Actor David Ackert '92 makes his mark on-screen and with the kids in the neighborhood.

by Ellen Potter

Taking notice: Ackert as Ali in a demonstration scene from Maryam

Not long after David Ackert '92, star of the recently released independent film Maryam, moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career as an actor, he noted one of the most common pitfalls of the profession. All around him he saw other struggling actors who had been feverishly chasing fame for years; and in the end all they had to show for their efforts were --- maybe --- "a walk-on role on Friends and a string of unfulfilling day jobs," he says. Unwilling to put his life on hold until fame came knocking, Ackert, along with Melissa Fitzgerald (who plays the recurring role of press secretary aide Carol on NBC's The West Wing), decided to put their talents to immediate use.

In 1995 they founded Voices in Harmony, a nonprofit mentoring organization for at-risk L.A. teens. Working with a group of 20 teens at a time, Voices in Harmony pairs each youth with a professional actor to create a one-act play around a topical theme, such as drugs, racism, or gang violence. At the end of six months they stage a production of the play. Jim Carrey, John Lithgow, Alfre Woodard, and Renée Zellweger have served as hosts. This past June Voices in Harmony's biggest production to date was hosted by cast members of The West Wing and attended by more than 2,000 people.

Making an impact: Ackert with fellow actor Melissa Fitzberald and students from Voices in Harmony

"It's our intention to have an impact on these kids on every level," says Ackert, who maintains that the program, while certainly fun for the teens, takes a tough-love approach. It stresses personal responsibility, integrity, and respecting others' boundaries. For many teens, the Voices in Harmony experience marks a significant turning point in their lives. "Their teachers tell us that the teens [involved in the program] participate more in class and that their grades have improved, and their parents say that they are much more communicative."

"When I came to this country nobody seemed to notice me," says Karla Nunfio, a former participant in Voices in Harmony. "All I got was indifference. I did not know English. It was hard for me to communicate with my teachers. Voices in Harmony helped me develop confidence in myself and taught me how to be more open-minded, meaning that I shouldn't be afraid to express my thoughts or feelings anymore."

Ackert's own career, which includes television roles on JAG, Six Feet Under, The West Wing, Walker Texas Ranger, and Days of Our Lives, hit a turning point in 1998 when director Ramin Serry was trying to cast the role of Ali, an observant Muslim, in his film Maryam.

"We held an exhausting search for Ali, auditioning dozens of actors in New York and Los Angeles," says Serry. "Nobody was even close to getting it right. It was looking pretty bleak. Then David walked in, read for the part, and blew us away."

Set in New Jersey in 1979, Maryam is the fictional coming-of-age story of an Iranian American girl who suddenly becomes a social outcast after Americans are taken hostage in Iran. When her conservative Muslim cousin Ali comes to live with her family, she is forced to reexamine her own cultural identity.

Although the film was completed four years ago, it struggled through the usual independent-film obstacles until Roger Ebert's two-thumbs-up review --- and the film's relevance to the events of September 11 --- made distributors sit up and take notice. Maryam opened in major cities this past spring and has since garnered exceptional reviews from the New York Times, New York magazine, the Village Voice, and the New York Daily News.

Himself a second-generation Iranian American, Ackert found that preparing for the role required him to face his own demons, including some long-held beliefs about Islamic culture. "I had very stereotypical ideas about the Muslim religion," he says. "I thought, 'Oh yeah, that's [the religion] where they bundle up the women, and they're all fundamentalist Uzi-carrying monsters.' I was practically a redneck when it came to Islam, and I had to just consider that maybe I didn't know what the heck I was talking about in order to portray a character who was very much in love with the religion."

Ackert began to reconnect with the Iranian community, attending mosque, taking Farsi classes, and reading the Qur'an. "I discovered so many beautiful things about the religion and saw how deeply misunderstood it is and how terribly misrepresented."

Although Ackert was born in the United States, his Iranian mother and American father returned to Iran when he was five years old but fled back to the States during the 1978 - 79 Iranian revolution. The family settled in Washington, D.C., where, in the midst of the hostage crisis in Iran, nine-year-old David became the class pariah, much like the young film character Maryam. The other children picked on him so mercilessly, he says, that he began to feign illness in order to avoid going to school.

"That is actually the beginning of how I became an actor," Ackert recalls. "I started lying." After a time during which he did some particularly compelling acting, he managed to get himself admitted into the hospital. "But by that time I'd actually started to believe I was sick, and the pain I experienced was real." The doctors were dumbfounded as to what was wrong with him, so they decided to take him in for exploratory surgery.

The day before the scheduled surgery, Ackert's teacher came to visit him in the hospital and gave him a manila envelope. Inside were little scraps of construction paper --- get-well notes from everyone in his class. "They said stuff like 'David, I'm sorry I called you [an ethnic slur]. Love, Debbie.' And 'Dear David, I'm sorry I kicked you in the head.' All these gestures of atonement. I was very moved, and suddenly the pain I had been feeling disappeared. They took some blood tests and decided that whatever was wrong with me had gotten better, and they let me go a few days later. I went back to school, and for one day I was the most popular kid in class. But the following day there was some riot on a campus somewhere, and suddenly I was a 'camel jockey' again."

These days, Ackert has come to view his ethnicity not only with pride but also as an advantage, since it provides him with a foot in the casting door more often than not. He played an Egyptian for his first TV series, Crossroads Café, which kept him employed for a year, and an Italian for his first lead in a feature film, Cool Crime, as well as for a guest spot on JAG. And Ackert's Persian accent in Maryam was, Serry says, impeccable. In fact, the director claims that audiences were consistently amazed at Q&A sessions when he told them that Ackert was born in Wisconsin and has an American accent.

Ackert credits Ithaca College's theater arts professor Greg Bostwick with teaching him how to be such a linguistic chameleon. "Greg taught me the dialects with which I would later go and book most of my jobs," Ackert says. "He taught me how to be masterful with the phonetic alphabet and how to take apart dialects."

What's next for Ackert? He recently finished shooting another independent film called Woman on Fire, a modern-day retelling of Medea, in which he once again plays a lead role. As for Voices in Harmony, having just wrapped up a very successful fund-raising event, the organization is entering a planning and development stage to assess how best to expand its programming.

"One of the dangers of being an actor in Los Angeles is that your career and your focus become all about you," Ackert says. "After all, 'you' is the product you are selling. So you can choose to spend your whole life in that mind-set, chasing after two lines on Frasier, or you can get out there and do something that will really give your life meaning and substance."

Luckily for more than 100 L.A. teens, Ackert has opted for the latter.