Few people remember how Maciej Orłoś started his career. “I couldn’t imagine doing anything else”

For many years Maciej Orłoś was one of the most popular journalists of Telewizja Polska. For over 25 years he ran “Teleexpress”, and after parting with the national broadcaster, he started his own journalistic activity. On YouTube, he successfully runs the “W Telegrafowym Krócie” program. Few, however, may associate that a well-known journalist began his career in a completely different field.

It was supposed to be just a “journalistic episode”

From an early age, he fulfilled himself in acting, and more specifically, he started with dubbing. In the fifth grade of primary school, he auditioned for the Warsaw Film Development Studio, during which Orłoś did very well. He spent many hours in the dubbing studio until his voice mutated. “I never went back to dubbing, even after acting school” – he said in “Wysokie Obcasy”.

He made his debut as an actor in 1975 as a young king in “Kazimierz Wielki”. It was thanks to his participation in this film that he managed to meet Ignacy Machowski, whom he met while returning from the set. The legendary actor invited the then young boy and his mother to the “Ball of mannequins” at the Ateneum Theatre. As Orłoś recalls in an interview with Interia, this event completely changed his plans for the future:

I fell in love with the theater immediately. In this situation, the theater school seemed to be a sensible solution

He has performed regularly in front of audiences ever since. Together with his school friend Hanna Śleszyńska, he often took part in various interest clubs and recitation competitions. After high school, he decided to choose a further education path at today’s Theater Academy. Aleksander Zelwerowicz in Warsaw. Orłoś got to her right away, but he quickly became convinced that acting is not as easy a profession as it might seem. He told about it in detail in an interview with the student magazine “PDF”:

I was confused, I didn’t fully realize how much demands are placed on a first-year student. I screwed up. I didn’t know, but I acted like I didn’t. (…) But we made it. I finished school, became a certified actor, got a job in the theater. I really wanted to be an actor, I believed in this profession and for many years I couldn’t imagine that I could do anything else

After graduating from the then State Higher School of Theater, he started acting in films. The first production in his adult career was Hania directed by Krzysztof Wierzbiański and Stanisław Wohl. He also decided to further hone his acting skills and studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in the United States. At the same time, he performed in his homeland at the Ateneum Theater in Warsaw.

At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, his acting career took off, and it coincided with the time when he began to try his hand at journalism. He managed to play in such films as “Deaf Telephone”, “Escape from the Wolność Cinema”, “Schindler’s List” or “Weak Faith”. On the other hand, on TV screens we could see him in such series as: “In the maze”, “Czterdziestolatek – twenty years later”, “Backpack full of adventures” or “Złotopolscy”.

After some time combining two professional passions, he came to the conclusion that the new path of development is more suitable for him, as he wrote in the student magazine “PDF”:

When my adventure with television was just gaining momentum, I had huge doubts. I was afraid that acting would escape me because of this journalistic episode. Reality showed that I was not wrong. Except that television turned out to be my main role, and acting was only an important episode

Interestingly, Maciej Orłoś, years later, approaches his acting past with more distance. In an interview for Interia in 2015, he admits that he would never become a great actor and does not regret having chosen a career as a journalist. At the same time, he still believes that acting studies were an important stage in his life:

I’ve never had it easy to evoke emotions, to open up, to externalize. And that’s what the acting workshop is all about – the instrument was me, my body, my body, my feelings

However, he never gave up acting completely. He managed to appear in several productions after 2000, in which he usually played journalists or TV announcers. These are movies such as: “Hacker”, “Missing”, “It’s not what you think baby”, “Postcards from the Republic of Absurd”, or “Pitbull: The Last Dog”. In 2018, he even returned to dubbing for a moment. He provided the voice of Chad Brentley in The Incredibles 2.

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