ESPN knows Liz, but Hollywood knows TJ

By Norm Wheeler
Sun editor
You know that kid from down around Empire who’s a smart, strapping, good-looking super-athlete who’s on TV all the time? You’re thinking Liz Shimek? Well, yeah, but I’m talkin’ about the OTHER Shimek, TJ, the one who’s been to Hollywood. He’s not just on TV, he’s in movies, too.
The acting bug bit Thomas James Shimek in tenth grade when he got a part in the annual Glen Lake High School spring musical. “I just loved it!” says TJ. His junior year TJ landed the meaty part of Nicely Nicely Johnson in Guys & Dolls, then as a senior he played the lead role of Adam Pontipee in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. At Aquinas College he didn’t get into the musicals, but he continued to indulge his love of acting. There TJ was the lead in Elephant Man, and he played Rosencrantz in Rosencrantz And Gildenstern Are Dead.

Like his sister Liz after him, TJ also took his prodigious athletic skill with him to college. As a member of Glen Lake’s State Championship Track & Field team of 2000, his senior year, TJ came in second in the state in the shot put and seventh in the discuss. When he graduated from Aquinas College in 2004, TJ was a five-time All American in the shot put and the hammer throw and was NAIA third in the nation in the hammer throw as a senior. “The college shot is 16 lbs,” TJ explains, “and the hammer is 3 feet long and also weighs 16 lbs. I also did the indoor weight throw where you hurl a 16 cm, 35 lb. ball so it doesn’t go so far.” Now TJ’s athletic pursuits include playing softball in Cedar and basketball either at the YMCA in Traverse City or at Town Hall Ball in Glen Arbor, as well as plenty of golf.
So how did TJ get to Hollywood? “I decided after college graduation last summer that I was young and nothing was holding me back,” TJ explains, “so I headed west.” He left town September 6 “as a tourist” and visited Steamboat Springs, Lake Tahoe, then proceeded on to Sacramento and San Francisco. “Then I hit all the beaches of California down the Pacific Coast Highway until I got to San Diego.” He returned to Los Angeles to try his luck at acting. “First I lived for a month and a half in a hostel in Venice Beach above Britney Spear’s dad’s smoothie shop.”
TJ had no connections in California, so he picked up the LA Express, “a newspaper with an entire section devoted to acting jobs.” He started calling numbers in the “Male Actors needed” ads and was called in to interviews. “They just wanted my money,” TJ admits, “they promised to make me a portfolio but they ripped me off.” Finally he got in touch with one good agency and ended up sitting in the audience of the Steve Harvey Big Time Show on the WB. “They paid me $54 to sit and cheer for about 4 hours. While I was there I asked around. “Where do I go?’”
Then TJ learned “the biggest casting agency in the US is Central Casting in Burbank. For $20 they took my picture and had me fill out a detailed resume of all my physical attributes: eye and hair color, height and weight, whether I had tattoos, what sports experiences I had, whether I could water ski, everything.” This led to a job on an Asian TV show called Love in Harvard for three weeks. “I worked 18 – 20 hours a day for $90 a day. One day we worked 27 hours straight!”
So TJ Shimek got into the habit of calling the Central Casting Hotline every day. “You listen to what TV needs they have that fit you for the following day. Often you get turned down when you call – they already got somebody – but I kept at it.” Soon TJ found himself working five or six days a week as an extra in TV and movies, and his list of shows is right out of the entertainment rags you see by the check-out counter. Here’s the Hollywood resume of what TJ did. Television: CSI-New York (circus-goer); Alias (hotel guest): Las Vegas (five times as a casino patron); Crossing Jordan (security guard); Seventh Heaven (pizza parlor patron); HBO Entourage & Six Feet Under (office employee); Listen Up with Jason Alexander (construction worker, met Jason); Complete Savages (a gay pride parade participant); Dante, TV pilot (“they took me to the Anaheim Angels locker room where I was the quarterback made to look naked but wearing rolled up boxers. Watch for that in the fall!”); My Name is Earl, TV pilot (“I danced for hours as a gay bar customer.”) Movies: Jim Carey’s Fun With Dick & Jane (bank customer); Speilberg’s War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise (”a bunch of us banged on Tom Cruise’s car tryin’ to get him to stop ‘cause he had the last working car in the world”); Bewitched with Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell (TV audience member); Forty Year Old Virgin with Steve Carrell from Anchorman (a dancer in a bar scene); Kicking and Screaming with Will Ferrell (“I met Will and taught him how to throw the hammer. Then they did three takes with four different cameras of me throwing the hammer. I was supposed to be featured, but then they cut out the scene!); Dying for Dolly with Usher (bouncer); Single White Female 2 (bouncer); American Pie 4 (a Julliard Music School trombone player). TJ also was in two commercials, one a Macdonald’s Super Bowl commercial, and the other a match.com dating service commercial.
You’re probably wondering how much money TJ made in front of all those cameras while his little sister Liz was bouncing leather in basketball arenas all last winter. “You get California minimum wage, $6.75/hr,” TJ explains. “You get a minimum of $54 dollars up to an eight hour day, and they are required to provide one warm full course meal, not just burgers and fries, for every six hours you work. (There’s also a meal penalty of $6.75 for every 15 minutes over the six hours.) Over eight hours is time-and-a half, and over ten hours is double time.” For the seven months he was in Hollywood TJ made just enough to live and to keep gas in his pickup truck. “My food expenses were few because they fed us.” He rented a room, “basically just a queen sized bed,” for $500 a month from a lady who was paying $1100 a month for a tiny 20’ by 30’ house. “It was at Franklin and Gower, and if you looked down my street you could see the famous “Hollywood” sign just above my house,” TJ laughs.
Did he make any friends, or get to know any celebrities? “You saw so many people over and over again on the set,” TJ says, “but the people there were just all about themselves. The only friendly people I met were from the Midwest, but there was not much free time. I was working all the time or tired.”
Sister Liz Shimek is determined to go back to the NCAA Championship game with the Michigan State Spartans, but TJ has no plans to go back to Hollywood. “I just got a job with SBC Ameritech out of Traverse City doing advertising and sales for their yellow pages book,” he concludes. After eight weeks of training in Troy that commences next week, TJ will be back around here “catching Liz’s games, starting a real life.” So TJ Shimek had a pretty adventurous year himself, and that’s the story of The Other Shimek!