Tyler Ham Pong: making the leap. Photo by Rachel Thalia Fisher.

Tyler Ham Pong lives in New York City. Just before we spoke on the telephone, he’d had a meeting with a casting agent. After we finished, he’d be off to an audition for a television commercial. Tomorrow would be taken up with a photo shoot for a clothing line, but he was most excited about the pre-production work he was doing for a role in his third feature film.

His publicist Ashley Shea wrote me because she felt Tyler’s story of “how a small town Canadian maintains his integrity in a city known for swallowing its artists” would interest readers in his Ottawa home.

It’s difficult to judge the integrity of a 22-year-old to whom you’ve talked long-distance for just 45 minutes.  I do know Ham Pong makes a living in a notoriously fickle city with his stunning good looks and a short acting pedigree that started in Grade 9 at Ashbury College.

Yet he’s definitely been swallowed by New York City because he willingly, and enthusiastically, jumped off the Canadian dock, aiming for the belly of America’s entertainment whale. And when you look at his four years since high school, the only thing that’s unambiguous is that Tyler Ham Pong was in one heck of a hurry to make that leap.

“Yeah, the funny thing is that the acting industry is very fast. You gotta get known when you’re young. New York was always my (immediate) goal, so why waste time,” he says. Starting in 2005, Ham Pong was on a mission.

By then he’d done the Merchant of Venice at the National Arts Centre with the Shakespeare Young Company (now Salamander Shakespeare Co). In the summer before his final year of high school, he took film training at the UCLA Acting and Performance Institute. There he met his first girlfriend and decided that acting was the only thing that could make him happy. After graduating from Ashbury, he enrolled in theatre at York University, lasting a year before deciding he had to go to the United States, where “they had the best training.”

He spent another summer at the New York Film School at La Fémis, the French state film academy in Paris.  Then to New York and two years in method acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film institute, where he added dancing to his repertoire, re-acquainted himself with singing (at Ashbury he played in a heavy metal band called In The Memory Of…) and finally realized that what he was doing was no longer a hobby.

“I always wanted to be an artist when I was young, wanted to be a concept like Da Vinci, the pinnacle of ingenuity,” he says. But theatre offered a bigger rush than painting; and now film offers a bigger rush than theatre.

New York is the biggest rush of all, a place where “you can be involved in any aspect of art you want, any time of day or night.” In that competitive milieu, Ham Pong is carving a niche.

He’s developed and acted in plays (E-dating, Time Travelling with Cannibals, Camino Real); written, produced and acted in a repertory-theatre production (Moony Mercury); earned significant roles in two independently produced movies (Still a Teen Movie, Unscripted); and has finally been given the opportunity to play an adult (a detective) in Open Season, which starts shooting in October.

There’s a dozen other of his projects you can find on the Internet but that aren’t listed on his resume because in America, you go big or go home. Which is why Ham Pong is down there in the first place. “It’s sink or swim. We take risks in my family.” It means he doesn’t have to spend 30 years in Canada before being able to indulge his “managerial bug,” probably in Los Angeles, in television (“You go to New York to train, to LA to sell out.”).

Inevitably, a path like this throws up big questions, like “what you are willing to do in the name of art,” he says. It’s an emotional investment that doesn’t allow for the comfort of Canada’s shades of grey. But it’s the path he’s chosen, for now, and after a brief glance out his apartment window onto the Indian restaurants of New York’s East Village, Tyler Ham Pong hurries out to take the next step in his headlong rush.