“ How do we tell stories that reach people with limited scope, to get them to open up or change? ”

Jon Orsini

Connecticut resident Jon Orsini launched his acting career while still in college at Boston’s Suffolk University. He earned critical attention for his role as a gay hustler who falls for a closeted film star in Douglas Carter Beane’s “The Little Dog Laughed” in 2008 at Speakeasy Stage. He then reprised the role in another production of the play at Hartford TheaterWorks. 

For his 2013 Broadway debut, Orsini earned an Outer Critics Circle nomination as best featured actor for his role as another gay character, Ned, Nathan Lane’s love interest, in another Beane play, “The Nance.” 

Pretty impressive queer credentials for a straight ally. But Orsini has long defied being pigeonholed as an actor and as a human being.

He stepped away from his successful acting career a few years ago to focus on the breath work and meditation that’s been integral to his life for many years.  Orsini is a certified breathwork and mindful outdoor guide, a meditation instructor and an archery instructor on the faculty at Kripalu in the Berkshires.

“For 14 years, I had tunnel vision on my acting career,” Orsini says. “I felt like the world was becoming increasingly divided and I wanted to directly and as immediately as possible draw on my own work with breath and meditation, which has always been part of my adult life and supported my acting career. I wanted to be in a place to unify people.”

Now, Orsini has decided to return to acting in the short queer film, “The Misadventures of Bucky & Beene.” Written and directed by Lisa M. Thomas as a pilot with plans to expand the film into a series, it’s about former Miss Gay USA Pepper Buckthorne, played by Peppermint of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and “The Traitors,” and her sassy sidekick Jelly Beene (played by Jonny Beauchamp, whose credits include the movie “Stonewall” and “Penny Dreadful”); together, the two characters host a queer pirate radio show in upstate New York. Orsini plays a homophobe upset that his wife Sharon (Anni Krueger) listens to and enjoys the radio program.

“The Misadventures of Bucky & Beene” was shot in the Hudson Valley. Orsini says a friend who was casting the film knew that the actor was living in Western Massachusetts, so he contacted Orsini and sent him the script.

“I wanted to do it because it’s about light, joy, love and inclusivity,” Orsini says. “It was fun, sweet and topical … it had social impact and a unifying feeling about opening up hearts and minds.”

Orsini approached playing a homophobic character as a challenge to “find a way to unify when everything is pushing people apart. I tried to find where the shared humanity lies,” he says. “He is closed-minded, but I can feel the seed of someone who can learn and grow. I see his potential in the big picture. He loves his wife sincerely, but he’s ignorant so, from his point of view, he thinks the radio show will be hurtful to her. He only knows what he knows.”

Although Orsini didn’t have any scenes with Peppermint, he says he enjoyed spending time with her and other cast members at the film’s New York premiere.

“Jonny and I have a bunch of friends in common, so it was great to finally meet and hang out. Everyone was so awesome. It was such a blessing.” Orsini says the positive experience has left him open to considering more acting roles. But he isn’t about to leave his teaching.

He’ll lead the program “The Medicine of Sound Healing and Somatic Breathwork” January 30–February 1 at Kripalu and will also be teaching monthly classes at Boston Yoga Union.

Orsini stepped away from show business in 2022 because “a lot of my actions were about panic or fear that I was not good enough. It came from a feeling of scarcity and lack.” The breath and meditation work helps him lead with love, not fear, he says. “Now my life more rounded. Storytelling is part of who I am; that door is open again.”

“I’m not perfect. I just try to come back to unifying and connecting hearts and minds,” he says. “How do we tell stories that reach people with limited scope, to get them to open up or change? I’m a straight, white man; I’m not as physically threatened in places where others might be, so if anything, my role is to talk to people where others literally might not be safe. We are a human collective, and our species will do better when we are more open to each other.”

More: jonorsini.com

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