Branded Content Presented by Santa Barbara City College Office of Communications
Just one semester into his first year at Ottawa University in Kansas, Michael James Lazar had a revelation: “I realized I no longer loved basketball.”
As someone admitted to college on a basketball scholarship, this was a tricky epiphany. But Lazar simply couldn’t ignore the pull he felt toward his true love: the theater.
When his second semester had rolled around, he started spending more time in the theater department, performing in plays. Almost immediately, he recognized it was where he was meant to be. Now, he had to inform his parents.
“Listen,” he told them. “I don’t want to be in basketball; I want to be an actor.”
Mom was hesitant at first. Dad was all for it, but cautioned him that acting was a competitive industry, telling him, “You have to really dive into it if you really want to do it.”
Mom eventually acquiesced, saying they should look for a city college with a strong theater program. Eventually, they found Santa Barbara City College (SBCC) and its robust theater department.
Once he arrived at SBCC in 2005, Lazar didn’t waste any time getting involved in the theater department. There, he met Katie Lars, the department co-chair, who gave him his first big role as Johann Wilhelm Mobius in The Physicist. He remembers the moment as a turning point.
The play, written for three German physicists, did not traditionally call for a Black actor, Lazar said. Being cast in the lead made him feel that Lars trusted him, and that show of faith helped him chip away at the unspoken barriers he felt around race and casting and showed him that maybe those limits were not as fixed as they seemed.
“Katie was really the one that helped build my self-esteem, my confidence,” he says.
After two years at SBCC, Lazar moved to Los Angeles, trying to break into the industry without any direct handoff or connections. He says SBCC and its theater program prepared him mentally and artistically — teaching him how to work hard, rehearse, and carry a large script.
What came next was a lot of “pounding the pavement,” trial and error, and figuring things out like a chess game, move by move.
While auditioning for roles, he did background work, small indie projects, and a stage production at the Odyssey Theatre in West L.A. — a respected theater where notable actors (such as Eva Marie Saint) saw his work and praised his performance.
It took about five years in L.A. before he landed what he considers his first big role, on the TV series Army Wives. He had gotten his first agent the year before, which was a major step, and that eventually led to booking that network job.
From there, his career grew into roles on shows such as Grey’s Anatomy, The Orville, How to Get Away with Murder, and Criminal Minds, to name a few.
But his entry into the acting world after SBCC was not a clean, straight pipeline — it was years of hustling in different roles, learning the business from multiple angles, and slowly building toward that first major on-screen break.
Lazar acknowledges that the industry has changed since he joined, shifting from a relatively straightforward, skill-proving ladder to a more chaotic system, where social media presence, corporate mergers, and changing economics all play big roles. You still have to believe in yourself, he says, but “you just have to figure out ways to go about doing it now,” and it may take longer than it used to.
Lazar’s newest show, Imperfect Women, aired March 18, and he plays the lead lawyer of a law firm. Acting opposite Kerry Washington was nerve-racking at first, he says. “I’m not gonna lie, I was, like, literally shaking.” But after a few takes, his shoulders relaxed. “It was a huge moment for me.”
Looking back on his career and time at SBCC, Lazar circles back to Lars. “She really was like my biggest supporter.”
Lars continues to invite him back to speak to her theater classes at Santa Barbara City College, where he answers students’ questions and shares his journey, encouraging them to “never give up.”
This article was paid for by Santa Barbara City College. For more information on Santa Barbara City College and the hundreds of programs they offer, visit sbcc.edu or call (805) 965-0581. If you are an SBCC alumnus, please join SBCC Alumni Connect at sbccfoundation.org/alumni.
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