East versus West

With these torture-some years behind her, Clare had her sights set on what was really important to her and knew exactly what needed to be done to reach her target and where she needed to go. "When I graduated high school, I knew I wanted to get into the arts and where as a lot of people I think dream of going to Hollywood and California, I was dreaming of going to New York," Clare replied when asked what her next move was, "so I applied to NYU and thankfully I got in and went to college there and studied a double major with theatre and psychology. I graduated a year early from college and then was just like auditioning for everything I could, you know, commercials and plays and I remember when I got my equity card, they had open calls and I would stand in the line and wait for my turn to do my two minute monologue and just kind of anything that came along I would audition for. After a couple of years, I got a screen test in LA, got flown out to LA and didn’t get the job but decided to stay there for a week and got another job and subsequently had a few more jobs follow that and decided that OK maybe I should move here as things seem to be going pretty well for me in California.”

Clare's decision to initially choose New York over Los Angeles to pursue her ambition is indicative of her ability to see things from the inside out. Natural instinct would suggest that Hollywood would be the destination that attracts aspiring young actresses as many have sought the bright lights of the City of Angels to seek their fortune. Although ultimately Los Angeles is indeed where Clare was to lay her professional roots, she needed something more before taking that step. She needed to learn how to hone her craft and that is what she found on the East coast. "With New York, I wanted education. I wanted to know the art behind it, I didn't want to just jump in and do something, and I wanted to study theatre," Clare tells us, "NYU has one of the top five theatre programs in the country and so that's what I wanted to study and once I started learning about Chekhov and Shakespeare and Ibsen and even current playwrights like David Mamet and Sam Shepard, that's when I really developed a true passion for the art. I think it's hard to find like the passion for acting and the art of acting if you don’t know the background of that art so for me it was more about studying, and studying the different methods, studying Stanislavsky and then what branched off of him, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Lee Strasberg and then studying Lee Strasberg's methods of acting and really for years getting a good grasp on that and that process was what attracted me to New York. I didn't think that that could be done as well in LA but I was only 17 when I made that decision so I could be wrong and you could probably get a great education in LA but to me there was something about the East coast that is somewhat of a different mentality when it comes to the arts and that's what I wanted to immerse myself in."

Although acting is what eventually seduced Clare, a career in the arts at first did not necessarily mean a career treading the boards. Like other actresses of the Whedonverse such as Angel's Fred/Illyria hybrid Amy Acker or Firefly's River Tam aka Summer Glau, Clare at first dreamt the little girl's dream of gracing the theatres as a ballerina. " I loved dancing," Clare admits, "and when I was applying for school I had to make that decision, do I want to dance or do I want to act or do I want to do neither and go on to do like literature or something. It was giving up the dancing that was pretty hard for me because I loved ballet, I mean I loved tap and jazz but ballet was my thing and I just decided you know what my body is not going to be able to have a prolonged career in dance you know I like eating and dance is a very, very difficult career and I just decided I had more passion for acting at that point. I think that I'd been dancing for so long, I danced growing up that it was time for me to branch out and like I said when I started NYU and started studying Strasberg and started learning about the history of acting, that's when I really fell in love with it."