Thom Gillott leads a double life. In Life One – he’s a Construction Detailer and AutoCAD ace who details the intricate engineering that underpins spectacular exhibit pieces. In Life Two – he’s a theater performer of repute with a stack of leading roles in his bio.
So how did this dual interest come about? The fascination with acting was the fault of his mom, who, on a whim, took the 9-year-old Thom to a casting session for a community theater production of Music Man in New York. He got the part and the stage was set.
When Thom reached college age it was only logical to major in Theater, and part of the course entailed building scenery. Here he began to hone his carpentry skills, an ability he took forward into graduate school with an internship in a much larger scenery shop.
A move to Atlanta opened up a new chapter: “A friend said, ‘Hey—why don’t you come work in the exhibit industry? It’s a lot like building theater sets.'”
Thom’s career flourished in this different kind of show business. Working for a number of exhibit houses, he started drafting and moved into project management. Along the way, one of the specialties he most enjoyed was designing artifact mounts for museum displays.
“It’s a unique skill set. I had the opportunity to handle some incredibly rare objects––things like 65-million-year-old dinosaur bones or ancient pottery fragments.”
One of the projects Thom remembers vividly was for the National Coast Guard Museum in Connecticut. This was the figurehead from the Barque Eagle––a German ship that was taken by the US as a war prize.
“It was an eagle, 8 feet across, carved from ebony and covered in gold leaf. It was also very heavy—over 1800 pounds! The challenge was to build an armature that could support it safely up in the air. We fabricated a structure of box-section steel which worked very well.”
The move to Atlanta also boosted Thom’s theater credits with a succession of lead roles in regional productions. “I played Alan Strang in Equus, Cyrano in Cyrano de Bergerac, Alan Turing in Breaking the Code,Salieri in Amadeus, and even Romeo in Romeo and Juliet––at the ripe old age of 35!”
Life, though, has a way of throwing curveballs and in Thom’s case it was kids. “I took a 20-year-break from acting while the children were growing up. When you’re working a demanding day job, rehearsing in the evening and going from one show to another—it puts a strain on family life.”
Despite this lengthy hiatus, Thom’s stage presence hadn’t been forgotten. “Out of the blue I got a call from someone I’d done a show with 20 years previously. He’d started his own professional theater company and asked me to come and join him.
“The company’s called Resurgens and they specialize in plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries––Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and others––as well as some by the bard himself. I’ve been working with them for over 10 years now.”
Thom’s many roles with Resurgens have included Iago in Othello, Caliban in The Tempest, and Volpone in Volpone. He particularly enjoys playing the bad guys and Iago is a favorite. ”He’s just delightfully devious and conniving. Villains are so much more fun!”
Thankfully, Thom usually leaves his villainy on stage, and during the day restricts his performances to working wonders with CAD, helping the CDI World construction team to meet their trade show deadlines.
When asked how his work colleagues would react if they saw him in one of his stage personas, he looks bemused. “I shudder to think!”
