Josh Pais on the Spontaneity of Downtown New York

By Natasha Lancaster

After living in the city for decades, actor and teacher Josh Pais had a full-circle moment: He moved back into the same building where he had briefly lived with his mother as a child. “It’s really odd,” Pais said of the coincidence.

Raised in downtown Manhattan, Pais is a veteran New York actor with a long list of credits, including his recent lead performance opposite Jeff Daniels in Netflix’s A Man in Full, a featured role in Hulu’s The Dropout with Amanda Seyfried, and the starring role in Funny Pages, an A24 film produced by the Safdie brothers. You may also recognize him as the “modelizer” from Sex and the City or as Raphael in the original live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.

While the building Pais coincidentally moved back into is in the West Village, he mostly grew up in the East Village in the ‘70s. Pais’s father was a Holocaust survivor from Holland and a physicist who came to America to work with Oppenheimer and Einstein. Pais’s mother was a former model, poet, and painter. After leaving the West Village, his mother relocated to 7th Street between Avenue C and D, an area that deeply impacted him. He described the neighborhood in the years he lived there as a child, saying, “It was a high-energy area: full of murder and violence but also creativity and people getting along and making art in the street. It was at times terrifying, but ultimately, such an amazing place to grow up.”

It was in an apartment in this “high-energy” area that Pais developed an interest in acting. His mother would host salon-esque events every other Saturday that were “just people getting up and doing all kinds of performances,” leading Pais to join in.

After going to Syracuse University and the London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art to study acting, Pais returned to his roots in the East Village in the ‘80s and found a job renovating abandoned buildings. At the time, landlords were burning down buildings in the area to collect insurance. As a result, “there were some people who were able to buy buildings from the city for a dollar because the city was like, ‘If we can at least get some tax revenue, it’s better than leaving these buildings abandoned,” Pais explained.

While he made money doing these construction jobs during the day, Pais acted at night, doing “off-off-off Broadway plays.” In the late ‘80s, he had his breakthrough role in the Broadway play I’m Not Rappaport, performing in 750 shows. Pais describes this experience of doing the same show so many times as “the best acting training ever.”

Still, while Pais learned a lot from I’m Not Rappaport, he had committed to continuing to study the craft of acting before he’d even landed that role. After leaving Syracuse, he felt that the training he received was “beneficial but very intellectual,” and he wanted to seek out a different approach focused more on the physical and spontaneous.

Pais’s pursuit eventually led him to develop Committed Impulse, a curriculum of training that develops “unstoppable creativity and presence.” He teaches online and in-person through masterclasses, intensives, and personal coaching. In fact, Committed Impulse has been such a successful program that Pais has a forthcoming book, Lose Your Mind: The Path to Creative Invincibility, that will be published by Penguin Random House in September 2025.

Reflecting on his fascination with impulse-oriented work and his background as a New York native, Pais said, “I have always sought to see how can I be spontaneous in my work, and maybe that desire came out of growing up in the [East Village] neighborhood of just everything being so spontaneous and how can I bring that aliveness into the work.”

You can see Pais’s most recent work in A Man in Full on Netflix and Power Book III: Raising Kanan on Starz.

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NATASHA LANCASTER is a writer born and raised in Greenwich Village. She’s a recent graduate of Kenyon College with a B.A. in English and Drama (playwriting focus).