Biography
Nicholas Guilak is a Los Angeles based actor, writer, director, producer, theatre artist, and professor whose career spans film, television, stage, and original storytelling. Born in Houston, Texas and raised in La Jolla, California, Guilak moved to Los Angeles in 1991 and earned his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Southern California, where he studied Theatre, Film, and Humanities. He later received his Master of Fine Arts in Acting from UCLA, building a foundation rooted in classical training, emotional truth, psychological depth, and cinematic storytelling.
With a screen career spanning more than 60 film and television credits, Guilak has worked across major network, cable, streaming, studio, and independent productions. His television credits include The Gringo Hunters, United States of Al, Ray Donovan, NCIS: Los Angeles, Henry Danger, General Hospital, 24, Bones, CSI: Miami, NCIS, JAG, The Agency, Threat Matrix, Chuck, Las Vegas, Dark Blue, Hawthorne, The Lost Room, Homeland Security, Saving Jessica Lynch, and The Bold and the Beautiful. His film work includes Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat, American Fighter, American Wrestler: The Wizard, Think Like a Man Too, Delta Farce, Cruel Intentions 2, Laleh, In Search of America, Inshallah, and other feature, television, and independent film projects.
As an actor, Guilak is known for portraying men of intelligence, authority, danger, contradiction, and emotional complexity. His work often lives in the space between strength and fracture, bringing specificity and humanity to characters shaped by pressure, identity, conflict, and survival. Fluent in English and Farsi, with additional language and dialect experience, he has played a wide range of international, dramatic, comedic, and psychologically layered roles throughout his screen career.
Guilak’s theatre background remains central to his artistic identity. He has performed in, directed, and produced numerous stage productions in the United States and abroad, with work spanning classical theatre, contemporary drama, ensemble storytelling, and actor-driven performance. He was a co-founder of Big Dog Little Dog Productions, a Los Angeles based theatre company, and his stage work includes productions such as The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, Glengarry Glen Ross, A Lie of the Mind, Hedda Gabler, Twelfth Night, The Rover, The Misanthrope, The Threepenny Opera, and Three Sisters.
In recent years, Guilak has expanded his work as a filmmaker and storyteller through Guilco Productions, Inc., his production company for original film, theatre, and story-driven creative development. His short film The Last Draft, which he wrote, directed, produced, and stars in, marks his directorial debut and reflects his interest in elevated genre, psychological tension, authorship, identity, and the darker corners of creativity. The film follows a reclusive novelist whose battle with writer’s block becomes a terrifying collapse between fiction and reality.
The Last Draft has built festival momentum, including a Beverly Hills Film Festival selection and a FilmQuest appearance, positioning the film as both a standalone psychological thriller and a proof of concept for a larger feature-length story. Through the film, Guilak continues to expand his creative identity as an actor-filmmaker drawn to stories about isolation, madness, wounded humanity, and the unstable line between imagination and reality.
In addition to his work as an actor and filmmaker, Guilak has taught theatre, acting, performance, and online asynchronous courses at Antelope Valley College and within the Los Angeles Community College District, including Pierce College, West Los Angeles College, and Southwest College. His work as an educator reflects the same principles that define his artistic career: craft, discipline, emotional truth, character, and a lifelong commitment to performance as a serious human art form.
Across acting, directing, writing, producing, and teaching, Nicholas Guilak’s work is unified by a fascination with wounded humanity, identity, power, isolation, and the psychological lives of people under pressure. Whether on screen, on stage, behind the camera, or in the classroom, his work is driven by story, craft, and the search for what is most truthful beneath the surface.
