‘Basic Psych’ of David Conrad

Pittsburgh actor David Conrad now lives in England, but that hasn’t weakened the Swissvale native’s local ties.

“[Pittsburgh] is always home and most of my oldest best friends all live there,” he said. “I’ve stayed involved with Pittsburgh ever since I started a professional career. My first job was a play, actually, in Pittsburgh.”

Recently, the Post-Gazette caught up with Conrad to discuss his latest film to hit local screens — “Basic Psych” — and what he’s been up to. The movie was shot in Western Pennsylvania and wrapped in the summer of 2021.

“Basic Psych,” which debuted in November at the Three Rivers Film Festival, saw its theatrical premiere on Friday at The Lindsay Theater and Cultural Center in Sewickley, which is showing the movie through Jan. 16. Film Pittsburgh describes it as “a taut psychological thriller pitting a psychiatrist trying to protect his family against a paranoid murderer.”

In “Basic Psych,” Conrad portrays one of the psychiatrist’s clients. Having read thousands of scripts throughout his career, he was impressed by the script for “Basic Psych” written by Jim Tucker, a pediatrician from Fox Chapel.

“What I liked about someone who is an amateur and a doctor, is that it surprised me, simply on more than one level,” Conrad said. “I felt the characters were surprisingly complex, strange. And you like the bad guy and kind of don’t like the good guy — and also the ending surprised me. I was like: ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

“I’ve always wanted to work with Mike Cerveris, who I just adore as an artist,” he said. “I mean he’s a huge deal. He’s a two-time Tony Award winner. So that was it, really. I didn’t care. Money? So what? All the rest of it didn’t matter.

“It was fun to be home and shoot something and walk around and be a tough guy with a leather jacket in Pittsburgh.”

After moving abroad in 2018 with his girlfriend, actress Juliet Rylance, the Carnegie Mellon University graduate has traveled between England and the United States to take on acting and teaching jobs alike.

Conrad, who acted in the Gina Gershon-directed Lifetime movie “12 Desperate Hours” in 2022, said he doesn’t have an agent and “doesn’t really audition for things.”

“If something falls in my lap, that’s great,” he said. “If Patrick Jordan from barebones [productions] calls me and says ‘Hey, let’s do this thing,’ then I might be able to do that. If Mark Clayton Southers, from his theater organization — I’ve always wanted to work with Mark — if those guys call me then, sure, I’d be like ‘OK, maybe if I’ve got two months or a month and a half, I’d be happy to make it happen.”

In England, Conrad takes as many opportunities as possible to teach acting. His career began in Pennsylvania, he said, where he taught a storytelling class for kids at the Braddock Carnegie Library.

That experience revealed a lot about acting and America to Conrad, he said, which has led him to continue working with various groups of people, including older professionals and people over 30 who “want to keep up their Shakespeare.”

“I just kind of go from place to place and do these workshops, basically stealing from all the teachers I’ve ever had and just running classes,” Conrad explained. “We’ll just do classes on how to brush up on your Shakespeare, as the quote says.”

His passion for teaching comes from his time in Pittsburgh. He attended Woodland Hills schools, then transferred to The Kiski School, a college preparatory school in Saltsburg.

As he was growing up, he watched the steel industry begin to crumble. Conrad compared this to a Great Depression that only affected a handful of American cities.

“The teachers who taught me said, ‘You could be worth something, you could say this, you could make this matter, you could sing this into something for other people to hear,’ ” he said. “To drill that through somebody’s head who is raised in a place where you’re being told maybe you don’t matter ...

“I had a lot of teachers who told me that [failure] didn’t matter, that you could go for it. You could get scholarships. You could try to make something yourself. And just doing that, just imitating that, for me, is giving back what was given to me.”