Actor Lenny Hernandez has been popping up on your screen for nearly two decades. He’s appeared on Nickelodeon and filmed a Comedy Central pilot. His most prolific gigs have been in commercials for major companies including Listerine, Dairy Queen and Tylenol. For all his Hollywood success, however, he’s never forgotten the first laugh that made him fall in love with performing.

As a high school freshman, Hernandez was cast in the ensemble of THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW at Springfield Little Theatre. He balanced rehearsals with football practice until the actor cast as Ichabod Crane dropped out for his own athletic ambitions. With less than ten days before opening, Hernandez was asked to learn the part of the famous schoolteacher. He recalls his first crash course in learning a part under a hard time crunch.

“[Assistant director] Tonya [Cunningham] and I met all day Saturday and all-day Sunday the weekend before the Thursday we opened,” he remembered. “I got the notice midweek, so on Saturday and Sunday the weekend before we opened, she and I rehearsed stuff and ran like three, four hours the weekend before to just run it, and run it, and run it.”

At the time, the show’s director Beth Domann was building up the education program and wearing many hats. Hernandez recalls that Domann had spent all week constructing a plaster horse that Hernandez could actually sit on.

“I mount the horse for the first time and then [my character] gets scared, so I start spinning. I accidentally kicked the head of the horse, and it flops over and breaks,” Hernandez explained. “So, the horse head is just limp.”

The disastrous prop malfunction could have been an unfortunate footnote in the show’s run, but Hernandez used his comedic skills to turn it into an opportunity.

“I do like a 25-second bit with the horse head trying to get his head back upright. I’m like, ‘No! Gunpowder, are you okay? No, I hurt you. Are you okay?’ I lifted it up and it fell back over, so I lifted it up, let go of it, and it just fell back over,” he laughed. “I’ll never forget it because my mom has a very distinct laugh and, as anyone who knows Beth Domann also knows, she has a very distinct laugh. I can hear both my mom and Beth in different parts of the auditorium laughing hysterically over everyone. It’s just one of those moments that I’ll never forget. Having that moment where it’s just like, ‘Oh, I’m making two of my favorite people laugh very loudly from this silly little thing I’m doing with this horse head that I accidentally broke.’”

Hernandez’ magnetic stage presence was apparent from a young age. A middle school teacher noticed how entertaining his class presentations were and approached his mother to recommend Springfield Little Theatre for further training. He leaped at the chance to learn dancing, acting, and improv and started in classes with Beth Domann.

“Beth was absolutely funny. She was one of my favorite people. I could tell you that I’m sure she found me to be some kind of obnoxious little thirteen-year-old. I was attempting to be a thirteen-year-old brown version of Jim Carrey. No doubt about it,” Hernandez joked. “That was me and I was always just bold.”

He continued acting through Central High School with Dr. Gretchen Teague then unexpectedly landed in the theater program at Drury University. Once again, he was spotted for his talent and recruited to the school.

“I was planning on just going to OTC because I didn’t know anything about colleges,” he admitted. “Nobody told me about how to do that process. About two weeks before school was letting out, we had a student teacher from Drury ask me, ‘Are you going anywhere to college for theater? Drury is auditioning in two weekends. You should audition for Drury.’ So, I auditioned for Drury and got in for their theatre program, which is insane.”

However, in his first year of college, Dr. Teague invited him to attend a performance of WEST SIDE STORY at Missouri State University with her class. Hernandez was mesmerized by the Broadway classic for a very personal reason. It was the first show he had seen representing the Puerto Rican community like his own family heritage.

“I said, ‘That’s the kind of theater I want to be doing,’” he reflected. “After seeing WEST SIDE STORY, this is a show about brown people. That’s what I want to do.”

After graduating with a BFA, Hernandez headed west. Within months of moving to Los Angeles, he had booked an agent and only a few auditions later landed his first job. As the lead in a series of promotions for New York New York Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Hernandez quickly learned how tedious film work can be.

“They flew us out to Vegas for five days. I was the lead, and it was my first time on set. It was just such a wild experience,” he recalled. “The first day there, we did the club sequence, so they booked out an entire modeling agency out of Vegas. They had a crane shot where they followed me with a crane through a crowd as I’m weaving and bobbing my head. They go, ‘Action!’ Then call, ‘Cut, cut, cut, cut! Back to one.’ Like four times they called cut after just a handful of movements and I was like, ‘What am I doing? What’s going on?’ And somebody goes up and was like, ‘No, no, no. It’s not you. The extras are staring at the camera.’ So, they had to go to each one of these extras and tell them to stop looking directly at the camera when it cranes through, because they’re models, they aren’t actors. That was a hilarious part of that.”

Hernandez’ most memorable acting note from the shoot was that the director didn’t want to see the blood flowing in his neck veins, so he had to hold his breath for 40 seconds through multiple takes.

As he adjusted to screen acting, he recalled his SLT training. Commercials, he noticed, don’t have complicated back stories or time to develop the character.

“The biggest thing with commercial work is you really have to use your imagination to put yourself in the situation as quickly as possible,” he explained. “That was stuff that I learned with Beth at SLT was using your imagination to help you see it and visualize it. That’s where the commercial work starts landing you gigs. That’s a direct reflection of the training I did at SLT in those middle school years.”

Hernandez said that his experience at SLT has also opened more opportunities by knowing when to say, ‘Yes.’  “Another great thing about being adaptable from SLT and beyond is that when you book or try to audition for things and you didn’t get in, they would sometimes offer, do you want to work crew? Do you want to work back behind the camera?”

One such opportunity appeared on the set of ALIENS, CLOWNS, AND GEEKS with director Richard Elfman – brother of celebrated composer, Danny Elfman. When Hernandez lost out on the role he auditioned for, he had the opportunity to assist Elfman on set.

“On the second to last day, we had a very long day, very heavy in prosthetics, and some guy dropped out, so guess who got to fill in as a full-blown prosthetic alien? Me! So, I got to step in and get an actual credit in front of the camera,” Hernandez remembered. “I would always recommend to people, even if you don’t get the role you want, figure out a way to still be part of the production. Even if it’s behind the cameras or behind stage, just so you can learn more things that you had not known before. You can always use that to your advantage moving forward.”

After the pandemic hit, Hernandez relocated back to Missouri, auditioning remotely as the industry became less concentrated in LA. He recently toured the festival circuit with multi-award-winning short film PARADISO, which he starred in and produced. The short also features SLT alum, Imari Stout. He will next appear in upcoming major feature film DUST TO MALIBU filmed primarily in Springfield.

Hernandez admits that film work can be clinical. The actor is often a tool for the director to get the shot they want. He occasionally feels the pull to do stage work again, which he finds to be a more creative endeavor. He starred in the award-winning Hollywood Fringe play SAVING CAIN and returned to SLT to lead PARENTAL GUIDANCE SUGGESTED directed by Beth Domann.

“What prepared me to go out to LA was the fact that people like Beth Domann and Dr. Gretchen Teague empowered kids to fully go as far as they can when it comes to performing,” Hernandez credited. “Be as ridiculous or insane or left field as you possibly can to see if something works, then find the best way of doing things as it works inside the script or the environment you have created. That’s one of the biggest things about theater, and learning it early on, is learning how to really be free of your self-conscience.”