watch an exciting game with an elite team.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I’d love to thank my mom, Dalia Salinas, who always believed in my endeavors from the start, and showed me the many films that have inspired me as a filmmaker. When I told her I wanted to pursue theater in college, she was incredibly supportive. When I was approached for a role to perform in a show abroad at the Scotland Fringe Festival in 2018, she personally funded my trip abroad which became the impetus for my film career.

I’d also like to thank Trisha Ray at Next Actor Studio in Houston. I began my on-camera experiences there with her as an actor after college and found some of my closest friends and actors who have starred in nearly all of the films I’ve written.

Website: https://www.chameleoneye.net/chameleon-eye

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chameleoneye?igsh=MTkzd2txeWdpb2o5ZQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qr

Youtube: https://youtube.com/@bigalmoney99?si=oMJt4eW09GmW7fKB

Other: My personal instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/_adsalinas_?igsh=Zm14YzJjdjEzdmF0&utm_source=qr

Image Credits
Jim Wadkins
Enrique Vasquez
Julian D. Jackson