North Texas actress and former TCU professor jumps from theatre to film

Allison Pistorius is getting her close-up.

The Dallas-born actress grew up in Richardson and Grand Prairie, and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in theatre and dance. She worked for several years with the Dallas Theater Center and was an adjunct theatre professor at TCU and the University of North Texas.

Pistorius now lives in Houston, where she works at the University of Houston as the head of the bachelor of fine arts in acting program.

After years of primarily working on the stage, Pistorius is making her feature film debut in “Tempest.”

“A woman in a troubled marriage finds a portal into a parallel world, where she begins an affair with an alternate version of her husband,” the film’s logline reads.

“Tempest” will make its world premiere on Friday, June 19, at the Dances with Films Los Angeles Festival. Ahead of that, Pistorius spoke with the Star-Telegram about making the leap into feature films and her journey into acting.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Star-Telegram: Do you remember when you first got the acting bug? Or what you watched that sparked that itch?

Allison Pistorius: Oh, wow. The first acting class I took, I was 7 years old, and I took it because I had a stutter. Instead of speech therapy, my pediatrician apparently told my parents, “I think this has something to do with her being really shy.” I took an improv class, and I still do it. But there was something about being able to express myself in the guise of other characters and bring this very healthy imagination that I had always kept to myself and sharing it with other people. That was a very formative experience for me.

Then, in my adult life, it’s funny because I tried to do everything but acting. I thought, when I went to college, I thought I was going to go to law school. Then I ended up switching to be a theater and French major. Then I moved to New York, and I started working in a production company doing the other side, I was working for a producer. That was really fun. Then I just couldn’t avoid it any longer. I tried so hard to do everything else and there was nothing else that spoke to me in the same way. That’s when I went to graduate school and got my masters of fine arts in acting, and then have been doing it ever since.

S-T: Why did you try to avoid acting?

AP: It was less about not having confidence in my success in the path, and more about — and this might be one of my things that I would say is emblematic of the way I approach acting — that I have a lot of different interests. Even today, acting isn’t the only thing I’m interested in. But there were so many things I wanted to learn about. I still really enjoy the workings of government, and a healthy, respectful political debate. I really enjoy science, which one of the things I thought was really cool about production, is logistics and taking an idea and then making it into a reality.

I would say it was less about fear and more, there were so many things I wanted to do. But acting and storytelling, that is the interest that even when my path diverged a little bit into one of these other things that I found fascinating, there was something about this central path of storytelling and acting that kept drawing me back.

S-T: This is your first role in a film. Why this project?

AP: This project is such a fantastic example of right place, right time. And also the adage that luck is when preparation meets opportunity. When I got this audition, I just finished playing Beatrice in the Houston Shakespeare Festival production of “Much Ado About Nothing.” Which is my first Shakespeare role in a couple years, so it was very much in the forefront of my brain and things that I was chewing on. Beatrice is such a fierce, very smart, fiercely loyal friend, but also has lots of vulnerability. Having just played a character like that, the pump was already primed, as it were.

Then I got this audition opportunity, and as I was reading the script, yes, the title is “Tempest,” but that can mean anything. I was reading [the script], and I was finding little Easter eggs because of my knowledge of the play, “The Tempest.” One of the character’s name is Miranda, then there’s a character named Ariel, they live on an island and there’s a big storm.

It was just was so exciting. I think this is possibly true in any career or in any passion, but whenever we get excited about things that have to do with our work, we show up differently for our work. I was in the perfect place to really show up for this audition in a way that felt authentic and also vulnerable, and it felt like I was able to put my best foot forward. I’m really glad it worked out. It was a fantastic opportunity, and I truly could not have asked for a better first feature film role.

S-T: You play two versions of the same character in the movie. How did you approach that?

AP: I started by thinking about the role that Ariel has in “The Tempest,” the play. The thing that I landed on is that Ariel is a helper. Then I thought about for these two very different versions of Miranda, one who is weighed down and heavy and closed off and really carrying this massive weight of her grief. She needs one kind of help, right? She needs a sister who has a little more brightness, who is trying to pull her out of the darkness in some ways. Whereas the other version of Miranda, who maybe doesn’t take things as seriously, needs someone to give her more straight talk and be frank with her and to cut through the BS a little bit. It was thinking about if I’m going to be a helper, and I’ve got two different sisters to help, which helper applies to which sister?

S-T: Going from stage work to the screen, what’s the biggest difference and easiest change?

AP: The interesting thing is that I think the acting part is actually the easiest, because at the end of the day, acting is acting, right? You adjust a little bit if you’re playing to a 700- or 2,000-seat house. You have to make sure they can hear and see, and that the people who paid for their seats at the back get the same show the people who paid for their seats at the front. Then, when you’re on camera, the audience is the person you’re talking to. You don’t have to think about that.

The main difference, and for me the biggest challenge, is the timeline of it. Because whenever you are working for live performance, you meet, you do a table read, and then everybody’s kind of all together through the rehearsal process. Then every night we all start the story at the same point, get on the same train and we all ride it to the end. It’s such a different process. I found out that I was cast three weeks before the film started shooting. We did a big table read by Zoom, then we said bye at the end of that Zoom call and then I didn’t see everybody again for two weeks. They shot for two weeks, and then I showed up for 10 days toward the end of the process. Rather than working things out together in rehearsal, I had to bring in most of my own ideas or thoughts or preparation.

Then, the thing that was so great about [director] Greg [Green] and [castmates] Erica [Piccininni] and Josh [Bywater], is that on the first day it was never, “You’re behind, we’ve got to go.” They made space for the new person to come in with new thoughts or new ideas, and for me to not have to just jump in at 60 miles an hour. It was such a wonderful welcome, because it would be so easy to make me feel like the new kid in school with no friends [laughs]. They didn’t, they were fantastic.

S-T: The movie premieres in Los Angeles this week. One, are you attending? Two, what do you hope people take from the film?

AP: Well, I’m not able to go. I wish I could. I’m going to be out of the country. This is the second summer [that] I’ll be working in Prague with the Prague Shakespeare Company. Last year was the first year I went. I taught a Shakespearean acting class, and then I played Brutus in their production of “Julius Caesar.” This year I am teaching Shakespeare again. I’m directing a version of “Macbeth” that I adapted myself, and then I’m acting in “Romeo and Juliet.” That was all planned so far in advance that when we got the news, there’s no way I can even get away for like a super horrible red-eye layover turnaround thing. I’m going to miss it, and I’m really sad, but I’m thrilled. We filmed this in the spring of 2024, so I’m excited to be able to share this story with audiences.

I really hope the takeaway, especially surrounding the messages of healing and grief and the way we move forward, is that it’s not always easy, but it’s possible. I’m a mom, and that was the other thing that I found really moving about the script that was just gut-wrenching, is that one of the Mirandas is truly living out a parent’s nightmare. I don’t like to think about it too much, because it just gets really heavy and hard for me to even project that, but it is handled really beautifully. One of the takeaways I hope is that in all of our humanity, that connecting with each other is the path forward rather than shutting each other out.

Brayden Garcia

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Brayden Garcia is a service journalism reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He is part of a team of local journalists who answer reader questions and write about life in North Texas. Brayden mainly writes about weather and all things Taylor Sheridan-related.