Written by Jose Romero
When Dan Shaked graduated from NYU Tisch after three and a half formative years at The Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute (plus a semester at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London), he walked out wearing three hats: actor, agent, and manager—all for himself. “Before graduating, I understood that I needed to manage and agent myself,” he recalls, a realization that has shaped a career stretching from New York and Los Angeles to Tel Aviv, Toronto, and beyond. Those miles—and the mindset behind them—trace directly back to his training at LSTFI, where he worked with Irma Sandrey, Bill Balzac, and, most influentially, Lola Cohen, who remains his mentor to this day.
Technique that Travels
Shaked’s resume reads like a case study in flexibility and adaptability. Off-Broadway audiences first saw him in Saviana Stănescu’s Waxing West at La MaMa, a production that later toured Romania with backing from the Romanian Cultural Institute. He then took on the lead role in On the Spectrum at LA’s Fountain Theatre—“one of the productions I’m proudest of,” he says. The production earned praise from The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, and Deadline, while buses full of teens living with autism were able to experience the thrill of seeing themselves represented onstage for the first time. Each project, he insists, funnels LSTFI exercises straight into the work: Animal Exercise, Stream of Consciousness, even the deceptively simple Private Moment.
“Private moment is the most valuable for TV,” Shaked explains. “You have a million people around you, so getting into the mindset of private when you’re not in private can be done through private moment.” When dialogue locks up, he still turns to Song and Dance to shake it loose. And on every set or rehearsal space, the first order of business is relaxation—“being conscious about tensions in the body is the most important thing I learned, that’s what Lola’s class was all about.”
Some of Shaked’s screen credits include The Mysteries of Laura (NBC), Body of Proof (ABC), Gilded Lilys (ABC/Shonda Rhimes), JOBS (opposite Ashton Kutcher), and Hulu’s How to Follow Strangers. His stage work includes The Normal Heart at LA’s Fountain Theatre, the world premiere of Davis Stallings’ Baby Monitor alongside Carol Kane, and Peter Kennedy’s Family Game Night alongside Kathleen Turner.
The German: A Full-Circle Role
All of Shaked’s preparation converged on The German, the seven-episode Lionsgate series premiering July 24 on Magenta TV. Shaked plays the only American in a cast led by Germany’s Oliver Masucci, hunting the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele across Israel and Germany. Shaked takes on the role of Steven Milk, an American researcher who comes to Israel to investigate the trauma in Holocaust survivors. The material is deeply personal: Shaked is the grandson of four Holocaust survivors. His own grandfather once stood face-to-face with Mengele on the Auschwitz platform, who sent him to the line where those who would survive went. “The show is the accumulation of everything I’ve done,” he says. However, he adds: “even if you ‘make it big,’ you have to keep doing it,” referring to the work.
That principle carried him all the way to Series Mania in Lille, France, where he represented the show this spring along with the very internationally diverse cast. Shaked’s career, in other words, is as much about creative elasticity as it is about performance.
Hustle as Creative Practice
Shaked splits his time primarily between Tel Aviv, NYC, and LA, but geography is never a determining factor. “When I work in LA, I look for work in Toronto; when I’m in Toronto, I look for work in NYC; when I’m in NYC, I look for work in Israel,” he laughs. “All work is under the same sky, there’s work everywhere.” That worldview fuels what he’s dubbed Creative Swirling: you have to swirl, go back home, reach out to people, move around, look for the next project, don’t stay stuck. “This morning alone, I sent 62 emails,” he adds.
He encourages LSTFI students to adopt the same kinetic mindset: write the email you’re afraid to send, invite the casting director you’ve never met, do the play in the tiny black-box one neighborhood over. “There are people out there I should meet, and that’s what keeps me motivated,” he says. “Actors are creative when told to, but you also have to be creative getting and finding the work. 80–90 percent of the time you’re not working, so you have to create magic in other parts of your life.”
Marrying Emotion and Technique
Once the audition door closes, Shaked jettisons control. Preparation and analysis stay in the body, ready but invisible. “You always have to throw everything away,” he says. “Make the work part of yourself, but don’t do it so much where you’re showing the work.” The goal is to marry the “Strasbergian self”—emotion, memory, lived experience—with the writer’s technical demands on the page. The sweet spot lies between authenticity and craft, between personal chaos and disciplined structure. Or, as he puts it: “Strasberg is the juice you put in the technical demands.”
What’s Next
Shaked is scouring new playwrights and filmmakers for a role “idiosyncratic where I, and only I, can play it”—a Holden Caulfield-esque part that matches his “controlled chaos.” He also contributed to a forthcoming book about on-set collaboration, out in October, where he expands on the concept of Creative Swirling for early-career artists.
For now, students can catch him in The German or follow the hustle in real time on Instagram @DanShaked, on Facebook, or on his website DanShaked.com. Before we sign off, Shaked insists on one final shout-out to his teacher, Lola Cohen, “my major mentor until today.” Shaked even made an appearance in her book, The Lee Strasberg Notes, a fundamental handbook of all of Lee Strasberg’s practical teachings and techniques.
His parting advice is simple: bank on relationships, not paychecks; treat self-care as seriously as self-taping; and remember that one well-timed email can set off a career-defining butterfly effect. For LSTFI students eager to leap from classroom to set, the takeaway is clear: the work is everywhere, under the same sky—go find it!