Army veteran Nicholas Roylance helps other veterans, pursues B.F.A. in acting
It’s not lost on Nicholas Roylance that the University of Mississippi Department of Theatre and Film is housed in a building that adjoins the ROTC program building.
Roylance, an Army veteran and B.F.A. acting major, was strongly influenced by both the arts and the military while growing up and has a passion for connecting these two ostensibly disparate worlds.
It seems almost preordained that he should end up in a place where it’s not uncommon to see fatigue-clad cadets navigating tangles of theatre students practicing lines in the open spaces around Isom and Barnard halls.
But of course, the San Francisco native didn’t know about the neighboring buildings when he applied. Originally planning to go to school in California, Roylance was drawn to UM for the quality of the B.F.A. program.
“Ole Miss was the first school to get back to me with a definitive ‘Yes — come on, let’s do this,’” Roylance said.
This was in 2016, shortly after Roylance left the Army. He had been badly injured during a dangerous training exercise and unable to deploy with his unit. Being left behind causes its own kind of trauma; one of his buddies from headquarters would not make it back at all.
“Acting is like this,” Roylance said. “I suffer from extreme survivor’s guilt and PTSD. I didn’t want to be me anymore, so getting the chance to be someone else, to be in a different mindset, was much more interesting to me at the time.”
Pursuing acting after the service wasn’t a snap decision, though. Roylance was bitten by the acting bug as a teenager, when he and his older sister, Barbra, made a “silly YouTube video” that ended up taking off. Barbra went on to appear in several episodes of “Hawaii Five-0” and a reality TV series called “60 Days In.” Nic ended up joining the Army.
After his discharge from the Army, Roylance quickly realized that his military experiences gave him a certain intensity as an actor, and that this quality, combined with his looks, rendered him especially well suited to cosplay as the character Daryl Dixon from “The Walking Dead.”
He began to attract attention at conventions as his lookalike “Norman Reedesque” (Norman Reedus is the actor who plays Dixon on the TV series), and before long, he teamed up with a friend who looks a lot like another character on the show, Negan; the two began appearing together.
Through this partnership, the nonprofit Walkers for Warriors was born. The organization raises money through cosplay appearances – with actors often posing for photos with fans of “The Walking Dead” – and donates it to help veterans. Last year, Walkers for Warriors gave more than $7,500 to help an Ole Miss Wish come true for a child with leukemia and his family, sending them to Disney World.
This high visibility also helped Roylance secure an agent, and in the last year and a half, he has done around 200 auditions — most of them submitted as videos but also some in person.
“I’d drive to Atlanta on a 24-hour trip, come back without sleeping and be in class,” Roylance said.
While Roylance remained dedicated to his studies, his dedication to his craft helped him land coveted auditions on high-profile shows such as “Stranger Things” and “Fear the Walking Dead.”
As much as Roylance hopes – like all actors – to hit the big time (a fantasy is to star in a remake of “A Clockwork Orange”), his day-to-day wish is to use his acting, and the arts in general, to both help other veterans who have suffered like he has and to build a bridge connecting two different worlds.
“Writing and the arts can really heal the brain and give you the sense of, ‘Wow, this wasn’t for nothing,’” Roylance said.
“If I could, all of my waking hours would be spent putting veterans and art students together and breaking the stigma. There doesn’t have to be this divide.”
Story by Katherine W. Stewart/ Department of Theatre & Film
