You probably don’t know who Brett Dalton is, but there’s a good chance you’ll recognize the name in a month. That’s because the actor is playing a lead role on one of the most anticipated television series of the season, Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Dalton has few credits outside of one episode appearances on Blue Bloods and Army Wives and playing Robert Todd Lincoln in the Killing Lincoln TV movie. So while Dalton has had acting jobs before, but nothing really compares to starring in a television series that connects to a multi-billion dollar film franchise. He admits to Yahoo!, “Nobody’s more lucky than me to get this part, and I know that I won the Lotto on this.”
Of course, he might have won the lotto, but the pressure is on: one can hardly go anywhere in public without seeing some kind of advertisement for the series. Dalton claims he has been able to ignore that though, saying, “I’m sort of blissfully unaware of that. I see the billboards everywhere — how could you not? — and the ads, but my feet are still firmly on the ground.”
Dalton’s acting career almost never happened. He confesses that he at first wasn’t comfortable with other actors as a high school senior, saying, “Theater people could be a little off-putting, a little weird.” However, after his first audition he was sold. He admits, “I knew in the first five minutes of auditioning that this was what I was meant to be doing for the rest of my life.”
However, when he tried acting in New York between attending University of California, Berkeley and Yale School of Drama as a graduate student, he didn’t have much success. He then decided to pursue a career in television and film, pointing out, “The theater didn’t decide to take a chance on me. So I’m going to go with where the ‘yesses’ are, and that’s from TV and film.”
