#cwinterview

Actor Chris Wood’s (@christophrwood) onscreen time has ranged from PBS’ period drama Mercy Street to HBO’s Emmy Award-winning series Girls to The CW’s Containment and The Vampire Diaries. Fans of Supergirl, also on The CW, recognize him as Mon-El, who had a twisty-turny relationship with the titular heroine, played by Melissa Benoist (Wood’s real-life fiancée). After closing out Supergirl’s third season, the 31-year-old actor, who studied musical theater in North Carolina before moving westward, took some time to pursue other interests, including writing and directing a short film, The Stew; cheering on his beloved Yankees; and founding a mental health awareness nonprofit that, in only two years, has donated $350,000 from the sale of branded merch to mental health organizations.

What have you been working on since leaving Supergirl?

Since leaving Supergirl, I’ve devoted all my time to writing and working on my nonprofit, IDONTMIND. I needed a break from acting, and I’m excited to get back in the saddle now that I’ve taken some time off. I’m really working to keep myself in a selective mindset so I don’t end up feeling stuck again. I’m in development on a feature I wrote—which is incredibly exciting, but I’m not able to talk about it yet—and have been writing other projects.

Why did you want to make your short film, The Stew?

So, The Stew came about in a moment of trying to take that creative power back. I had to do something that felt good to make, and give myself permission to take risks and to tell stories the way I wanted to tell them, regardless of what other people thought. I made something really quirky and unique, which I’m proud of in spite of any flaws.

Does being an actor influence your writing and directing?

I grew up writing and making short films, and by college my focus had shifted almost entirely to acting. Not consciously, it’s just what happened. I never stopped writing, but I was really only doing it for myself. As an actor, I had been very fortunate to have had so many opportunities, and I had been working more or less nonstop for a solid few years, but I wasn’t getting the same rush out of acting that I used to, and my need to write and create content was only growing stronger.

Why is mental health so important to you?

A while back, I had an impossibly tough year that left me juggling grief and depression. My coping mechanism was to shut it down and not talk about it. When people would ask how I was, I just ended the conversation and said I was fine. For a couple of years, that was how I operated. And it was terrible. I didn’t really start to heal until the first time I decided to actually be honest about what I was feeling and what I had been through. Instead of shutting people down when they asked how I was, I heard myself starting to respond with, “Oh, I don’t mind, I can talk about it.” Just that tiny switch in my response to people changed everything. I hadn’t been admitting there was a problem, so how could I get help? Only when I admitted that I wasn’t okay could I even start to look for ways to get better.

Why did you start your own organization, IDONTMIND?

Fast-forward a few years into my healing. I was starting to work with mental health organizations so I could give back, and I just kept thinking: Every approach I’m seeing caters to the insiders, to people who already know mental health is a problem and needs attention. It occurred to me that maybe we needed to try something different in order to reach more people. … If it’s true that 1 in 4 people in the world will experience mental illness in their life, then we’ve all been close to someone who has suffered. And that means we can all relate and we should all be able to talk about it. So  I founded IDONTMIND in 2017. It’s a mental health awareness campaign working to defeat stigma by inspiring conversations. The idea is that the more we talk about mental health, the more we normalize it, so we do everything in our power to get people talking.

How is your organization different from other nonprofits focused on mental health?