Local actress reaches for the stars

Belleville resident Elisa Linfante has played a lazy usher in a movie, a vulnerable pregnant woman in a horror film, a restaurant patron in a commercial, and an exotic dancer in a comedy.

But the role she really wants to play for real is a working actress.

“It’s a great thing,” said the 27-year-old aspiring actress about her craft. “I love it and it’s a lot of fun.”

Between her part-time job and acting classes, Linfante is currently working on the independent feature- length film, “The Art of Theatrical Ushery,” which is being produced in New Jersey and is about “an usher who takes his job way too seriously,” she said. Christopher Banks, Linfante’s friend, plays Ronnell Chambers, an overbearing, perfectionist usher while Linfante is Arlene, a co-worker with an unapologetic lazy attitude who doesn’t care about her job, she said.

“I am part of something big. It has been fun to work on it,” she said about the movie.

Linfante stumbled into acting after she took an acting class in her last semester at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey in Pomona, where she graduated in 2004 with a communications major and a concentration on film and television.

“It was a lot of fun. I get someone’s script and I get to play around with that,” she said. “It clicked.”

Before, Linfante was more interested in being behind the camera either by directing, editing, or doing production work, she said.

Her first real role was the best friend of the heroine in a romantic drama for a fellow student’s thesis film, Linfante said.

But after graduating from college, Linfante went to work to pay her bills as a substitute teacher and ultimately as a secretary at a footwear company where she was promoted to sales coordinator. She also worked in production for a company that made self-defense videos.

Acting fell to the wayside and Linfante was close to giving up on it.

“It was really hard and gradually it became something I put on the back burner,” she said.

About a year after graduation, her old friend Banks contacted her to be part of a short film he was working on that eventually became “The Art of Theatrical Ushery.” It sparked her return to acting when she started work on the film in 2006, she said.
Linfante said she then started studying acting seriously and going to auditions. Banks suggested a stint at the New York Film Academy in Manhattan. In 2008, she took a 12-week certification course at night. Instructors were tough and pushed her to be her best, she said. It was an inspiring time for her.
“They introduced a lot of concepts,” she said about the class. “There were a lot of talented people there.”

Since then, she has done a restaurant commercial and played a stripper in a comedy short. Linfante also played Ms. Bradley, a pregnant woman in a horror film called, “Billy’s Cult.” She was recently cast in an Internet webseries called “Nightwing: Escalation.”
She is also currently taking classes at Breakthrough Studio School for Drama in Manhattan. To pay the bills, she works part time at Fed-Ex.
And of course, Linfante reprised her old role of the lazy usher in Banks’ feature-length version. The movie shoot officially started last fall and continues now because filming has to be worked around people’s hectic schedules with a projected finish in mid April.

“He’s a great director and great to work with,” Linfante said about Banks.

Banks said Linfante is a great actress who can impersonate different races and takes her craft seriously. He has also seen an upward trajectory in her acting abilities throughout the years, Banks said.

“She has talent. She has skills. She’s one to watch out for,” he said.

Meanwhile, her parents and old brother have been supportive of her career path.

“They are 100 percent behind me,” she said.

While New York City and New Jersey have been a nurturing environment for her budding acting career, Linfante has thought about moving to Los Angeles.

But she quickly dismisses it and says, “I don’t think I can live out there. I am an East Coast girl - all the way.”