Catching up with the Multi-Faceted Miss USA from Methuen. ( Editor’s Note: Visit mvm’s facebook page for more Susie Castillo photos. )
Mention Susie Castillo to someone who’s lived in the Merrimack Valley for a while, then watch their face closely for the ping of recognition. Maybe they know it right off, as that Methuen girl – or was it Lawrence? – who won Miss USA back in, like, 2003. Or was it ’04? No, definitely ’03. If they’re under a certain age, there’s a good chance they know her as a former VJ from MTV’s “Total Request Live” (for those over that certain age, a VJ is a video jockey, and the show is what your kid used to call “TRL”). Or maybe they just feel it clanging around their brain’s pop culture storage locker – susiecastillosusiecastillosusiecastillo – as a How-Do-I-Know-That-Name? with an asterisk for local relevance.
But if you really want to amuse yourself, ask what she’s doing right now. You could get any one of a dozen answers, and they all might be right. You also might get a blank stare. Because Susie Castillo has pulled off a fascinating post-Miss USA show business trick, simultaneously becoming less famous – remember that basically the whole country knew her for a heartbeat six years ago – but more successful. Quite a bit more, actually; the girl from Tenney Street (it was Methuen; the family move to Lawrence came after high school) is earning a living in L.A., and she ain’t coming back.
There has been a parade of hosting gigs for reality shows or TV specials. There were guest appearances in a few sitcoms, and now a recurring role in one very successful one. She scored a couple of small movie parts, one in a Disney summer flick. There are two national endorsement deals. Last year came a book. Speaking requests are steady. And, just for fun, there’s the weekly radio show.
But if you had to sit down and make it all fit comfortably on a few magazine pages, you might have trouble seeing the sum of the parts, wonder what type of pie all those slices add up to. You might logically hope talking about it with Susie will help. You would be disappointed. Because while she’s friendly and articulate and patient and answers every question no matter how dopey, that just leads to a whole other list of things she’s chasing, working on, auditioning for, negotiating or dreaming up. It’s all just out of view, percolating at the edges of the official resumé.
So we’re left trying to build a profile on someone who is part actress/part “television personality;” part author/part motivational speaker; part ex-beauty queen/part product pitch lady; part medium-sized celebrity/part aspiring major celebrity; part local girl and wife/part rampaging business woman.
Fortunately, in 2009 there’s a place to go to make sense of a person like that. It’s the only place, really: the Internet. And not only can we go there, we can see what everyone else was looking for re: Susie Castillo. Punch her name in to the search engine, you get that convenient little list of suggestions, based (allegedly) on all Susie-related searches everywhere and offered in order of popularity. We’re not above giving the people what they want. So here then, stopping only at the really important stuff, is Susie, suggested.
Susie Castillo – Miss USA:
Yes, it’s first. While she argues at one point that “most people nowadays remember me from being a VJ on MTV,” those people apparently aren’t doing the Web searches. But if it sounds like a part of her clearly wants to move on to being known for other things – and it does – the rest of her knows the deal. Turning 30 next October might make it seem like a lifetime ago, but it’s not going anywhere. “Miss USA is always going to be on my bio,” she says. “It’s the reason why I’m here and doing so well. I owe it everything, really.”
It’s what first let people fall in love with both the girl and the story (she’s had to tell it many, many times along the way: abusive, philandering, all-around son-of-a-bitch dad abandons family when she’s 6; mom, with help of grandmother, manages to support and raise three daughters in gang- and drug-afflicted neighborhood).
It’s also a reminder to the rest of us, as we watch her grind her way through an industry that has chewed up and spit out too many pretty faces to count, that she’s not just winging it. Because this whole thing wasn’t pure luck. “My plan, always, from the time I was 10 or 11 years old, was to work in the entertainment industry,” she says. “I wanted to model, to host – I wanted to be on TV. I didn’t know how it was going to happen.”
Winning Miss Massachusetts Teen USA was a start, and as she entered her college years there still didn’t seem to be a better ticket out west. “One thing I didn’t want to do was move across the country without knowing anybody and no connections. Maybe sometimes that works out; I can tell you most of the time it does not. I wanted to have a leg up on all those people.”
So while getting her interior architecture and design degree at Endicott College in Beverly, she would go to the library and research the Miss USA vs. Miss America question. It wasn’t hard to figure out that if exposure and marketing are what you’re after, you want the one owned by Donald Trump. Then it was figuring out how to win, and not minding people laughing as she spent the better part of a year watching pageant videos to analyze what separated the winners and losers.
“This was an opportunity I saw, a way to get from Point A to Point B,” she says. “I never wanted to be a pageant girl or a beauty queen or whatever you want to call me. But once I decided to do it, I did my research and did my homework to put my best foot forward.” Well, that foot is attached to one of two impressive legs, which are carrying around a torso with its own series of impressive attributes, all of which is topped off by a really lovely head, which in turn contains a pretty good brain. So the longest of long shot career plans worked.
She won, served her year, and from there came MTV and the rest of it. Last year that sash was still putting food on the table, in the form of Confidence is Queen: The Four Keys to Ultimate Beauty through Positive Thinking, which obviously leans on the landing of the 2003 tiara for a good deal of its authority (might as well acknowledge that beauty queen-gets-book deal is an easy target for some cynical, sarcastic types, but are those people published by Penguin? No, so they should shut up).
The bottom line on Susie Castillo and Miss USA is this: don’t derisively dismiss it, and don’t romanticize it. Respect it for what it was – a professional calculation held up by real work.
Susie Castillo – Charlotte Russe:
If you didn’t know VJ or “TRL,” then there’s a good chance Charlotte Russe doesn’t mean much to you, either. But according to their first-ever brand ambassador, Susie Castillo, it’s a retail chain with 400 stores nationwide, selling clothing, jewelry and accessories to mostly young women.
It’s also part of the path to turning Susie Castillo into something more, the name itself into a product. She has always been quick to name Jennifer Lopez – the acting, singing, clothes-designing, perfume-peddling business success J-Lo; not the tabloid-selling drama factory J-Lo – as a personal inspiration. “My goal is to have my own clothing line sold exclusively at Charlotte Russe,” she says. “I absolutely want to brand my name. I want to do all different things.”
Neutrogena continues to use her face to sell skin and hair care products, and considering the ever-expanding stable of Neutrogena girls (Jennifer Garner, Hayden Panettiere, Jennifer Love Hewitt, among many others) that’s a good sign.
Actually, almost any sign is a good sign in the celebrity business, where exposure, proven marketability and a relatively painless paycheck are gold. “It’s all of those things,” says Castillo. “If you’re an actor, a host, whatever your career is, if you get an endorsement deal, that’s where you want to be.”
Photos by Lara Woolfson
Susie Castillo – Superstars of Dance:
This was her most recent hosting job, side-kicking that “Lord of the Dance” guy Michael Flatley on NBC’s primetime international team dance-off last year. Castillo doesn’t seem optimistic about a season two, but it’s not a crushing blow when you realize how completely the genre has embraced her. Seems safe there’ll be more reality TV work where that came from. Along with “TRL,” there was “America’s Prom Queen” (on ABC), “The Swan” (Fox; technically, she was a judge on that one), the 2005 Miss Teen USA pageant (NBC) and a slew of random things like “Real World” reunions, “Inside the Action” movie specials (both MTV), and The World Series of Video Games (CBS).
Maybe there’s nothing groundbreaking there, but in case you’re not counting, that’s facetime on all four major networks and then some. It’s steady work in a field where that’s absurdly tough to come by, and it’s the thing that most safely moves her beyond the realm of recovering beauty queens doing desperate things for headlines or cash.
“At this point in hosting I don’t even have to audition,” she says, adding that her day job these days is trying to develop a couple host-reliant reality shows of her own creation. Presumably she won’t have to audition for those, either. But it’s the other, more meager side of her Internet Movie Database profile (susie castillo imdb pops up right above “Superstars” on your suggested searches, if you want a peek) that seems to get her pulse up. Over several conversations, acting was the one topic that seemed to get her genuinely excited. That may be because it’s a bigger leap. “Hosting, it’s just you, your personality – hosting’s definitely easier,” she says. “Acting is something you’re always learning.”
She’s learned it takes a while. She started with single-episode spots on sitcoms “My Wife and Kids” and “Half & Half” the year after Miss USA; then it wasn’t until 2007 that she got on the big screen with a small part as a television reporter in Disney’s “Underdog.” Last year brought the best chance so far – the recurring role of neighbor Mercedes Hernandez on “Tyler Perry’s House of Payne.” It’s a cable sitcom with a rabid, loyal audience, and TBS can’t run new episodes of it fast enough.
Two more seasons have been ordered, and Castillo just recently got word that Mercedes will be back, which is particularly welcome news since comedy and sitcoms are where she really wants to go. She’s also waiting to see what happens with “The Heartbreaker,” an independent movie in which she has another small part and is now in the mysterious world of postproduction. In the meantime, there is the endless corridor of auditions, callbacks, maybes and rejections on the way the occasional, glorious yes. “It’s all about perseverance,” she says, sounding like someone who wrote a book on the topic. “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I will be acting until I am old and gray.”
Susie Castillo – Maxim:
We won’t linger here because it wouldn’t be classy, but we’ll find a way to make it relevant in order to justify it in our browser history. How about this – the girl takes a nice picture. An obvious point to make about a beauty queen, model and actress, to be sure, but the key here is that she pulls off every kind of picture. She’s no classic American beauty – intimidating jaw, exploding curls; too many features are too interesting – but the whole package is highly appealing and easily customized.
She can be the girl next door for the cover of Confidence is Queen or she can be whatever the opposite of that is for Maxim, which is purchased by men with little to no interest in a woman’s confidence. And you’re crazy if you think that’s not an important skill for someone trying to sell herself in half a dozen different celebrity mediums. If you can put on a bikini for a 100 Hottest list in a men’s magazine without forfeiting any of that wholesome role model vibe for the girls you’re selling clothes to, a lot of doors should stay open.
Now stop staring.
Susie Castillo – Husband:
No idea what algorithms Google is using to put this on the list, but it gives us a chance to express hope for a local girl’s east-coast, blue-collar roots. There’s no doubt the battle for her heart is lost to Hollywood – surrender formally declared with the arrival of two pet Chihuahuas – but at least part of her soul seems to safely belong back here.
In 2006 she married her college boyfriend, Ipswich native Matthew Leslie, who owns a Web-design firm with a partner who still operates in Boston. They come back when they can to visit both families. They like to go to the movies. They fend off nosy questions about when babies will get here (“My answer,” she says, “is always that it’s not something we want at the moment. Maybe someday that’ll change.”). They Twitter about everyday silliness.
That’s not to say it’s a typical domestic arrangement – he proposed live on Ryan Seacrest’s TV show, their wedding was written up in People, and red carpet appearances aren’t unusual – but all things considered it seems pretty normal. It’s part of the reason she comes off as what we’d call grounded. She returns messages herself and calls when she says she will, every time, even if it’s to say she has to move the interview because she completely forgot she’s got acting class.
Sure, she has bigger and better always on her mind. But it doesn’t sound like never breaking free from the Hollywood peloton of would-be stars, never getting her J-Lo moment, would break her. She’s still part Tenney Street and cold gray winter and Methuen High. She’s already playing with house money, and she knows it. “I’m really happy, I’m out here living my dream, and I feel so lucky to be able to say that,” she says, sounding a little like a pageant contestant again, only more like she means it. “The trick is to continue working hard, continue improving on where I am as a human being and my career, over time, can only get better. I love where I am now. From here I can only continue to move onward and upward.”
Susie Castillo – Future:
If only. But we’ve seen enough already to like her chances.
Susie Castillo – Cover Feature, September / October 2009
Catching up with the Multi-Faceted Miss USA from Methuen.
( Editor’s Note: Visit mvm’s facebook page for more Susie Castillo photos. )
Mention Susie Castillo to someone who’s lived in the Merrimack Valley for a while, then watch their face closely for the ping of recognition. Maybe they know it right off, as that Methuen girl – or was it Lawrence? – who won Miss USA back in, like, 2003. Or was it ’04? No, definitely ’03. If they’re under a certain age, there’s a good chance they know her as a former VJ from MTV’s “Total Request Live” (for those over that certain age, a VJ is a video jockey, and the show is what your kid used to call “TRL”). Or maybe they just feel it clanging around their brain’s pop culture storage locker – susiecastillosusiecastillosusiecastillo – as a How-Do-I-Know-That-Name? with an asterisk for local relevance.
But if you really want to amuse yourself, ask what she’s doing right now. You could get any one of a dozen answers, and they all might be right. You also might get a blank stare. Because Susie Castillo has pulled off a fascinating post-Miss USA show business trick, simultaneously becoming less famous – remember that basically the whole country knew her for a heartbeat six years ago – but more successful. Quite a bit more, actually; the girl from Tenney Street (it was Methuen; the family move to Lawrence came after high school) is earning a living in L.A., and she ain’t coming back.
There has been a parade of hosting gigs for reality shows or TV specials. There were guest appearances in a few sitcoms, and now a recurring role in one very successful one. She scored a couple of small movie parts, one in a Disney summer flick. There are two national endorsement deals. Last year came a book. Speaking requests are steady. And, just for fun, there’s the weekly radio show.
But if you had to sit down and make it all fit comfortably on a few magazine pages, you might have trouble seeing the sum of the parts, wonder what type of pie all those slices add up to. You might logically hope talking about it with Susie will help. You would be disappointed. Because while she’s friendly and articulate and patient and answers every question no matter how dopey, that just leads to a whole other list of things she’s chasing, working on, auditioning for, negotiating or dreaming up. It’s all just out of view, percolating at the edges of the official resumé.
So we’re left trying to build a profile on someone who is part actress/part “television personality;” part author/part motivational speaker; part ex-beauty queen/part product pitch lady; part medium-sized celebrity/part aspiring major celebrity; part local girl and wife/part rampaging business woman.
Fortunately, in 2009 there’s a place to go to make sense of a person like that. It’s the only place, really: the Internet. And not only can we go there, we can see what everyone else was looking for re: Susie Castillo. Punch her name in to the search engine, you get that convenient little list of suggestions, based (allegedly) on all Susie-related searches everywhere and offered in order of popularity. We’re not above giving the people what they want. So here then, stopping only at the really important stuff, is Susie, suggested.
Susie Castillo – Miss USA:
Yes, it’s first. While she argues at one point that “most people nowadays remember me from being a VJ on MTV,” those people apparently aren’t doing the Web searches. But if it sounds like a part of her clearly wants to move on to being known for other things – and it does – the rest of her knows the deal. Turning 30 next October might make it seem like a lifetime ago, but it’s not going anywhere. “Miss USA is always going to be on my bio,” she says. “It’s the reason why I’m here and doing so well. I owe it everything, really.”
It’s what first let people fall in love with both the girl and the story (she’s had to tell it many, many times along the way: abusive, philandering, all-around son-of-a-bitch dad abandons family when she’s 6; mom, with help of grandmother, manages to support and raise three daughters in gang- and drug-afflicted neighborhood).
It’s also a reminder to the rest of us, as we watch her grind her way through an industry that has chewed up and spit out too many pretty faces to count, that she’s not just winging it. Because this whole thing wasn’t pure luck. “My plan, always, from the time I was 10 or 11 years old, was to work in the entertainment industry,” she says. “I wanted to model, to host – I wanted to be on TV. I didn’t know how it was going to happen.”
Winning Miss Massachusetts Teen USA was a start, and as she entered her college years there still didn’t seem to be a better ticket out west. “One thing I didn’t want to do was move across the country without knowing anybody and no connections. Maybe sometimes that works out; I can tell you most of the time it does not. I wanted to have a leg up on all those people.”
So while getting her interior architecture and design degree at Endicott College in Beverly, she would go to the library and research the Miss USA vs. Miss America question. It wasn’t hard to figure out that if exposure and marketing are what you’re after, you want the one owned by Donald Trump. Then it was figuring out how to win, and not minding people laughing as she spent the better part of a year watching pageant videos to analyze what separated the winners and losers.
“This was an opportunity I saw, a way to get from Point A to Point B,” she says. “I never wanted to be a pageant girl or a beauty queen or whatever you want to call me. But once I decided to do it, I did my research and did my homework to put my best foot forward.” Well, that foot is attached to one of two impressive legs, which are carrying around a torso with its own series of impressive attributes, all of which is topped off by a really lovely head, which in turn contains a pretty good brain. So the longest of long shot career plans worked.
She won, served her year, and from there came MTV and the rest of it. Last year that sash was still putting food on the table, in the form of Confidence is Queen: The Four Keys to Ultimate Beauty through Positive Thinking, which obviously leans on the landing of the 2003 tiara for a good deal of its authority (might as well acknowledge that beauty queen-gets-book deal is an easy target for some cynical, sarcastic types, but are those people published by Penguin? No, so they should shut up).
The bottom line on Susie Castillo and Miss USA is this: don’t derisively dismiss it, and don’t romanticize it. Respect it for what it was – a professional calculation held up by real work.
Susie Castillo – Charlotte Russe:
If you didn’t know VJ or “TRL,” then there’s a good chance Charlotte Russe doesn’t mean much to you, either. But according to their first-ever brand ambassador, Susie Castillo, it’s a retail chain with 400 stores nationwide, selling clothing, jewelry and accessories to mostly young women.
It’s also part of the path to turning Susie Castillo into something more, the name itself into a product. She has always been quick to name Jennifer Lopez – the acting, singing, clothes-designing, perfume-peddling business success J-Lo; not the tabloid-selling drama factory J-Lo – as a personal inspiration. “My goal is to have my own clothing line sold exclusively at Charlotte Russe,” she says. “I absolutely want to brand my name. I want to do all different things.”
Neutrogena continues to use her face to sell skin and hair care products, and considering the ever-expanding stable of Neutrogena girls (Jennifer Garner, Hayden Panettiere, Jennifer Love Hewitt, among many others) that’s a good sign.
Actually, almost any sign is a good sign in the celebrity business, where exposure, proven marketability and a relatively painless paycheck are gold. “It’s all of those things,” says Castillo. “If you’re an actor, a host, whatever your career is, if you get an endorsement deal, that’s where you want to be.”
Photos by Lara Woolfson
Susie Castillo – Superstars of Dance:
This was her most recent hosting job, side-kicking that “Lord of the Dance” guy Michael Flatley on NBC’s primetime international team dance-off last year. Castillo doesn’t seem optimistic about a season two, but it’s not a crushing blow when you realize how completely the genre has embraced her. Seems safe there’ll be more reality TV work where that came from. Along with “TRL,” there was “America’s Prom Queen” (on ABC), “The Swan” (Fox; technically, she was a judge on that one), the 2005 Miss Teen USA pageant (NBC) and a slew of random things like “Real World” reunions, “Inside the Action” movie specials (both MTV), and The World Series of Video Games (CBS).
Maybe there’s nothing groundbreaking there, but in case you’re not counting, that’s facetime on all four major networks and then some. It’s steady work in a field where that’s absurdly tough to come by, and it’s the thing that most safely moves her beyond the realm of recovering beauty queens doing desperate things for headlines or cash.
“At this point in hosting I don’t even have to audition,” she says, adding that her day job these days is trying to develop a couple host-reliant reality shows of her own creation. Presumably she won’t have to audition for those, either. But it’s the other, more meager side of her Internet Movie Database profile (susie castillo imdb pops up right above “Superstars” on your suggested searches, if you want a peek) that seems to get her pulse up. Over several conversations, acting was the one topic that seemed to get her genuinely excited. That may be because it’s a bigger leap. “Hosting, it’s just you, your personality – hosting’s definitely easier,” she says. “Acting is something you’re always learning.”
She’s learned it takes a while. She started with single-episode spots on sitcoms “My Wife and Kids” and “Half & Half” the year after Miss USA; then it wasn’t until 2007 that she got on the big screen with a small part as a television reporter in Disney’s “Underdog.” Last year brought the best chance so far – the recurring role of neighbor Mercedes Hernandez on “Tyler Perry’s House of Payne.” It’s a cable sitcom with a rabid, loyal audience, and TBS can’t run new episodes of it fast enough.
Two more seasons have been ordered, and Castillo just recently got word that Mercedes will be back, which is particularly welcome news since comedy and sitcoms are where she really wants to go. She’s also waiting to see what happens with “The Heartbreaker,” an independent movie in which she has another small part and is now in the mysterious world of postproduction. In the meantime, there is the endless corridor of auditions, callbacks, maybes and rejections on the way the occasional, glorious yes. “It’s all about perseverance,” she says, sounding like someone who wrote a book on the topic. “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I will be acting until I am old and gray.”
Susie Castillo – Maxim:
We won’t linger here because it wouldn’t be classy, but we’ll find a way to make it relevant in order to justify it in our browser history. How about this – the girl takes a nice picture. An obvious point to make about a beauty queen, model and actress, to be sure, but the key here is that she pulls off every kind of picture. She’s no classic American beauty – intimidating jaw, exploding curls; too many features are too interesting – but the whole package is highly appealing and easily customized.
She can be the girl next door for the cover of Confidence is Queen or she can be whatever the opposite of that is for Maxim, which is purchased by men with little to no interest in a woman’s confidence. And you’re crazy if you think that’s not an important skill for someone trying to sell herself in half a dozen different celebrity mediums. If you can put on a bikini for a 100 Hottest list in a men’s magazine without forfeiting any of that wholesome role model vibe for the girls you’re selling clothes to, a lot of doors should stay open.
Now stop staring.
Susie Castillo – Husband:
No idea what algorithms Google is using to put this on the list, but it gives us a chance to express hope for a local girl’s east-coast, blue-collar roots. There’s no doubt the battle for her heart is lost to Hollywood – surrender formally declared with the arrival of two pet Chihuahuas – but at least part of her soul seems to safely belong back here.
In 2006 she married her college boyfriend, Ipswich native Matthew Leslie, who owns a Web-design firm with a partner who still operates in Boston. They come back when they can to visit both families. They like to go to the movies. They fend off nosy questions about when babies will get here (“My answer,” she says, “is always that it’s not something we want at the moment. Maybe someday that’ll change.”). They Twitter about everyday silliness.
That’s not to say it’s a typical domestic arrangement – he proposed live on Ryan Seacrest’s TV show, their wedding was written up in People, and red carpet appearances aren’t unusual – but all things considered it seems pretty normal. It’s part of the reason she comes off as what we’d call grounded. She returns messages herself and calls when she says she will, every time, even if it’s to say she has to move the interview because she completely forgot she’s got acting class.
Sure, she has bigger and better always on her mind. But it doesn’t sound like never breaking free from the Hollywood peloton of would-be stars, never getting her J-Lo moment, would break her. She’s still part Tenney Street and cold gray winter and Methuen High. She’s already playing with house money, and she knows it. “I’m really happy, I’m out here living my dream, and I feel so lucky to be able to say that,” she says, sounding a little like a pageant contestant again, only more like she means it. “The trick is to continue working hard, continue improving on where I am as a human being and my career, over time, can only get better. I love where I am now. From here I can only continue to move onward and upward.”
Susie Castillo – Future:
If only. But we’ve seen enough already to like her chances.