Michael Angarano Credits His Film Sacramento For Giving Him His Family

We all know him as Will Stronghold from Sky High, but Michael Angarano is proving to be more than just an actor on set. After 10 years in the making, his second directorial feature Sacramento premiered at this year’s Tribeca Festival.

Led by Angarano, the flighty and unpredictable Ricky forces his reluctant and reclusive best friend Glenn (Michael Cera) on a road trip. In the worn yellow seats of Glenn’s old college car, the two men reckon with the mistakes of their past and the questions lurking in their future, all on the open road to Sacramento. 

What started as an idea for a story of two friends on a road trip ended up changing the entire trajectory of Angarano’s life. The film features Angarano’s now wife Maya Erskine and he credits this very film for the two of them meeting, marrying, and having a son together, with a daughter now on the way. “I can’t put it into words how personal this film is for me.” Angarano told me. “I met my wife because of this movie. If it wasn’t for this movie, I might not have had my son. This movie changed my life in so many ways, and aside from that, it was an amazing experience making this movie.”

Alongside Angarano, WWE wrestler AJ Mendez moves from the ring to the screen as she plays an ex-fighter in the film. While there are a plethora of transferrable skills from WWE to transition into acting, such as “performing, understanding what an audience will react to in real time, and being able to switch performances,” those same skills forced Mendez to "start from the bottom and figure it out” as she told me that acting is a “completely different animal” when it came to her role in Sacramento. “Not having an immediate reaction and not knowing if something worked” was the biggest hurdle in Mendez’s transition to acting on screen.

We’ve seen plenty of wrestlers such as Dwayne Johnson and John Cena build successful acting careers for themselves outside of the ring. Mendez echoed this sentiment, saying, “I think every single wrestler has the skills to be a writer, actor, producer. [WWE] really is the breeding ground for a lot of skills.” There’s certainly something to be said of those who start their careers in the ring as Mendez was a natural on screen.

Sacramento has formally been picked up by Vertical, but a release date has yet to be set.