If you want to dig down to the very roots of Jaime M. Callica’s burgeoning acting career, you have to go all the way back to the 1980s, and to a powerhouse performer otherwise known as the Gloved One.
Like Michael Jackson, the Vancouver actor was a born entertainer. Callica grew up just north of Toronto, and was “performing before I could walk,” he laughs in a recent phone interview.
Standing in front of his mother’s television set, watching “Bad” and “Beat It” on constant replay, he practiced the signature Michael moves until they were his moves, too (“My mom would always run up with a pillow and say, ‘if you’re going to drop to your knees like Mike, make sure that pillow is on the ground there; I don’t want you hurting yourself!’”) – to the point where, at six- and seven-years-old, he was working birthday parties and weddings as an MJ impersonator.
Callica danced throughout his teens, and more so after he moved to Vancouver in the early 2000s. He danced in music videos and feature films (including Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief and Hellcats), and trained with Van City’s top hip-hop dancers at Granville Street’s Harbour Dance.
Callica’s journey to be just “Like Mike” was moonwalking along just nicely – until a life-changing instant in 2004, when he and a friend were struck down in the street by a drunk driver.
Although the friends survived the accident, Callica’s dance career was essentially derailed. He spent a few years on a vastly different path – the business world; he owned and operated a handful of stores in downtown Vancouver – that took him farther and farther from performing.
“I loved making business deals and I enjoyed it, but I always knew that I was put on this planet to perform in some capacity,” says Callica. “After the car accident, I felt like I’d lost a step.”
Cut to the tail-end of 2011. “One day, I woke up, and I knew: ‘Today’s the day I make a change,’ and so I called my realtor and I said, ‘We’ve got to sell everything I have,’” says Callica.
It took a year to sell off all of his stores, and after a few months of globetrotting, in early January 2013, Callica was once again immersed in the life of a full-time performer – but this time, as an actor.
Since this drastic leap of faith, Callica has appeared in Smallville, Man of Steel, The Secret Circle, Big Time Movie, and The 100.
He’s currently recurring on Fox’s Wayward Pines, a television adaptation of Blake Crouch’s bestselling trilogy of books. The first season of the creepy sci-fi drama starred Matt Dillon as a man who wakes up after a car accident in a strange town where – dun dun dun – nothing is as picture-perfect as it seems.
When the second season premiered a few weeks ago (with Jason Patric replacing Dillon as the star of the show), Callica made his debut as Simeon, a supporting character whose role will expand over the course of the season.
Next month, Callica will appear in the series finale of the Vancouver-shot whydunit, Motive.
He’s also shooting his first leading role in a feature film: as a nerdy guy who wants to fit in with the cool crowd in the comedy feature The Perfect Pickup.
That’s a lot of success for three short years, but Callica is the first to admit it hasn’t been all smooth sailing since he made the decision to pursue acting full-time.
“When I started, people would gas me up and say, ‘You’re a good-looking brother in the city, you’re going to book everything,’ and I had this notion that that would be true,” says Callica.
He snagged a lot of auditions right away, but couldn't seem to close to deal, with good reason. “I wasn’t good, so I wasn’t booking anything,” he says, chuckling. Despite this, casting directors continued to bring him into the audition room, “I feel almost like because they hoped that one day I would come in and just be better than those last 20 times, but I wasn’t.”
And so Callica trained, with a discipline and diligence that would have impressed his idol. “It wasn’t until I decided to really put in the necessary work, the required work, did I start to see some success,” says Callica, noting that if he ever wins an award, he plans to thank casting directors from those early days for giving him the chance to get in the audition room and realize what he needed to do to succeed.
Callica is a man of few regrets and little sadness. “If I could go back in time, I might say, ‘hey, dig those heels in a little harder and focus now, because greatness awaits you,’ but I also think everything was supposed to happen the way it did,” says Callica.
