Kansas City actor had string of success. Amid COVID he lands a new gig: Saving lives

Nathan Darrow has played “Gotham” villain Mr. Freeze, a presidential bodyguard on “House of Cards” and countless leading men on stage in his native Kansas City.

But the latest role he has taken on is far different. He’s an emergency medical technician. In real life.

Call it a coronavirus pandemic expansion of interests.

“I guess maybe I’m just looking to branch out and learn other things and find other things to do,” Darrow says by phone from his home in South Orange, New Jersey. “I do know that acting, and specifically working on plays in a meaningful way, is the thing that I’ve done in my life, where enough of the time that I’ve spent doing that I’ve had that very deep, very sure voice that says this is what you ought to be doing with your energy and your life.”

So being an emergency medical technician is not a plan B. Though Darrow’s last role was a walk-on part for the show “FBI” about a year ago, he’s since had plenty of auditions and come close to snagging another part. However, live theaters aren’t in production during the pandemic, and the Screen Actors Guild has protocol in place that aims to cut down on variables like guest stars.

Until theaters and television production open back up, he has this new gig — albeit, a volunteer position. He passed his EMT certification test Jan. 12.

It was a pandemic bike ride that made it happen.

Branching out

Darrow says he became interested in theater when he was a student at Santa Fe Trail Elementary in Overland Park. His love grew through his time in the theater department at Shawnee Mission North High School. (Full disclosure: This writer attended North with Darrow.)

He went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in theater and acknowledges that it looks like he was never really a plan B kind of actor. One glance at his IMDB page shows a solid work history since 2006, suggesting that he hasn’t often needed a fallback.

Between his television roles, he has found time to star in Kansas City theater, most recently in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” at Kansas City Repertory Theatre and “Hamlet” at Heart of America Shakespeare Festival.

It’s that sure voice inside him and the feeling that he knows the craft of acting really well now that reassures him he’ll be back under the lights again soon.

In the meantime, he says, he’s not “constitutionally adept” at occupying himself in his downtime. But, like everyone else, he tries. He and his wife, Susan Hyon, are foster parents and have had some children in their care as well as Hyon’s mother for a while.

Darrow also notes that his “cooking game has gotten good. But that’s not special. I think a lot of people are like, ‘Hey man, I’ve got this.’”

It’s biscuits in a cast iron skillet he’s especially enjoyed making.

And he goes on lots of bike rides that are about much more than exercise. He uses the time alone for memorization of sonnets and bits of Scripture — all of which he shouts at the top of his voice as he pedals.

He’s noticed Isaiah 58 lends itself particularly well to shouting while biking.

As if to demonstrate, he starts: “‘Cry loudly, do not hold back. Raise your voice like a trumpet and declare to my people their transgressions.’ It goes on and on and on. It’s an incredible piece of text.”

But his free time isn’t all occupied by hobbies and household concerns; it’s where, for Darrow, anatomy entered the scene.

In the months just before the pandemic, he’d grown interested in an area seemingly far afield from the stage, one that involves the body, diseases and health care.

“I don’t know where it came from, but it kind of hit me. So I start reading books, or I start watching anatomy lectures on YouTube, and I get a rise out of it; I get kind of a thrill out of it,” he says.

How to become an EMT

Then on one of his poetry-shouting 2020 bike rides, he noticed a first aid tent advertising that it needed volunteers.

Darrow says he didn’t know it at the time, but emergency medical services across the nation are bemoaning a shortage of personnel. The shortage was not a problem caused by the pandemic, but one that, like others, became more apparent and worsened because of it.

The main reasons often cited are low wages and high stress.

After passing the first aid tent a few times, Darrow called the number on the volunteer sign and asked how he could be involved. They explained that the organization would pay for his EMT training in exchange for one 12-hour shift per week for a year.

Darrow says he enjoyed the classroom experience, which was partly online and partly in person. But he laughs recalling how he initially thought his ability to memorize lines would help him with the memorization work required in health care.

“But when it’s a mass of material, one has to take the step of organizing it. Probably on a subconscious level, I was able to memorize certain things just because I have practice at that, but it’s very different,” Darrow says. “A sonnet has so many other things besides the words and the rhythm.”

Still, he delighted in certain vocabulary words, and that emotional response made them easier to recall.

For instance, he animatedly describes the process of food digestion: “It becomes this sort of pulpy mass that starts to go into your small intestine, and that pulpy mass is called chyme.”

And don’t get him started on the duodenum, the first part of the small intestine.

“It’s called the duodenum because duad means 12, and when it very first was named way, way back when they were robbing graves to dissect bodies, they found the duodenum was 12 finger-lengths long,” Darrow explains.

Great words aside, Darrow says he isn’t interested in a career change. He says of his new certification, “I may do that to occupy myself outside of the home.”

He thinks this is a known tack for others in the arts. He recently had his hair cut by someone whose partner, a Broadway musician, had just earned a real estate license.

Darrow wonders if, when those in the arts are working again, their approach might be different than it was before.

“I heard somebody say once that acting is a terrific side job,” Darrow says. “It’s not the best main job there is. It could be that I become more of a hyphenate, but not a hyphenate in one industry, a hyphenate across industries or across disciplines.”

Until then, he’ll take lessons from his new position as an EMT. He says he has a script to follow when first approaching a patient that helps him identify the source of distress. In addition to that, there’s a lot of observation and improvisation involved.

Darrow says, “I guess everything informs a person’s acting.”