Follow Your Star: Ben Bledsoe

The Big Time: Boy-next-door Ben Bledsoe may be Hollywood’s next hottie

By Kristin Harmel
Photography: Roger Snider
Stylist: Lindsey Dupuis

You may have seen Ben Bledsoe get punched in the face during a chess match. Or watched his brush with death on a reality singing show. Or seen him match wits with California Bureau of Investigation consultant Patrick Jane. Or perhaps you were one of 9.6 million viewers who saw him being groped by Mr. Ryerson, the former head of William McKinley High School’s glee club, in May 2009.

These small-screen episodes (House, CSI, The Mentalist and Glee, respectively) are just a sample of the ways that local-boy-makes-good Ben Bledsoe is making his way into your living room and your life.

A celebrated actor and former member of Natural, an internationally renowned band managed by the infamous Lou Pearlman, Bledsoe is also co-starring with Val Kilmer in the upcoming feature film Riddle and voicing a character in the highly anticipated animated feature Ronal the Barbarian, due out this year.

The 29-year-old Lake Mary High School grad also is close to inking a contract as the new voice of Microsoft, which means you’ll likely hear him on Microsoft and Microsoft-partner products such as the GPS system in new-model Fords.

Ben Bledsoe is everywhere. But his roots are in Longwood, where he was living when he scored his first major acting break and was catapulted, practically overnight, into a life of worldwide fame.

Everybody’s Somebody…

How did he get from Seminole County to the big time?

The story begins in 1982 in the small Atlanta suburb of Snellville, where the slogan on the city-limits sign reads, “Everybody's Somebody in Snellville.” When Ben was 7, he moved with his parents, Michael and Jan, and his older sister, Lara, to the San Francisco Bay area. By sixth grade, he had tested out of all of his middle school’s math classes, so he was sent across the street to Diablo Valley College, a two-year community college, to take higher-level math during the school day. There he saw a sign for the school’s upcoming production of The Music Man.

“The sign said they were looking for some kids to be in the musical,” Bledsoe recalls. “I said, ‘Whoa, singing, acting and people watching? This sounds fun!’ ”

He was an extra in that first production, but it was enough to get Bledsoe hooked on acting. Next he went out for the college’s production of Oliver. It was there that he caught the eye of the show’s director, who was in the midst of putting together a stage cast for Great Expectations. He asked Bledsoe to play Pip, the play’s lead character.

“Things picked up pretty quickly from there,” Bledsoe explains. “I knew it was something I loved to do, but at that time, I never really thought it could be a career. People liked what I was doing and my parents were incredibly supportive, which made it easier too. My parents were never ‘no’ people, which is amazing because one ‘no’ can kill the dream.”

Bledsoe kept on dreaming and, with the help of sister Lara, who entered him in a cover-model contest despite his protests, he landed an agent and booked a commercial for video game-maker Sega right away.

The commercial was the nation’s first exposure to Bledsoe. It ran in 1994, when Bledsoe was 12, and featured him playing a Road Runner video game on a Sega Game Gear handheld console. Commercials with retailers Marshalls and Mervyns soon followed.

“Then my agent in San Francisco said, ‘It’s time for you to move to L.A.’ ” Bledsoe recalls.

After talking it over with his parents, that’s exactly what he did.

“It has always been our goal to never discourage Lara or Ben’s interests,” says dad Michael. “Ben was interested in going down for pilot season, and so we had to figure a way to make it happen. Finances were tough, but we made a plan and Jan, Lara and Ben were off to Hollywood. I stayed and gathered his weekly assignments from his middle school and worked. One of us would drive the eight hours each weekend so the family would still be together.”

The family rented an apartment at The Oakwood, a famed apartment complex between the Warner Bros. and Universal studios where scores of soon-to-be stars have lived over the years. Jan, a former schoolteacher, home-schooled her son between auditions and Ben, then almost 13, quickly landed a series of five national commercials for Kentucky Fried Chicken, a job that paid the rent. He also did a Partnership for a Drug Free America commercial and became the face of Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or D.A.R.E.

The bigger jobs – including a role he auditioned for on the popular sitcom Family Matters -- were more elusive, though. Bledsoe lived in Los Angeles for just over a year. Shortly after he turned 14, his dad, who worked for an agricultural chemical company, got a job offer that required a move to the East Coast. So far, the family had managed the 350 miles between San Francisco and Los Angeles, but having a whole country between them was a different story.

Michael had a choice between New York and Orlando, and he and Jan let their two kids weigh in.

“I don’t know how much say I really had in it,” Bledsoe says, “but they knew acting was something I took very seriously. At the time, Nickelodeon and Disney had studios fully up and running in Orlando, so that’s what made us choose to move there.”

So the family relocated to the Wingfield Reserve neighborhood in Longwood, and Bledsoe arrived in time to begin his freshman year at Lake Mary High School. He hit the audition trail once again and soon landed roles on Kenan & Kel and The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo, two popular kids’ shows at the time. He also appeared in a handful of commercials.

But acting was losing its appeal, especially as the studios began to downsize their production capabilities in Orlando. Fortunately for Bledsoe, he also had lots of talent in another arena: music. And now he was in the right place at the right time – Central Florida in the late 1990s – to make those dreams come true too.

It’s Only Natural

While living in California, Bledsoe had played upright bass in his school’s jazz band. But when he moved to Florida and talked to Lake Mary High School’s band director, he was told that if he wanted to participate, he’d have to play in the marching band. Since it’s impossible to march an upright bass, of course, Bledsoe was given two alternatives: march a triangle in the percussion section or play in the pit.

“I went out there and tried it for a day,” he says. “It was the end of summer and I watched the tuba player next to me pass out from heat exhaustion, then a trombone player. I thought, ‘This isn’t worth it.’ ”

So for the next year, he honed his acting skills and developed his singing chops with the help of Winter Park-based vocal coach Ron Feldman. He booked a holiday musical-theater gig one year with rising star Mandy Moore. One of his film agents happened to be there to see them perform a duet.

“My agent called me afterwards and said, ‘I know you told me you could sing, but I didn’t know you could really sing,’” Bledsoe says. “Two days later, she called me up and said, ‘I have an audition for you, but it’s an unusual one. It’s about a possible big singing opportunity.’

“I prepared two or three songs, then I went to a salmon-colored house over in the Isleworth area,” Bledsoe recalls. “It turns out my audition was with a guy named Lou Pearlman.”

Pearlman is, of course, the impresario who had launched the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC. Both bands were huge hits in Europe at the time and had just begun to make the move across the pond to American audiences. At the time, Pearlman had a conundrum on his hands: The Backstreet Boys were doing enormously well, but there was a chance that one of the members was going to leave the band.

“So what basically happened was that Lou was auditioning people to fill Nick (Carter)’s shoes if he left,” Bledsoe explains. “I was there for an hour auditioning and he said, ‘You’re perfect. You’re in if Nick decides to leave.’ He also said that he was bummed that he hadn’t met me earlier. He had just put together *NSYNC, and they’d been looking for someone with a nice low voice to sing bass. I sing bass, but Lance Bass had come along before Lou met me.

“At the time, it didn’t mean a whole lot to me, because those bands weren’t big yet,” Bledsoe says. “That was that. Nick stayed in the Backstreet Boys and I couldn’t turn back time to join *NSYNC, so I went on my merry way.”

But Bledsoe didn’t forget Pearlman or the man’s words of encouragement, and he found himself dreaming of being in a band. However, he didn’t see himself in a typical Pearlman-esque boy band. He wanted to play his own instrument. But he couldn’t imagine being in a garage band with his classmates either.

“I was the kid who did musical theater and liked pop radio,” he says with a laugh. “I grew up on the Beatles and Stevie Wonder, and I was into Everclear and Fastball. That was my kind of music. And that’s not what I would have been playing in someone’s garage.”

Then one of Bledsoe’s friends overheard a waiter at the Longhorn Steakhouse in Lake Mary talking about how he’d just moved to town and wanted to meet some guys who could sing and play because he wanted to start a band.

The waiter was a guy named Marc Terenzi, and when Bledsoe’s friend introduced them, the two got along right away, despite the fact that Terenzi, then 20, was four years Bledsoe’s senior. They began writing songs together for local singers, but before long, they realized they liked the music they were making together too.

“We really liked the way our voices meshed,” Bledsoe says. “So we thought, ‘We’ve got to do something with this.’ ”

They put together a band that summer, just after Bledsoe turned 17, by adding drummer Michael Johnson, Patrick King on guitar and Michael “J” Horn on piano. Bledsoe played bass while Terenzi played guitar too. They called themselves Natural. Soon after, they met German-born producer Veit Renn, who’d been instrumental in developing the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC.

“He loved that we were a band that played instruments,” Bledsoe says. “By the end of that summer, we’d gotten signed by him.”

After that, it was a whirlwind for Bledsoe and his Natural bandmates. They sold out their first show at the House of Blues at Downtown Disney, and they were sent to Germany for their first tour. While attending a huge musical festival in Cologne, Germany, as spectators, Natural was asked to step in when the headlining band was detained and unable to get there. They appeared on the main stage before a crowd of 150,000 to play the only four songs they knew.

“We decided to jump up and down during our set, and when we looked out at the crowd, it was just a sea of people jumping with us,” Bledsoe recalls. “It was the craziest show ever, and that’s when we got label interest.”

That’s when Lou Pearlman came back into the picture too. He remembered meeting Bledsoe a year or two earlier. Natural already had a built-in audience that was very similar to that of Pearlman’s other bands. He got them a meeting with three major labels and told BMG that if they didn’t sign Natural, he’d make it the biggest decision they’d ever regretted, Bledsoe recalls.

“We negotiated and signed with Lou,” Bledsoe says, “and then a deal came through him later on with BMG.”

In the next few years, Natural swept the world, although their success in the United States never matched that of Pearlman’s previous bands. Their debut single, “Put Your Arms Around Me,” hit number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 Single Sales Chart after Pearlman partnered with Claire’s, a popular accessory store for teenage girls, to offer the CD for just 99 cents with a purchase. Natural appeared in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and at several NASA shuttle launches. The band even toured with The Monkees in a show designed to appeal to mothers and their teen and ’tween daughters.

“It’s still one of my favorite tours,” Bledsoe says. “It was a bus tour across the U.S. with these guys who were total pros. I learned a lot about media from Davy (Jones). He knows how to spin anything into anything he wants to talk about. I learned a lot of life lessons from Peter (Tork), because he’s real and he’s a crazy son of a gun. He’s a great musician too. Mickey (Dolenz) is super-talented. I love his voice, and he’s just a really nice guy.”

They became moderately well-known stateside, but in Germany, the guys of Natural were superstars. They had multiple top 10 hits there and toured both Western Europe and Asia numerous times. Bledsoe’s bass guitar is on display in the Hard Rock Café Munich, right beside that of legendary U2 bassist Adam Clayton.

And for residents of Bledsoe’s Longwood neighborhood, it was hard not to notice the star down the block.

“Fans found the house and often would park out front,” says Bledsoe’s dad. “One time, Jan found two in our garage. Some took rooms close by and made multiple attempts to meet the guys. Jan and I would often speak with the fans, mostly because we felt they deserved some contact after coming so far. We had to change our phone number multiple times over the years and each time had it unlisted.”

Adds Bledsoe, “Fans would drive up and down the street, which was pretty obvious since we lived on a cul-de-sac, so there weren’t exactly people passing through.”

After one last number 1 single -- “Just One Last Dance,” with Terenzi’s girlfriend, German rock star Sarah Connor -- Natural called it quits in early 2005.

“Those years with Natural were the craziest ride known to man, a lot like Beatlemania,” Bledsoe says. “Now, looking back on it, it feels like my early years of acting were like my first life. Those years in Natural, I look at as my second life. Now, it’s hard to imagine that those years with Natural were something I ever experienced. I’m on to my third life.”

Screen Dreams

After Natural folded, Bledsoe spent the next year at home in Florida enjoying some time out of the spotlight, although his family’s front lawn was still populated with German fans on a regular basis. It was then that he recorded his solo album, the soulful An Insomniac’s Guide to a Lonely Heart, which continues to post steady sales. But Bledsoe missed acting and in 2007, he decided that he was ready to pursue a career in front of the camera once again. He knew that meant a big sacrifice.

“I only really decided to leave music behind because I wanted to make sure people in acting knew I was serious, not that I was going to be a musician who was going to try his hand at acting,” explains Bledsoe, who continues to write music for other bands. “I also knew that in order to succeed in acting, I’d have to move to Los Angeles. I knew that for me, even after all the success I’d had with Natural, it would be like starting from the beginning in another industry.”

Fortunately, Bledsoe already had some name recognition as an actor. The lessons he had learned as an international superstar also served him well when he re-entered the world of Hollywood.

“The industries aren’t that different,” he explains. “The film and TV industry is a little more structured than the music industry, but the industries are both based on entertainment. There’s some science to how it can work, and the industries cross paths. I had a pretty clear vision of the fact that I wanted to be here and I knew what I needed to do to make it work.

“I may not have known all the rules, but I’ve been trying to take the right steps,” he continues. “And I think that having that music experience behind me, with all the craziness of touring, has helped keep me level. Once I’m done with an audition, for example, I don’t think about it again. A lot of people think about what they messed up, but all you can do is your best in the audition room and wait to see.”

That balanced approach – and the acting classes Bledsoe enrolled in as soon as he moved to L.A. in 2007 – soon helped him land his first post-Natural acting job: a teenage chess champion on the Fox television show House.

“That was huge for me,” Bledsoe says. “It was just a two-minute spot, but it was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I can do this again.’ It had been eight years since I’d done any acting that wasn’t related to music, and the industry was semi-welcoming me back.

“We trained for a day and filmed for two,” explains Bledsoe, whose character was punched in the face and bloodied by another character early in the episode. “I got to meet Hugh Laurie (the show’s star), and one thing I really respected about him was that even though he’s British, his character is American, so he always speaks in an American accent on set because he wants to be told if he’s saying anything incorrectly.”

Roles in CBS’S CSI and CSI: NY, CBS’s The Mentalist, ABC’s Castle, FX’s Justified, the Disney Channel’s Jessie and Nickelodeon’s Fresh Beat Band followed, but it’s another series of auditions that stands out the most in Bledsoe’s mind.

“I went in eight times for Glee,” says Bledsoe, who was up against Corey Monteith for the role of singing quarterback Finn Hudson. “For the final call, they wanted to see how we’d do with musical theater, so I brought in a couple of Broadway songs I’d prepared. Before I went in, Corey went in first. I could hear him doing a fun rock ’n roll song that you could tap your feet to. He came out, and I looked at him and said, ‘Dude, you booked it, you son of a gun.’ ”

Still, the Glee producers wanted Bledsoe in the pilot episode as a character who could recur later, so he was cast as student Hank Saunders, who is groped by the school’s glee club teacher in one of the first scenes.

“As the writing went on, it didn’t work out for me to return,” Bledsoe says. “But I had a blast working with everyone.”

Solving the Riddle

The next step for Bledsoe: the big screen. In 2010, he auditioned for a starring role as the boyfriend of a small-town sheriff’s daughter in a film called Riddle. He didn’t know much about the production other than the basic storyline, but that’s not unusual in Hollywood. He simply prepared his scenes and showed up to audition.

“I got a call a week later from my agent, saying, ‘They want to book you. Can you leave tomorrow for Pittsburgh?’ ” Bledsoe recalls. “That’s where the movie was filming, and of course I said yes.”

His agent had something else to tell him too -- his co-star would be Val Kilmer, who has famously played Batman, Jim Morrison and other noteworthy roles. Bledsoe was incredulous.

“It was huge for me,” he says. “One of the films that had inspired me to go into acting as a profession was The Saint, which he’s the star of. It was all coming full circle.”

Bledsoe arrived to find that he’d not only be working with Kilmer, but also with veteran actor William Sadler, whose films include The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile.

Bledsoe, Kilmer, Sadler and the rest of the cast spent six weeks in and around Pittsburgh filming the psychological thriller, which is about the mysterious disappearance of a teenager in a creepy town called Riddle that’s home to a burned-down mental hospital. It is scheduled to hit big screens nationwide this spring.

Moviegoers will also be able to see – or rather, hear – Bledsoe in the upcoming Ronal the Barbarian. Bledsoe, who has his own studio, has been doing a lot of voiceover work lately. So far, he has done national Burger King commercials and been the voice that officially introduced the new government of Thailand. Now he’ll likely sign on as the voice of Microsoft, which means he’ll be the voice of the GPS system in new Fords.

He’s also the star of the original web series Waxing Platonic, which can be viewed free at www.WaxingPlatonic.com.

“Ben is a great person. True to his Southern roots, he is warm-hearted, extremely easygoing and very genuine, which is a rare commodity in Los Angeles,” says Sanjeev Sirpal, the writer and director of Waxing Platonic. “He's a big goofball, which makes his movie-star looks bearable.

“He's not fame-hungry or attention-starved and doesn't have any of the hang-ups that a lot of young Hollywood does. He’s incredibly versatile and, when it comes down to it, a lot of fun to hang out with. When you're making a movie, you're with people for 20 hours a day for who knows how long. It's a huge thing to actually like being with the people you're forced to be with. Ben also doesn't do anything without giving 110 percent. You never have to worry about Ben's performance because it's always going to be spot-on.”

Bledsoe also stars in the upcoming Alfred Hitchcock-influenced suspense film No One Will Know, filmed in Marin County, California, near where Hitchcock’s legendary The Birds was made. Bledsoe plays the film’s lead, “the guy you love to hate,” he says, “and the guy you hate to love.”

Bledsoe, who lives in the Hollywood Hills with girlfriend Lindsey Dupuis (a fashion stylist whose clients include Ashley Tisdale, Emma Roberts and Mandy Moore), returns to Central Florida to visit his family several times a year. For now, his career will keep him in Los Angeles most of the time. To those who have worked with him, it’s clear that Bledsoe’s future is bright.

“He's always super-prepared and constantly thinking about and honing in on nuances in whatever roles he plays,” Sirpal says. “The reasons he can play a wide variety of character types are one, because of his talent, and two, because he prepares meticulously. When he is in a role, he doesn't stop thinking about it when the camera stops rolling. It's with him 24 hours a day.”

That’s all part of the hard-working nature that has gotten Bledsoe to this point in his career.

“I just can’t tell you how many times people have said to me that being an actor is impossible, or that it’s crazy, or that I should just get a ‘real job,’ ” Bledoe says with a laugh. “But this is what I want. Will Smith once said that there is no plan B, because it distracts from plan A. This is my plan A and it seems like it’s going to work out.

“I’ve been fortunate enough to have really supportive parents who always encouraged me and I continue to have supportive people in my life,” he adds. “So now, I’m just trusting my instinct and doing what I think is right. I’m going for it.”