“You look familiar.”
Rod Biermann often gets that from people. No autograph requests, no swoons of recognition, just the quizzical I-know-your-face-from-somewhere look. And that oft-heard line.
That nagging sense of familiarity likely doesn”™t owe to Biermann”™s current profession and the public figure he cuts in a courtroom as an employment-law litigator at Dorf & Nelson LLP in Westchester. His is a lean, 6-foot, 5-inch figure, topped by a thick crop of longish brown hair neatly parted on one side ”“ an artfully poised, well-spoken figure that might equally well serve a trial lawyer or a Hollywood leading man.
Before he attached “Esquire” to his name on his business card, Biermann carried a Screen Actors Guild card. He worked in Hollywood ”“ off-and-on work, auditions galore, the lot of most actors ”“ for about 15 years. He played some hunky Lotharios, but did not land the leading man roles before leaving Tinseltown for law school in New York City.
Have you ever seen “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle?”™”™ The 2000 movie? DeNiro. (Biermann calls him “Bob.”) Jason Alexander. Rene Russo. Piper Perabo”™s romantic interest in the flick, Rod Biermann. Familiar?
Or how about “Pearl Harbor,” director Michael Bay”™s 2001 special effects and bombing extravaganza? Ben Affleck. Alec Baldwin. Josh Hartnett. Cuba Gooding Jr. Rod Biermann?
Or maybe you vaguely know him from that “guilty pleasure,” as he calls it, “Saved by the Bell,” the television sitcom with a long, lucrative afterlife in reruns. The lawyer still collects residuals for the couple of characters he played there.
Or how about that other guilty pleasure, the daytime soap opera “The Young and the Restless?” Biermann played Kyle, a new love interest for one or more of the 42-years-and-still-ticking show”™s mainstays.
“That soap opera received the most notoriety of any things I did,” Biermann says, reminiscing in a conference room at Dorf & Nelson headquarters in Rye. “I would get all this mail” addressed to Kyle. And it was only a three-month, off-and-on gig.
“When I left, I left on my terms and I was ready to go,” he says of his West Coast career. “I don”™t dwell in the past. It was a clean break and I never looked back.”
“I didn”™t go out there to be a star. I went out there to be creative and just act.”
His westward migration was not the pursuit of a lifelong dream. For a kid growing up in Sterling, Illinois, a mill town 100 miles west of Chicago with a population of 16,000, “Things like being an actor or a lawyer just don”™t register,” says Biermann. At the University of Illinois, he was a pre-med student, having chosen medicine as “a respectable career that I thought I had a knack for.”
In his junior year, he took an elective course in acting, an academic diversion before “eight more years of school” as a med student. He was smitten.
“That just floored me,” he says. “For the first time I got into something that really, truly interested me.”
Biermann won the lead role in a campus production of Neil Simon”™s “The Good Doctor.” “It terrified me,” he recalls. “I had so many lines to learn. It terrified me, but it was the most exciting thing I had ever done.”
Within 48 hours of his college graduation, the 22-year-old Midwesterner was on the road to Los Angeles with his life possessions. “I literally packed up my Eagle Talon and drove out there.”
“I got out to L.A. and I didn”™t know a soul.” He enrolled in a method acting class and found his first manager, who was related to someone the Biermann family knew in Sterling. Sometimes it pays to hail from Sterling, Illinois.
Biermann began taking roles in student films shot by budding directors at University of Southern California and UCLA. “I did about five or six of those, which was a really fantastic experience,” he said.
An agency hired him to do commercials. His first was for Big Red Gum ”“ whose commercials he had loathed as a kid. “I had to kiss this girl. It was fantastic,” Biermann recalls. “I had to make out with this girl all day and I got paid for it.”
He would do six or seven commercials while looking to break into television and film. “There was a time when I had two or three national commercials airing at the same time.”
The commercial work qualified him for a Screen Actors Guild union card. But acting work was slow to come his way and sporadic when it did. Like many aspiring actors, Biermann waited tables ”“ making two bucks in tips on a good night at a diner frequented by L.A.”™s Z-listers ”“ before joining another aspiring thespian in his carpentry finishing business in Malibu.
“It was very tough,” he says. “I started to work and I started to believe that this was something I could do.” In Hollywood, “There really are no overnight stories of success.”
Biermann says he did about 10 television shows and 10 to 15 independent films in roles “ranging from an all-American lead to a vampire.” In a Danielle Steel made-for-TV movie, he played a preppie rapist.
He landed numerous roles in television pilots. If his face looks familiar, you didn”™t see it first in one of them.
“They never did run,” says Biermann. “I was the kiss of death for a lot of those things.”
The Rocky and Bullwinkle film “was my first major motion picture. It was a $200 million movie ”¦ Working on that movie at that level was really unbelievable.”
Biermann met his wife Rachel, a New York City native, in an acting class in Los Angeles. She was pregnant during the filming of “Pearl Harbor,” Biermann”™s second major motion picture.
Filming on an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, he was notified that his wife had gone into labor. The producers bundled him into the nose of a World War II-era B-25 Mitchell bomber and the cast and crew aboard the carrier cheered on the nervous father as he flew to San Diego. There a waiting Disney jet flew him to Los Angeles, where a waiting limo rushed him to the hospital.
It was like a scene from a Hollywood movie: “As I”™m running into the room, she basically had the baby right then,” Biermann says.
About two hours later, he returned to the B-25 and filming.
The biggest jerk with whom he worked in Hollywood? Nolo contendere: Ben Affleck on the set of “Pearl Harbor.”
For the young couple, “We were just immersed in the entertainment business. We met some incredible people, had some amazing experiences, and really made my time out there something to remember.”
Still, “I never knew when my next job was going to be. You always finished a job and you were back to the grind” of landing the next one.
After the births of their two children, Biermann had a father”™s epiphany. At home one day during another interval without work, he realized that out-of-work actor was not the role he wanted to model for his kids.
“I realized I had to have some control over my destiny”¦.That concerned me. I had friends older than me that were struggling and hit a wall” in the entertainment business.
“I made a decision that day that this was something that was fun in my twenties, but now I have to figure out what to do” in a new career. “I realized that I had a good run. I had a lot of fun. But I was ready to make the transition, to make a break.”
Biermann saw role models for a viable, attractive career in his wife”™s mother, Saralee Evans, then a New York State Supreme Court judge, and his wife”™s stepfather, civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel, the former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “I realized that I could use the skill set I developed as an actor to act in the courtroom. So I went to law school and became a litigator. I was able to use what I had developed and take it to another level.”
The Biermanns, who now reside in Larchmont, moved to New York City, where the former actor enrolled in the City University of New York School of Law. He was admitted to the state bar in 2007.
“The funny thing about that transition, it was very tough. As an actor, you”™re taught to feel and not think. As an attorney, you”™re taught to think and not feel.”
Yet Biermann found the skills he”™d developed as an actor performing in public and his life experience were “critical” in giving him an advantage over many of his courtroom peers. “Being a public speaker and being in a courtroom is a high-stress, high-stakes environment,” he says.
Biermann says he chose to practice employment law because it “was an opportunity where I could help other people and really have an impact.”
Although some thought it would be a natural move for him in his career change, “There was nothing about entertainment law that interested me. With entertainment law, I felt I”™d be keeping one foot in and one foot out” of the business he”™d left behind.
In 2011, Biermann joined the Dorf & Nelson firm. Last May, the firm launched its employment law group headed by Biermann. The former actor had presented a business plan for the new practice group that swayed his colleagues.
“It”™s been incredibly successful,” he says. “It”™s really filled a niche in Westchester County and New York.” On with the next act.
