Junior West Mulholland began his career as a bully, a psychopath, and a murderer. “It started because I was a little bit taller,” he says. At 13, the young actor was cast as a social outcast, Stripes, in his first television role, on the ABC sitcom Fresh Off the Boat. He’s since played a slew of villainous parts on TV and in film, including the violent antagonist in Steven Soderbergh’s drama-thriller Presence, which premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
The stories he grew up hearing were much less ominous. Throughout his childhood, his mother, Bridget, an English professor, read him to sleep, and his dreams often reminded him of Dr. Seuss stories. Soon enough, he began to tell his own, filming Lego stop-motion movies and creating elaborate imaginary worlds with his younger cousins. Storytelling, he says, is “like an itch or a craving,” and he’s integrated his courses into that process. “I’m able to model my classes around what I want to do creatively,” he says. Last year, after researching Japanese incarceration camps in California for an American studies course, he used a film class assignment to conduct archival research about the children in the Manzanar camp (where one of his great-uncles was incarcerated), and his findings sparked a short story for a creative writing course. With ambitions to write and direct movies, Mulholland is hoping to turn the story into his first feature-length script.
For now, though, he’s still thrilled to be in front of the camera. “My favorite place in the world to be is on set because it’s just magic,” he says. “We’re all working together to create one beautiful story.”
“When I’m on set, if I’m not acting, I’m trying to get the director to let me be a grip or be a part of the camera department, because I just want to learn.”
“No one ever thinks they’re the villain, right? When you play a killer or a psychopath, it’s extremely hard to tap into that, so my way in is finding their pain. Kind of like seeing, OK, how can I justify why this character thinks this is right in their mind? Although it’s a hard journey—one that’s really complex—I think it’s made me so much more emotionally intelligent.
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“I liked acting because it was the first thing that I was really good at. I had tried every single sport, and I was really bad at a lot of them. It’s funny, because now I play an athlete in a lot of these projects, but they’ve always got to get a double for when I’m throwing the football or something, so I’m working on it. I’ve gotten better. I’ve gotten a lot better.
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“Sometimes when I forget a line, those are the best, most real moments, because it means that I’m just listening. When that happens, and when I totally embody the character, those are some of my favorite moments as an actor.
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“On one of my latest films, I spent a whole day wrapping wires. That’s what makes a good director—if you understand every part of the process.
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“My second-favorite place in the world is the ocean. I’m a part of the surf club at Stanford. I love teaching the beginner surf days, and I love surfing down in Santa Cruz. I have a French bulldog, Epic, and I taught him how to surf, too, one summer.”
Kali Shiloh is a staff writer at Stanford. Email her at kshiloh@stanford.edu.
