Almost every actor needs a day job to fall back on, a paying gig to balance the budget. It can be waiting tables, teaching, answering phones, fighting fires . . .
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Small and wiry, the 32-year-old Van Swearingen hardly fits the Hollywood image of the heroic, hunky firefighter. “It’s what I do for a living–but I don’t think I could get cast as a fireman,” Van Swearingen says.
A lifelong Chicagoan (and Senn High School dropout), Van Swearingen studied theater before entering the firefighters’ academy in 1987. Once settled in his full-time job, he turned his attention back to the stage. His schedule made it unlikely that he’d get cast in other people’s shows, so he helped start the Rare Terra theater company, which made its debut with Athol Fugard’s “Master Harold” . . . and the Boys. Van Swearingen played a white teenager in this drama about South African race relations–and the show got panned. “It was a bad choice for us,” he admits–but a good learning experience for his next attempt at running a theater.
“Fighting fires and acting to me are very similar,” he reflects. “There’s a certain risk factor. When you’re onstage it’s like an affirmation of your existence. And when you’re fighting a fire it’s the same thing: you’re hot, you’re sweaty, you’re excited, you’re emotionally charged. Of course, the stakes are higher–life and death, in fact. I have been burned by hot embers at different times, and I fell out with heat exhaustion one year. I don’t know. Maybe I can’t get enough of a good thing.”
