Cast

10-year old Betsey

Zoe came to the audition for The Fly Room and immediately commented on the milk bottle lying on the table. “Are those fruit flies?” She is a naturally curious young lady, who spends her breaks off-camera to observe the flies or make intricate drawings of microscopes and flies. She has a talent of putting on a variety of accents. She has worked with us on the short film The Fly Room and is cast for the feature.

21-year old Betsey

Mikal Evans is a musician and actress. She has worked on numerous films including Jay Roach’s Emmy award winning GAME CHANGE with Julianne Moore. Other credits include “Kisses Chloe” (Hampton’s International Film Festival” and “How We Got Away It” (Bare Bones, MaGa Fes, Soho Int Film Fest, Sonoma Film Fest). You can also see Mikal in the upcoming Hillary Brougher/Killer film “Innocence” with Kelly Reilly.

95-year old Betsey

Betsey Bridges is playing herself. Her voice will carry through parts of the film, as she comments about the relationship with her father and retells her trip to the Fly Room with her dad in 1927. Check out her interviews and photos.

Calvin Bridges

Haskell King recently played Isaac Newton in Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Production of Isaac’s Eye. He previously played James Watson in EST’s production of Photograph 51. Film credits include Brother; Pagans; Shadows & Lies (with James Franco, dir. Jay Anania); Jimmy Crane; Happy Hour (dir. Brian Devine) Cannonball Luke. Television: As the World Turns; Law and Order: Criminal Intent; Director: Truth-O-Matic (Winner, Best Commercial, GSFF); Currently a second year MFA student in the Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University.

Gertrude Ives Bridges

Andra Eggleston is a writer, director, and actress. Her recent film credits include BABY MAMA and THE LONELIEST TIME OF MY LIFE. She also starred in a documentary feature BY THE WAYS about her father William Eggleston, widely credited with increasing recognition for color photography. She will be playing Calvin’s wife, Gertrude Ives.

Alfred Sturtevant

Ben Mehl is an Alumni from the NYU Graduate Acting program with a background in physics. He will be slipping into the skin of American geneticist Alfred Sturtevant, who constructed the first genetic map of a chromosome in 1913 and was Calvin Bridges’ colleague in The Fly Room.

Hermann Muller

Thomas Hunt Morgan

Stuart Firestein is the chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where his laboratory is researching the vertebrate olfactory receptor neuron. He teaches biology and the popular “Ignorance,” a course that invites professors to speak to students about what they don’t know and what they question in their field. Firestein worked in theater for almost 20 years in San Francisco before entering academia.

Edith Wallace

Dr. Leslie Vosshall, head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior at Rockefeller University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, probes the brains and neural networks of creatures from fruit flies to Homo sapiens. She will incarnate the famous Edith Wallace, the science illustrator in The Fly Room.

Theodore Dreiser

Joseph LeDoux is a professor and a member of the Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology at NYU. His work is focused on the brain mechanisms of emotion and memory. In addition to articles in scholarly journals, he is author of “The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life” and “Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are.” LeDoux is also a singer and songwriter in the rock band, The Amygdaloids.

Arthur Clark

Henry Hopper is an actor, painter and sculptor. His film credits include Gus Van Sant’s film Restless that premiered at Un Certain Regard at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011. He was also featured as 20-year old American poet C.K. Williams in TAR, a collection of poems adapted into an omnibus film. In The Fly Room, he will be playing Betsey’s best friend and will dress up for a college surrealist party as a 30-year old Salvador Dali who is getting ready for the 1939 World Fair.