Cela Scott – Show Stopper
Written By: Michael D. McClellan | Cela Scott takes your breath. A multi-hyphenate badass with roots in Nashville and a career in Hollywood, Scott oozes brashness, confidence, and sophistication in ways that set her apart in an industry teeming with starry-eyed wannabes trying to make their mark. Meet her, and your first reaction is to find a parallel, but drawing comparisons only cheapens both her inimitable range and magnetic charisma. The talented singer-songwriter-actor makes up one-half of the LA-based alternative duo, Automatik Eden. On screen, she’s done everything from Wells Fargo commercials to Star Trek: Renegades to indie movies like the dark comedy Dick Dickster, where she plays a neophyte porn star named…wait for it…Peaches Ripen. Yes, Cela Scott is from this world, but she is not like the rest of us, nor is she someone who can be pigeonholed into a stereotype for the sake of conversational brevity.
“I like being me,” she says, settling in for the interview. “I’ve always charted my own course and figured out things on my own terms.”
Indeed.
Scott could have played it safe and stayed home, working some honky-tonk dive in downtown Nashville, fronting a mediocre band and churning through a weepy old set of country-music standards every weekend. A move like that was never in the Cela Scott playbook. Slender and radiant, with piercing eyes that grip you and refuse to let go, it’s as easy to imagine Scott gracing the cover of Elle or Vanity Fair as it is to watch her perform in the official music video for Renegades. Her vocals on the Automatik Eden single Gold to Straw cast a hypnotic, dreamlike spell where time seems to stand still, while the voyeuristic video dares you to look away. (Spoiler Alert: You can’t.)
Earning her theater degree at the University of Southern California, today Cela Scott oscillates between music and acting with uncommon ease, equally comfortable in both worlds. Her husband, David Crocco, makes up the other half of Automatik Eden. Their debut LP, Madland, produced a single by the same name that charted on Billboard’s Hot Singles Sales Chart at #12. Scott’s voice delivers exceptional range, natural elegance, and lucent tone. There is a refined edginess to her vocals, a hint of danger dabbed with pop playfulness. She plays the guitar, and does so exceedingly well. And then there’s the look: Depending on the mood and moment, Scott’s eyeliner is a precision event, a marvel, as if drawn on by the kind of pre-programmed robot arm used for laparoscopic surgeries. Red lipstick. Black lipstick. Ornate, patterned jackets over Gothic, ruffled shirts. Tight dresses that stop mid-thigh. All of it complimenting the equally effectual look worn by Crocco and completing the vibe that is Automatik Eden.
“We have fun with it,” she says with a laugh. “When you take the stage, you’ve got to play the part. That’s rock and roll.”
Scott’s comfort level in front of the camera is evident at every turn. She’s acted opposite Tim Russ in Renegades and Robert Ray Shafer in Dick Dickster. She’s played a reluctant goddess of the underworld/part-time secretary at a dotcom. She can soon be seen in Deep in the Forest, a thriller starring seasoned actor Peter Jason.
Today?
Cela Scott continues to audition in the face of COVID-19, using her quarantine time to dress up like a rock star and produce a self-tape to be shared virtually. She, along with Crocco, are plotting the next move for Automatik Eden. Together they continue to grow Crocco’s Emmy-nominated audio post-production company, which has mixed such TV hits as Behind the Music, Punk’d, and United Shades of America. There are more songs to write, more roles to own, more galaxies to explore. All while staying true to her inner compass.
“There is plenty to keep me busy,” she says, smiling. “There is no shortage of opportunities. Sometimes I find it. Sometimes it finds me. It all works out in the end.”
No doubt.
The next chapter, like the last, is all about success.
Please take me back to the beginning.
I was the oldest of four homeschooled kids in Nashville. We were somewhat on the front wave of the homeschooling phenomenon, so not a lot of people had heard of it yet. Today it’s much more accepted as the norm, and now everybody knows what it is. And during COVID-19, many families are getting a taste of what it might be like! My mom is really getting a kick out of that. There was a lot of creativity in my family. My dad was a musician, and my mom was into the theater. I grew up doing mostly musical theater, which is what eventually jettisoned me from Nashville to Los Angeles.
What was it like growing up in Nashville, and how did that influence your creative side?
I came to the guitar later in the game, which is ironic since I grew up in Music City, USA. Nashville was mostly a country town when I was growing up, which is what it’s still famous for, but it’s become a much more diverse place for artists these days. I did not take music seriously as a youngster. It’s kind of what everybody was doing there – everybody in Nashville wanted to write a hit song, just like everybody in Los Angeles wants to write an Oscar-winning screenplay. Growing up I never really saw myself going in either of those directions. Weirdly, I sort of ended up in both of those worlds.
When did you start singing?
I was in the Nashville Children’s Choir for several years, and we toured all over the place. We played Carnegie Hall and went all over the country, so I have this sort of classical background in music that later would transition into more of a rock ‘n roll sensibility when I got out into L.A.
You went to college at the University of Southern California. Please tell me about this period in your life.
I did my undergrad in theater at USC. That was a very cool time in my life. To this day, some of the closest friends that I have – many of whom are working actors now – are people that I met at USC. Through the theater I also worked with my husband, David Crocco, on music for a theater piece called Vinegar Tom. This was an existing play about witch hunting in the 1800s, as told through the lens of a modern, feminist perspective. The director wanted to modernize the music that was supposed to go with it, so we created the soundtrack for the play. That was our first collaboration, and it later led us to form a band together.
You and David are Automatik Eden. How did you meet?
David and I have been together a long time. We actually met in Nashville as cast members during a production of Hair, which was before we moved out to California. Hair is this famous rock musical about hippies living in New York during the time of Vietnam, so there are a lot of songs about war protests, the most famous of which culminates in this nude scene at the end of a very powerful song where everybody takes off their clothes. This was a little bit too spicy for Tennessee sensibilities at the time, but we like to joke that we met in the nude [laughs].
Have you acted together since?
Hair was David’s first and last play. He’s really not an actor, but he auditioned because he loved the music so much. He keeps getting sucked into it here and there because I’m involved in it, so he’s always sort of on the periphery.
How did Automatik Eden get its start?
It wasn’t until after college that we had the epiphany. David had been a musician for a long time, basically his whole adult life, but he had taken a break from it to start an audio production business for TV and film called. A.G.E. Post, which is now an Emmy-nominated post-production facility, which is pretty cool. In 2018 we were nominated for an Emmy Award for mixing Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath. We were kicking around one day in the living room, and he was playing something on guitar that’d he’d written. I had some classical text lying around – I think it was some Shakespeare or some poetry by Lord Byron – and I just started singing the words that were available to me. I was used to cold reading and rehearsing from a script, so I just sort of created a melody to go with what he was playing. We had so much fun doing it we thought, “Oh, maybe we have something here. Maybe this is something we can do together musically.” From there it evolved into the band.
Automatik Eden kicks ass.
Thank you! We started getting kind of serious about it maybe five years ago. We went through a couple of different machinations as a band – a couple of different names, and a couple of different band members – but it’s always been the two of us writing all of the original material and recording everything on the tracks. There are occasions where we will bring in some super awesome friends with specialized skills that we really like to showcase on the records, things like saxophone and cello. And our producer is a dear friend named Sean Beavan, who produces and engineers all of our stuff, including Madland. Sean is extremely talented. He’s worked with Marilyn Manson, and 9-Inch Nails, Garbage, and No Doubt. He has a killer sensibility.
How do the two of you collaborate? Is this like Bernie Taupin and Elton John?
Yes, it’s exactly like Bernie and Elton [laughs]. No, I would not compare us to those guys, but those are two of our favorites. David is one of those kind of musicians who can play everything. It’s annoying in an endearing sort of way, but he’s good at all of it – good musician, good lyricist, and good singer. In terms of how we collaborate, it’s been a little bit different every time. Typically, he’ll have an idea for a song that’s fully fleshed out, and then I’ll add a little sparkle to it and kind of fill in what’s left. Or it works the other way around – I’ll have something that is pretty much done, but it’s missing a bridge, or it’s missing lyrics, or needs a stronger chorus, and David will fill in the blanks. There have also been times when we will write something together from the ground up, so it really varies, depending on the mood and the situation.
Madland is one hell of a debut LP.
Thank you again! Madland was really important for us to complete, and we’re very proud of it. We did a few singles before this record, and we released a couple of EPs, but all along we knew that we wanted to do a full-length album. That was a big goal of ours, and we were able to achieve that with Madland. The title is our commentary on the insane state of the world as we see it.
The goal of the record – and I really do hope you got the opportunity to listen to it from start to finish – is for the listener to experience all of it uninterrupted. It’s good driving music in that regard. It’s throwback to the albums from the ‘60s and ‘70s that we loved so much, when the music was connected and it was really about a journey, where one song is meant to go into the next, in a particular order, and it takes you on a ride. We really missed that record experience. You just don’t get that with a lot of today’s digital music, especially with the attention span of today’s listener.
Madland is really diverse.
You’re definitely going to hear some Beatles-inspired stuff. You’ll hear Radiohead and Massive Attack, too. There is a slinky, sexy, electronic, down-tempo kind-of-thing going on as well, which draws its inspiration from Portishead. The more upbeat and aggressive tracks might remind you of an early Pretenders, or maybe White Stripes.
Automatik Eden are wildly popular in Cleveland.
We do have a very strong following in Cleveland. It’s really great. David spent his formative years there as a teenager and as a young adult, and he still has a lot of friends there. We became connected with oWOW Radio, which, I’d like to say, is an amazing streaming service started by John Gorman. John became famous for WMMS in Cleveland, which was a terrestrial radio station that broke acts like Rush, Brian Ferry, and David Bowie in the United States during the early 1970s. People from that region know that station and know that guy, so it’s been very cool to be played a lot by oWOW Radio.
The voyeuristic video for the single Gold to Straw is amazing. You star in it, and it clearly plays into your strength as an actress.
Thank you! I love acting – whenever I can combine music and acting, it’s a good day for me.
Did acting school help you transition from stage to screen? Did it help you as a musical artist?
I would say that in some ways it helped, but in some ways going from one medium to the other can also hinder you. If you’re so used to theater, for example, there are some adjustments that need to be made when you get in front of a camera. You’re not playing as big necessarily as you would to a stage audience. Being a classically trained musician was a really good thing because of the skills that I learned, but that didn’t really apply once I got into a rock ‘n roll kind of sound and started doing music videos. It was more important that the music didn’t sound too perfect or put together, the way one might sing in a choir, which is the way I learned growing up. I had to be aware of the difference, and then let things naturally be more edgy and imperfect. Then I could find the fun in that.
You play Persephone, a reluctant goddess of the underworld/part-time secretary at a dotcom, in the web series Godsdotcom.
That was a fun one to do. It has to do with the idea that the Grecian gods have fallen out of style, and nobody’s really worshiping them anymore. They don’t have the same cachet that they once had, so they try to make themselves relevant again by starting a tech startup company. It has a lot of elements of The Office. They find themselves in this office-y environment, although they are larger-than-life deities, and they have to do mundane jobs to keep the lights on. Persephone is a secretary with not-so-great of an attitude.
Do you enjoy playing comedic roles?
Comedy may be my favorite thing to do. I loved doing Dick Dickster with Bobby Ray Shafer, who everyone knows as Bob Vance, Vance Refrigeration in The Office,and Tim Russ from Star Trek: Voyager. Bobby Ray made the film on a shoestring budget, and he did it in a handful of days. He also used Citadel in the film, which is one of our songs from Madland, Citadel.
It was a lot of fun – I played Peaches Ripen, who is sort of a newbie, wannabe porn star with some serious daddy issues. She’s trying to infiltrate a close knit group of the porn community and make a name for herself, but she’s always messing up. It’s a fun premises for a dark comedy. It’s really a send-up of Hollywood and how everybody wants to be famous and sorta wants to be somebody that they’re not. I had never worked with either of these guys before, but they are so creative and so talented that it made it a blast to be involved.
I hear that you auditioned in full porn star costume.
Yeah, I think I freaked out Bobby Ray, who was at the auditions. I went in with long blonde hair, extensions, fake nails, super high heels, a spray tan, and a little cocktail dress. I was just going for it. Bobby Ray looked at me and thought I was a real porn star. And I was like, “I’m here in character, this is my resumé. I’m acting right now.” Then I did the read and he looked at me like I was an alien [laughs]. I got a call a few hours later and learned that I got the gig.
How did you get your start in acting after moving to California?
I did a bunch of indie kinda stuff, which I still do – I’m pretty much always involved in some kind of independent film project. In 2015 I did a film called Death Valley, which was directed by T.J. Scott, who directed the television show Spartacus, among many others. There were several other cast members who were also from Spartacus, wonderful actors like Katrina Law, Nick Tarabay and Victoria Pratt. That film was very fun to do – they even ended up incorporating some of our songs into it as well, so that was an added bonus.
Your music has also been featured in a very popular Wells Fargo commercial.
Yeah, that was pretty cool. That commercial was created for the STAPLES Center, where the L.A. Lakers play. They have giant TV screens for the sporting events and stuff, and we shot the Wells Fargo commercial portraying a band that is “ready to rock the house.” They used the largest camera I’ve ever seen in my life, the lens looked like it was the size of a car. That was really cool to do, and it played for several years at the STAPLES Center. Actually, it’s weird to see yourself on giant screens like that. It’s surreal – you think you’re prepared for it, but every time you see it there’s a disconnect, because seeing something on that scale is hard to relate.
You’ve not only appeared in Star Trek: Renegades, but Automatik Eden performs the operatic title song, Captain of my Soul.
I ended up getting involved in Renegades through Tim Russ. I actually met him on the set of Dick Dickster, and we connected instantly. It turns out that he’s a musician, too, so I guess that was the common bond that drew us together and helped create our friendship. He’s actually a great musician, and he plays all over Los Angeles with his band, the Tim Russ Crew. He cast me in Renegades, which was a real thrill because I’ve been a total Star Trek nerd since childhood – and I still am!
Tim ended up asking David and I to do the title track. The captain in this series really takes to heart a poem by William Ernest Henley called Invictus. One of the lines in that poem is I am the captain of my soul. They really wanted to take this older poem in turn it into a piece of music, so that’s what we ended up doing. Tim Russ directed the music video, which was also a lot of fun to do. My scenes in the video are done against a rocky, desert backdrop, which gives it a really cool vibe. That’s how it all came together. Captain of my Soul is rather sweeping and epic, with lots of strings. They thought it was kind of appropriate for space opera like Renegades.
Please tell me about your role in the pilot.
The captain in this series is a female, her name is Lexxa. She is played by Adrian Wilkinson from Xena: Warrior Princess, among other things. I end up playing her mother in flashbacks to her childhood, and you quickly learn that she’s lost her mother under some tragic circumstances.
How important is it for an aspiring actor to have an agent?
You need an agent, definitely. It’s kind of tricky – you need an agent to get the jobs, but in order to get an agent you need to have already had jobs, so it’s a Catch-22 kind-of-situation a lot of new actors find themselves in. You have to start building a resumé as best you can. It’s tricky terrain to navigate, because it’s not always easy figuring out what kind of work you want to get involved with…and it’s really hard to know the quality sometimes. Most actors are really just trying to build their reel, which is just a series of clips, an example of their body of work that shows what they can do. A lot of time you’re doing smaller projects in the beginning, maybe student films and independent stuff. You’re just trying to build that reel, so that you have enough of a resumé that you can take it to an agent who might be willing to take a chance on a newcomer. As a newbie actor that’s how you have to approach it. You want to say, “Hey, here’s what I have, here’s what I can do, give me a shot.” From there, you just audition and you do the best you can. There’s a lot of competition and it’s easy to get burnt out. It’s a wild world and it can beat you down if you let it, but for people who really love acting, you keep getting drawn back into it. It’s sort of hard to get away from in that respect.
How important is networking?
It is, and it isn’t. I think there are a lot of “networking” events and workshops that are traps that young actors can fall into. I think you have to keep your eyes open and try to be aware of what’s a genuine opportunity and what is a waste of time. There are a lot of sharks out there preying on actors who are kind of naïve. I would advise that nobody ever spend money for anything that is supposed to be considered a networking event. I think the best way to network is to work. That’s the best way to meet other actors and professionals in the business who can really help. You want to network with the people who are on sets, and try to make as many friendships as possible. If you hit it off with the right people, that always leads to other opportunities.
What do you currently have in the works?
In 2020 I’ll be starring in the short film Impulse Control, written and directed by Juliette Beavan of the rock band 8mm. She is Sean’s wife, just a super talent. This film is the first in a series of narratives and music videos inspired by the artists in 8mm’s sphere. Juliette’s motto with these: “Move Fast, Make Things”. She’s in post-production on this one now, and there will be plenty more coming this year.
If you could offer one piece of advice to aspiring actors, what would that be?
I would say hang in there. It’s tough. It’s also really rewarding. As a creative individual, be sure you have other things in the arts that you enjoy doing. For me, the saving grace has been having another creative outlet. When acting becomes difficult, I can go to music. When I start to get burnt out on music I can go back to acting. I think it’s really helpful if you have something like painting, or writing, or something else in the arts that can help fill that artistic drive when one area has dried up for you. It’ll be easier to keep your momentum going, and you can go back to acting when the time is right.
During Corona Quarantine, I’d love to encourage actors to use some of this extra free time to keep your talent sharp and continue to build your reel. Now is a great time to find a monologue online, or write one yourself, and tape it. Most of us have access to some really good looking phone cameras now. Order a little microphone online and teach yourself about audio. Direct yourself, download some editing software and learn about that. Plan to be ready to get back out there when the world opens up again.
- Mario Andretti – Full Throttle - February 4, 2024
- Tim Russ – Star Trek: Voyager - July 25, 2021
- Maeve Press – Everything’s Gonna Be Okay - May 23, 2021
