After spending nearly half his life playing Grover Johnson on the hit CBS sitcom The Neighborhood, actor Hank Greenspan was ready to stretch his acting muscles. Known for sharing scenes with comedy heavyweights Cedric the Entertainer and Max Greenfield, Hank has grown up in front of the camera, absorbing everything he could from his co-stars. Now, he’s stepping into a new spotlight as the lead in the indie drama Ethan Bloom, a coming-of-age comedy about a teenager navigating grief, questions of faith, and the highs and lows of first love.
In this interview, Greenspan opens up about what it was like to carry a film for the first time, the challenges of leaving the comfort of a long-running series, and how working alongside seasoned actors helped shape his performance. He also shares some real, down-to-earth advice for young actors, talks about juggling auditions, and reflects on what he hopes comes next in his growing career. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Watch the full conversation in the video above or on our YouTube channel.
I imagine you are super busy with the show. What made you want to tackle a lead role in a film?
Hank Greenspan: I’ve been doing The Neighborhood since I was six or seven, which I’m 14 now, so it’s like half my life. I love doing the show and everyone there is extremely nice. It’s just a very nice family dynamic. But, you know, you do that for, for like five or six years in a row and I got a little bored.
I would get auditions for super cool projects, I would do the audition, I would get a callback, and I would almost book them. But then The Neighborhood would film, and the schedules would overlap, and then I couldn’t do them anymore.
And so me, my parents, and my manager went to my agents, and we were like, we’ve been doing this for a while now, can you send some maybe indie stuff our way?
And not long after that, they sent the audition for Ethan Bloom. And that’s how we got that. And I wanted to do something, maybe a little more dramatic, just something different to shake it up a little.
I was surrounded by a lot of very experienced people. There’s really only one other kid in the movie who is prominently featured. So, it was a real learning experience.
Josh Molina is amazing. Rochelle [Lefevre], she helped me a lot, there’s a super emotional scene with her, where I have to give a big monologue. And I remember when we sat down in the room, she just said, “However you want to do this… dramatic, serious. Some people like to talk in between takes, some people don’t want to talk at all, whatever you’re doing, I’m cool with.”
Going from The Neighborhood where you’re in this big ensemble, to filming this, where you’re first on the call sheet, did you feel a huge responsibility or any pressure?
Hank Greenspan: I mean, yeah, it was. I’m in every scene, except for like two. So, I definitely had that over my head, but it didn’t bother me.
My schedule for filming was that we would wake up at whatever time, sometimes the call times were super easy, and then sometimes they were like 6:30 in the morning and we would film the scenes for that day. I would go home, my mom was there with me, and they would send the next set of scenes they were shooting for tomorrow. And then we would memorize those, we would just get off book with those. And then we would go to bed and wake up and repeat.
I think my mom said this but the first thing we realized was, if we didn’t show up, they couldn’t shoot. Like, the thing with playing Grover on The Neighborhood is that I’m only like four scenes per episode. So, I mean, if I’m 10 minutes late, or if I’m sick, they could just do something else. Like, there’s enough of the show that isn’t Grover, that they have the ability to just kind of be versatile. But with Ethan Bloom, no one could do anything until we were there.
So, we figured out a way to take it scene by scene. I mean, this is my process that I like, I’m sure every actor has their own thing. Like some people can probably get off book, get an entire script off book. And the script wasn’t that long. It’s only like 90 pages.
You’ve got some fantastic comedic co-stars on The Neighborhood. Watching them work for all these years, is there stuff that you brought from watching and learning from them to Ethan Bloom?
Hank Greenspan: Yeah, for sure. The film is funny, it’s not all just serious.
I’ve learned a lot about acting just by doing it. Just by seeing other people act and being funny. You just you take all that in.
This is the last season of your show. Are you actively looking for projects like this to keep moving forward?
Hank Greenspan: I definitely would like to keep doing projects like this. I still audition, so we just do the auditions when they come in.
I loved doing Ethan Bloom and I would definitely really like to do more projects like that. I’ve been doing this for a while but these are like, my only two real roles. I’ve had guest starring roles on other things, but The Neighborhood and Ethan Bloom are probably my two biggest accomplishments so far.
But the industry’s kind of slowed down ever since the writers strike. Auditions definitely are coming in way less frequently than they used to come in. But, yeah, I would love to do more. I love acting and I think I’m going to be acting for the foreseeable future.
What’s your advice for younger actors?
Hank Greenspan: There’s kind of a difference between industry advice, and acting advice, because there’s like what you do from like a business perspective, and then what do you do to improve at acting, but I think for young actors, auditioning is a huge part of it.
So auditioning advice is, this might sound super obvious but understand what you’re saying. For a really long time, I just didn’t do this and it didn’t even register that I was doing it. But I would sometimes get a line, and didn’t know what it means. But you have to understand what you’re saying. Because if you don’t understand what you’re saying, there’s nothing behind the line.
Some auditions provide the whole script, alongside the sides you have to do so you can read those if you if you want to. If you want to read the script, you can get context by that. But if you don’t have it, I like to come up with some kind of plot. It doesn’t have to be anything super complex, or you don’t have to make up the whole story in your head.
But, if there’s something you’re not getting, come up with a backstory for what’s happening. It doesn’t have to be right. You don’t have to guess what the plot is.
Auditions suck, basically. There is no sugarcoating it. But if there was a better way, we probably would have found it by now.
Definitely get comfortable with auditions because you’re going to be doing them a lot. I’ve been doing them for the last seven years and I’m still not comfortable with them.
