Writer: Chris Ahrens
When a new acquaintance asks, what do you do? we assume they’re referring to work. The insecure among us might mentally shuffle through our mundane resumes, hoping to enhance our answer. Just that quickly, window washer translates to vision enhancement engineer and stay-at-home mom becomes CEO of domestic finance.
    Ranking just below rock star as the coolest thing ever, working Hollywood actors don’t require much more. We all know they have the best job, and we can fill in the rest. With an actor, especially a TV actor, it’s easy to think we know all about them—the fast cars, the faster company, the titanic ego, the powdered Peruvian reality antidote that destroys the fast car and leads to that final starring role on Celebrity Rehab.
    It’s the last day of shooting for A&E’s The Cleaner. Star Benjamin Bratt has bought ice cream for the entire crew and one of his co-stars, Esteban Powell, is dressed up like a cyclist for his part, something that, with his wiry frame, he easily could be.
    The final scene is shot and everyone hugs. Powell changes into street clothes, lights a smoke, and performs a cool magic trick, by making it disappear as I follow him through the hotel lobby and into the pool area, where smoking is still allowed and the cigarette reappears. At poolside, we overhear a guest telling his astonished family that he just saw Benjamin Bratt, right there. Esteban laughs, saying, “I hear stuff like that all the time.” If that doesn’t humble you, maybe hard beginnings and a string of right-place-right-time incidents (he wouldn’t call them coincidences) will. What he does is not so relevant as how he does it, how he got there and he gets there. My bet is he will go places, not just because he knows his lines, but lots of other things.

Risen Magazine: Esteban Powell: those two names aren’t placed together very often.
Esteban Powell: It’s funny you should say that. [I was] born in Durango, Mexico, from a mother who was born in Juneau, Alaska. My father was from Fruita, Colorado. They met in Vegas when my mother was working for the Vegas mob. She married my dad, got angry with him, and decided she wanted to own land in Mexico. Not being a citizen, she couldn’t do that. But she went to Mexico anyway and delivered me. She always used to tell me, “You were born in a one-room hospital, dirt floors, one window, chickens running around, two beds in the place.” She told me that she was there, teaching English to nuns. I was like, “Oh, that’s cool.” At nineteen I found that cocaine and black market babies were the two major exports of the town I was born in. I wasn’t a black market baby, thank goodness, but I never asked too many questions after that. I’m sure it was mob related and drug related. It’s kind of funny and ironic at the same time, now that I’m on this television program where the whole basis of the show is helping people escape addiction.
    While my mom was delivering me there was one doctor, one nurse. The nurse was yelling at my mom. She got pretty upset, slugged the nurse, and knocked her out. After she came to and I was delivered, the nurse took off and went home. My mom had just delivered me when these women came in crying, because the woman they were there with was having an inverted baby. The doctor was yelling at my mom, “Julie, Julie, get up, you have to help me deliver this baby.” They had already started the mourning process because they thought they were going to lose the mother and her baby. It turns out my mother’s platelets were a match for the woman’s blood type. She used her blood to help the mother and her baby survive. The two older ladies took a clip of my hair and hung onto it. That’s my angel baby story.

RM: So, you’re not even born yet and you’ve already got material for a movie of the week.
EP: [Laughs] That’s awesome; I appreciate it. It’s really my mom’s story. She gets more joy out of telling it even than I do from listening to it. She’s a good lady, nomadic by nature, worked for the airlines. We didn’t have a lot of money growing up, so we would get on a plane, go to London, have a meal, get on a plane and go back home. Those were our weekends. No money to really do anything, but we got travel passes all over the world. Family was spread out all over the world—one sister is in the military, my other sister is an artist and a professor in London. We finally settled in Houston, Texas, from second grade to twelfth grade. I graduated from a little performing arts high school.

RM: So you had to become an actor.
EP: I got an amazing jumpstart in theater from my high school. Slowly but surely I started getting into regional theater and then one summer I booked this movie which ended up being my first picture, Dazed and Confused, which is now a pretty renowned in terms of cult movie status. I made more in four weeks than my mom had made in an entire year.
    I’ve only had two conventional jobs in my life. I delivered flowers and worked in a haunted house. I stuck around Houston until I realized there wasn’t a future there for me unless I wanted to work in a restaurant or in the oil business, neither of which I was suited for. In Houston even the best professional actors would duke it out for four or five speaking lines that might come through once or twice a year. Your other options were like the Shakespeare Festival.
    I made a pact with a friend of mine that we would move out here. After six months I had saved every penny I could, which was sixteen hundred bucks. I packed up my ’86 Buick LeSabre. Then my friend’s mom passed and he couldn’t go with me. I said, I’m still going. I had a friend who wanted to move to LA and I said, Cool, I need a roommate. My radiator overheated in San Antonio, and we towed my car from San Antonio to El Paso. We couldn’t go faster than 45 miles per hour. We pulled into a Pep Boys in El Paso, where they said they’d fix my radiator for six hundred bucks. I had less than eight hundred dollars left, and we hadn’t even left the state yet.
    I remember driving in on the [Interstate] 10, and there’s this stretch where you can see the LA basin. I have conversations with God and when I was coming over that hill, I asked, Am I going to be okay? He said, Son, I’m going to take care of you. You can’t even imagine what I have in store for you. I have a pretty active imagination.
    In LA, I couldn’t hold a job. My mom started sending me twenty-five dollars, spending five dollars to send it. I started going to these AA meetings, just for association and to meet a good group of folks.

RM: Did you have any drug associations before that?
EP: I didn’t. Hard drugs never found me. I smoked pot, tried just about everything. I smoked cocaine in a joint once when I was like seventeen. I was in the passenger seat of a car, thinking it was the worst feeling, ever. I never bothered with it after that.

RM: You went to AA to meet people?
EP: I went because of this one girl I met at Sundance. She was a recovering heroin addict. She was a jazz singer, 33 years old with the mentality of a 17-year-old, because she had never had a sober day, literally, in her life, until she started working the program. I was in love with her. She had the bluesiest voice and she was so cool. She asked me to the meetings. I did