Culture

Actor/Filmmaker and unlikely CEO Andres Faucher aims to forge creative alliances with MyTeeVee.tv

In 2003, actor/director/entrepreneur/thrill-seeker Andres Faucher found himself face-to-face in a restaurant with the leader of a guerilla group in Caracas, Venezuela—one of the world’s most dangerous cities. These days, the chameleonic character actor is most recognized for his scene-stealing role as the suave gay male nurse who ushers Pete Campbell’s mom around town (and possibly to her death) in Mad Men, and he’s poised to gain even more notoriety for his improvisation-heavy role opposite Christian Bale as an investment banker in American Hustle. But back then, Faucher was simply known as a documentary filmmaker in town for post-production, who the militant decided would make the perfect propagandist. “‘You make documentaries,’” Faucher recalls him saying. “‘You come with me.’”

"I don’t know if it’s something in me or if it’s just the age in which we live in now. I have a lot of ideas, and I get frustrated by just one outlet."

The Venezuelan-born, Washington D.C.-reared Faucher, 44, leans in closely, his blue eyes glimmering with excitement. Although he’s a former college rugby player—and looks it—his manners are graceful, his voice often hushed. Escorted by the leader, he met with members of a political faction in a nearby slum. Upon arrival, “people wearing hoods on their heads tapped on the glass of the car with AK-47s,” he says. Faucher explained to them that Symphony, his documentary, was actually a feel-good movie about South American kids surmounting adversity by playing classical music. As testament to his natural charisma—and, it goes without saying, his cajones—he was, miraculously, let off the hook. He giggles, while kicking back in his family’s swanky, art-laden Upper East Side apartment, jaunty Latin music wafting in the background. “I don’t know if I thought I was going to die….”

The medium he risked his life for back then is, not surprisingly, the one he champions the most now. “I couldn’t figure out how to just be an actor,” says Faucher, who also co-founded New York City’s Lobo Theatre Group in 2001, after graduating with an MFA from The New School. (His acting influences are intriguingly gender-neutral. He cites performances from Gérard Depardieu and Tilda Swinton alike as inspirations.) “I don’t know if it’s something in me or if it’s just the age in which we live in now. I have a lot of ideas, and I get frustrated by just one outlet.” So he moved to Los Angeles and last year launched MyTeeVee.tv, a free social network where filmmakers can post their projects and get constructive criticism from their peers.

Andres FaucherAndres Faucher in his family’s Manhattan apartment.

“The whole point is to create creative allegiances that are not bound to geographic or economic boundaries,” Faucher says of the site’s genesis, adding that there is a fertile market out there: “There are 100 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.” Still, what makes MyTeeVee.tv unique is how it expands on the culture of DIY video-uploads pioneered by fellow actors such as Will Ferrell (Funny or Die) and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (hitRECord). With it, Faucher and his longtime friend, theater-vet Kevin Allen Jackson, have actually manifested a creative ecosystem.

MyTeeVee.tv’s anthology Web-series Match sources the site’s talent for its producers, directors and the like. The more hits a video gets, the more money it makes—and a chunk of that profit goes back into hiring more user-talent for additional content. Funded on a bank loan, MyTeeVee.tv boasts nearly 25 million fans, followers, viewers and members who reside in more than 70 countries and counts Sony and Panavision among its no-strings-attached sponsors. Faucher is its unlikely CEO.

Faucher’s whirl of business acumen, lust for life and admirable multitasking skills was forged in his genes. His mother is a highly respected world economist who brought him to America at age eight, after divorcing his father. Just before Faucher enrolled as a poli-sci major in New York’s Mount St. Mary College—where the slacker undergrad first took an acting class for an easy grade—he decided to reconnect with his dad, Bernard Faucher. “He is the Most Interesting Man in the World,” the actor enthuses. “He started a commune in the mountains of Venezuela—Timothy Leary went through there back in the day. He ran Jacques Chirac’s mayoral campaign in Paris. He married Margaux Hemingway.” 

He was also an internationally reknown creative director at a few Venezuelan ad agencies—part of a generation of “Latin American men who acquired a certain continental behavior to them” and informed his Mad Men performance as the hyper-refined Manolo Colón. “I’m imbued with it, too,” Faucher says, of that cultural wanderlust. “I’m a pilot. I ride motorcycles. It’s just in my blood.”

His impulsive curiosity explains how he can be both a bon vivant and a CEO. “I was an actor at an age where I should have had a much longer résumé,” Faucher explains. “In my case, I had to try everything. And now that I’ve done everything, I’m free to be who I am. I learned by doing it.”