OCA Intern Alum: Shawn Jain
Interview by Skyler Murao / Written by Skyler Murao and Kent Tong
IF YOU’RE ONE OF THE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE who’ve tuned into Law & Order or listened to an audiobook, or one of the billions of people with a streaming service subscription, chances are you might have met Shawn Jain. For the last seven years, he’s been working as an actor in New York City. A member of SAG-AFTRA, he has acted on shows across networks like CBS and NBC and streaming services like Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, and Peacock. He’s narrated over 120 audiobooks for major publishers. And he’s even worked off-Broadway and at major regional theaters across the country. But when he was an OCA intern back in 2007, being an actor wasn’t part of the plan.
Jain was raised in Novato, California, an hour north of San Francisco, to Indian immigrants, and went to undergrad at the University of California, Berkeley, studying political science, Spanish, and South Asian studies. A friend from Cal who participated in the OCA summer internship program a few years prior, Diana Quach, encouraged him to apply. Interested in political communications, he was placed to work at Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s office. It was an eventful time to intern there since Pelosi had just been elected as the first woman to serve as the Speaker of the House of Representatives. He worked in the press office supporting their Spanish-language spokesperson, primarily helping to promote immigration reform. He also helped answer the overwhelming number of phone calls the office received; it was so excessive, there’d be two full-time staff and four interns manning the phones during high-traffic hours. He estimates he probably spent one-third of his internship answering phone calls. “I was actually pretty good at the phone room,” he laughs. “It was mostly just people calling, being like, ‘Nancy Pelosi is a witch!’” He'd simply respond, “Thank you for your message.”
After graduating from Cal, Jain moved to New York in 2009 to work at a public relations firm before moving to Washington, D.C. in 2012, where he continued to work in communications for nonprofits and health-related organizations, including the ACLU. In 2016, he pursued his master’s degree in acting at Harvard University. While this may seem like a complete 180, he believes his internship at Speaker Pelosi’s office was valuable in providing him with hands-on experience working on Capitol Hill and learning that he actually didn’t want to work in political communications. “Even though I liked it, I didn’t love it and I didn’t love the environment the way I thought I might,” he says. “It was great to know, Okay, I like the communications part, but I don’t want to do campaign or politics work.” He’s thankful to have had the experience when he did because, otherwise, he would have learned this lesson much later in his career. He also appreciates the relationships he gained from the internship, even crediting his supervisor and spokesperson from Pelosi’s office, Marcela Salazar, for serving as his professional reference in his early post-grad career; the two of them would become good friends and continue to support each other professionally throughout their careers.
Shawn Jain with two other OCA summer interns at the OCA National Convention in Sacramento, CA (2007)
Jain has loved acting since his youth. He remembers being cast in a middle school production of David Mamet’s The Revenge of the Space Pandas, thanks to a theatre director who believed in him. “It was maybe the first time I felt seen as a person,” he recalls. He enjoys entertaining audiences, making them laugh, and that there’s always more to learn with the craft. He says, “There’s something about acting, even though it’s pretend, that feels more real and grounding than anything I’ve done.”
He graduated with his MFA in 2018, just a couple of years before the COVID-19 pandemic—and New York was one of the earliest places in the country to be hit. It’s safe to say that it wasn’t a good time to be an actor. Many productions became permanently shuttered; it would take years for the theatre industry to recover. “I was actually in the middle of rehearsal for a play in March of 2020,” he remembers. “It was like, Oh, rehearsal’s canceled next week . . . and then it was like, Okay, this play is just never coming back.” But Jain is proud of himself for making a huge career shift into acting, enduring COVID-19 and entertainment strikes (he supported himself by working part-time in communications), and taking the time to build rapport with casting directors who would eventually help him find consistent work.
Shawn Jain in a commercial for Universal Studios Hollywood
Today, in addition to acting full-time, Jain is still doing some communications consulting on the side, as well as trying to sell his first feature screenplay to producers. “I’m very glad that I had the journey I had and didn’t go straight into doing acting right out of college,” he says. "It's not like sports—with arts, genuinely, you’re never too old.” He's grateful he experienced working in an office environment in his 20s before pursuing the arts in his early 30s because it makes the business side of entertainment come easily to him. "I know how to manage a budget," he says. “Nothing is a waste of time.” In his opinion, we should treat time less as a commodity and more as an opportunity to reflect, find value from any situation, and learn new lessons. “That’s how life is.”