Multi-hyphenate Jordan Mitchell-Love is not exactly the kind of guy you’d think of immediately when picking a horror fan. He has a seemingly boundless, buoyant energy and an easy laugh that sets you at ease.

He’s also a very, very busy man. To name just a few of the projects he’s currently working on:

1. He’s casting teams of two for the Wipeout competition show hosted by John Cena and Nicole Byers.
2. He’s recording a couple of episodes of a new podcast called A Bad Feeling Horror Podcast due out in September of this year.
3. He’s appearing in season two of The Fortnight, an LGBTQ+ web series, which is set to premiere this fall.
4. He’s taking part in the first ever Fortnight Retreat, a virtual convention for the web series that will be taking place from 6 pm to 9 pm PT on June 25-26, 2021.
5. He’s in the process of launching a self-help business with high quality YouTube videos, released Tuesdays @ 9 AM PST. It’s evolving into a full-fledged business teaching others about cultivating self-awareness.

I’m not entirely sure when he sleeps and I have no idea how he managed to carve out time to chat with me for iHorror’s Horror Pride Month this year, but he did it. He did think I was calling him to be interviewed rather than the other way around for the first couple of minutes of our conversation, but that’s a story for another day.

I’m always curious when and where a person becomes a horror fan. I think those moments are burned into our memories, and Jordan was no different when I asked.

“Oh my God, so, my mom really liked having me watch a lot of different movies,” he began. “I watched a lot of old movies growing up, but there was a weird eclectic mix. So, I would watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers one day and then watch Psycho the next day. Alfred Hitchcock became one of my all-time favorite directors. I also really loved Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and The Silence of the Lambs, and I still say that those are the scariest movies ever. If you try to correct me, I will battle you.”

I wasn’t particularly looking for a Battle Royale so I asked him to tell me more.

“When I got a little older, I also started reading a lot of the horror classics,” Mitchell-Love continued. “I read Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Jekyll & Hyde was a personal favorite of mine. There’s something really fascinating to me about the human psyche. It is one of the most in depth, unexplainable, beautiful and terrifying things ever. You could be looking at someone who is looking at you as a loving, caring parent or sibling and then the next they go out and kill someone else. The depravity of people is terrible. That’s the stuff that truly horrifies me.”

Some of this fascination seems to grow out of the actor’s childhood, though he doesn’t open up to chat about that quite so easily and so again, we moved to a slightly different subject, though still related to human nature and identity.

Jordan Mitchell-Love lived in the southeastern part of the United States until he was a freshman in high school and his family moved to Vermont. One would think it was the perfect place for a young man who might be beginning to question who he was and his identity, but the performer points out that it really depends on where you are.

“A lot of people think that because a state passed marriage equality or legalized marijuana that the whole state is that open-minded, and that’s generally not the case,” he said. “It was kind of a very quiet thing. Growing up in rural Vermont, you were only seen as a man if you were a butch guy who wore plaid, could grow a full beard by age 14, and drove a pickup truck. I’m 34 years old and it takes me five days to get a five o’clock shadow!”

Needless to say, things were not so easy. His first near-experience with someone of the same sex was someone older who was without a doubt a predator. Thankfully, nothing happened, but it did color his own attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ community and of course, himself, as he continued his own path to accepting his bisexuality.

It’s perhaps directly because of this that the thirty-something mid-stage millennial only began coming out in the last couple of years.

It was 2019 and he was in a show in Los Angeles when he realized he had a crush on one of his male co-stars, and he really began to face and define those parts of himself that he’d kept hidden away eventually becoming comfortable enough to tell some of his friends who, of course, responded with, “Yeah, we kind of suspected.”

Fortunately for Mitchell-Love, the many facets of acting let him explore himself as well as jump into things he will never be.

“They say actors want to be something they aren’t,” he pointed out, “and I’ve always been so upbeat and positive and sometimes forgetful but also a very loving person so playing a complete and total sleazeball is great. Darker characters are fun and interesting to me.”

The actor relishes the freedom those roles and the realm of horror as a whole present to creatives.

“It’s fun to play scared,” he explained. “The characters in horror are grounded and flawed. It’s fun to watch them and to be taken over by them. It’s a great adrenaline rush. It keys into the primitive parts of our brain. I think I love psychological horror because I love really good stories. One of my favorite films of the last few years was Train to Busan. It’s a Korean zombie film, and it’s ridiculous but it also has incredible character development and story. I was heartbroken at the end of that film. Parasite is another film. That twist at the end…that’s horror.”

For more info about Jordan Mitchell-Love or to keep up with his latest projects–and I refer you back to the beginning of this article that there are a lot of them and I didn’t even list everything I don’t think–be sure to check out his social media on: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, IMDb, and Tik Tok!