Nate Hromalik, a Casa Grande High School graduate, is headed for Hollywood.

By DEREK MOORE
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Nate Hromalik’s celluloid dreams are taking the recent Casa Grande High School graduate on an unconventional path.
While many of his peers are headed to colleges or universities, Hromalik will be enrolling this fall at an acting school in West Hollywood.
Hromalik hopes what he learns at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy will launch him into a career on stage or in film, preferably as an actor in serious dramatic roles.
He claims that acting is the only thing he excels at.
Others would disagree, given Hromalik’s laudable volunteer work and the writing skills he has displayed in columns he has written for the school’s Gaucho Gazette newspaper.
In one recent column, Hromalik described himself as a private person who never got good grades in high school and always rode the bench on sports teams.
He also discussed how he bottles up his emotions, including painful ones, such as when he cradled an infant in Haiti who died a short time later and his parents’ recent separation.
But all of that is fodder for the actor’s craft, he wrote.
“These experiences, which can make me smile, laugh and cry, are part of a large stream of complicated, mixed emotions, all of which I can use to apply to universally similar situations within performances,” he wrote.
He said performing onstage is the one place “where I always was the best, where I always worked the hardest, where I always felt at home.”
Hromalik earned a scholarship to attend the Los Angeles acting school, where he will live on campus in a student apartment.
He never had been to Los Angeles before visiting the school. Nor has he ever been to New York City, the other mecca for an aspiring actor.
But he said he’s convinced that living in one of those cities is for him.
Hromalik said he wasn’t planning on acting school right out of high school. He originally hoped to enroll at a more traditional university and study acting and international relations.
But he said none of the schools he applied to accepted him. He suspects that’s because his grades were not deemed good enough.
Few applicants, however, could compete with Hromalik’s record of community service, which included going to the Dominican Republic on two separate occasions to help build homes.
He also was a student ambassador for the World Affairs Council and a member of the Key Club, Helping Hand Club and the Global Citizen Corps.
Hromalik credits Lynne Moquete, his human interactions teacher, for inspiring his interest in helping others.
He said he hopes to retain that spirit of giving wherever the road leads next.
That path may include, possibly, the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Stay tuned.

You can reach Staff Writer Derek Moore at 521-5336 or derek.moore@pressdemocrat.com.