>Story by Shea Vaughan-Gabor
As told to Alessia Girardin
“Someone who says what’s on their mind.” That’s the best way to describe Shea Vaughan- Gabor, and it’s what attracted agents at a Samsung event to approach her, thanks to a viral YouTube video she posted in high school.
Vaughan-Gabor has an edgy style — wearing a long gray blazer and black translucent tights, smoking a cigarette in NoHo — one that compliments her strong personality. Now, she reflects, in her own words, how she has made her parents proud by achieving her seven-year-old self’s dream.
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Ever since I was a kid, I knew I wanted to either be in front of the camera or behind it. I was that kid who would annoy their cousins, forcing them to be actors in my play. I loved scary movies. I would make my cousins watch Child’s Play — everyone would run home afterwards. When my cousins would reluctantly give in to being my actors, I was doing what I loved. With my small hand and pointed finger, I would create scenes I liked in my large living room area. After I finished playing with my cousins, I would ask my parents to sit down and watch. They sat clapping their hands and nodding with an almost expected smile, giving me the satisfaction I was looking for. That was my seven-year-old dream. At 10 years-old, I directed my first film at the time my parents passed away.
My brother, seeing my passion for improv, put me in The Second City’s acting classes in Chicago, which led me to the Chicago High School for the Arts (ChiArts) . There, I took a film class during my senior year, for which I had to create a video of my choice. I remember sitting at my desk, looking at the ceiling and thinking about what I could do. I came up with a video called “people react to being called beautiful.” I posted it to YouTube on my personal account. In it, I interviewed people from my high school, some of whom I knew, many of whom I did not, and told them that I was “taking pictures of things I find beautiful,” and filmed their reactions. The premise of the project was simple, and I didn’t think it was going to have much impact. But a little goes a long way. I graduated from ChiArts and moved to New York City, where I wanted to pursue my dreams of being an actress and film director at Pace University.
One morning during my freshman year, I looked at my phone and saw that I had received a barrage of YouTube notifications. I thought it was so random, and didn’t understand why. My phone was vibrating, the screen’s light beaming continuously, leaving me curious and confused. The video I posted had gone viral, reaching more than 100K views, six months after I first posted it. I felt that it was a little late to gain so much traction, but it at least it happened, I guess. I didn’t think a video, in which I simply call people beautiful, could get so much popularity. But it did.
Instead of just paying attention in class, I was trying to silence my phone, or run out to get a call quickly before producers hung up. I was getting offers and gigs from producers at Samsung. Ramaa Mosley and Hope Farley, the CEO’s of Adolescent Content, a youth-focused creative agency based in Los Angeles, emailed me saying they wanted to represent me and the video itself. I was like, “Yeah!” I remember getting calls every hour from producers trying to negotiate a deal with me to be on the next Samsung commercial, and I was like, “I can’t. I’m in class right now.” Eventually, I began picking up my phone whenever I had a small break and agreeing to the deals that were offered to me. This led to me getting a call from my agent, who asked me to “play more hard ball with them.” “It’s Samsung,” they told me in a reassuring tone. “They got money baby.” That went on for a week, and like most gigs in the acting industry, they came and went.
I had to take time off from class, my teachers were pretty mad at me for flying to LA to shoot the commercial for two weeks. It was overwhelming for sure, you feel like an imposter. Like, I’m very young, most people who want to get into commercial directing, you don’t start this early. So I feel like I’m young, nobody is going to think I am the director on set. I told myself, I hope I can direct this huge $300K commercial after doing a YouTube video and then you do. Now, these kinds of gigs, ones that come and go, sum up my life. And those producers I talked with on the phone are my bosses still to this day. Some weeks, I will be confronted with the same first week of getting that Samsung gig like it’s Groundhog Day. And when I don’t have a gig, I am working at a coffee shop, networking, or working on my own passion project of just creating art.
To make it in the acting world, sometimes it just comes down to luck. It’s either you know people, you get acquainted with people, or you go viral. When I get a call, it’s not like I get the job right away. It’s just that, over time, things change. And when I do get the job, I’m like, “oh my god, all my problems will go away.”
I feel good when I direct a commercial — it makes me feel more confident about one day producing my own big film. I can say that, as of now, I’ve acted in and directed Samsung commercials and Twirla ads for birth control products, and I’ve also produced some films, like Because of you, and the Tinder series “Swipe Night.” And, at my young age of 25, that is impressive. I am lucky to have gotten this much success from being a young person that not many can relate to.
Down the road, I want to be able to produce my own horror movie. But I like to tell myself, when I get bored of the commercial work, “To get there, you need to do some commercials, Shea.”
With my amount of success, I can say that I like to think of my parents as my motivation. Of course, there is pressure attached to that — but I am happy with how far I have come, and I still have my whole life ahead of me. There is pressure to be a successful Black artist as well, and that is a narrative my dad always told me about. Making my parents proud is like making myself proud. That keeps me going.