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It’s nice talking with people who are well-spoken. Especially sincere people. It’s a refreshing quality and can even be pleasant to the ears. Nick Hansen is a pretty well spoken guy. The fact that he graduated Summa Cum Laude from Gustavus Adolphus might have something to do with it. Nick is a filmmaker, actor, producer, writer and a very interesting person. He was just part of a recent Youtube mini-series called Tether, which had about 13,000 views in the first five hours of it’s premiere. It now has over 2 million views!

Aside from life as an actor he is an avid tennis player and has been throughout his whole childhood in Duluth. He volunteers with the Marshall tennis team and will be taught lessons over the  summer at LongView Tennis Court, which also happen to be his life-long stomping grounds. Nick has been all over the world and lived all over the country, but as with a lot of us, we always end up coming back to the lake.

MJ: What have you been working on lately/recently?
NH: I’ve been working on a  project centered around tennis. I have 3 or 4 scripts and one of them is about tennis. Except that I want it to be like Goodfellas meets The Mighty Ducks. (laughing) I’d like to shoot a movie in Duluth. We live in a very ethereal city and I want to capture that. I was just recently a main actor in a movie called Chris that premiered at the Minneapolis St Paul International Film Festival. I produced and acted in a short film called Lambent Fuse which ended up winning the Twin Cities Feature Film Festival. So that’s pretty cool. Some other good stuff also came out of it. I think it’s going to be distributed as well.

MJ: What’s it like working on films, acting and the like?
NH: I can best equate it to my background in sports. You have to wait around a lot. But when it’s good, it’s good. It’s not glamorous getting started out in independent film. You’re working for free or getting jobbed out of money. In any given day on set we’re moving an apartment worth of stuff to set up scenes. On any given day you could be acting, lifting things, setting up, producing. You have to wear a lot of different hats.

MJ: How’d you get into acting, producing, etc?
NH: I got really interested in film after Video Art class in my freshmen year at Gustavus. We produced two feature length films in college. I just started taking acting classes, we had cameras and it spawned from there.

MJ: What’s been your favorite project to work on so far?
NH: Honestly, it was while I was in college. My sophomore year in college we wrote a script called Sixes and Sevens. It took us a whole year to make it and we had 500 people audition for it, we had to turn 100 people down. That was a highlight for me.

MJ: What are you passionate about?
NH: The lake. Life. Movies. Writing. Art. I’m very passionate about tennis right now. I played three hours this morning, three hours yesterday morning.Tennis has been a very big part of my life lately. The French open is on, i’ve been watching that. It’s very familiar to me. I’m a volunteer assistant coach at Marshall, we’re going to State this year. I’ll be teaching at LongView this summer. Tennis has been a saving grace in my life.

MJ: What do you do in your spare time?
NH: I play a few different instruments. I play cheap instruments. Guitar, ukelele, keyboard. I like to watch movies, go fishing, play tennis, hang out with friends. I love to go out, maybe a little too much. I read a lot. I usually watch a lot of Youtube. Though lately i’ll go three or four weeks without going on the internet. It’s refreshing.

MJ: Favorite thing about Duluth?
NH: The people. I travelled a lot and I really love the people of Duluth. I never appreciated the lake until I came back to Duluth. Now I run next to it almost everyday. It’s so powerful it’s hard to fathom. The lake is amazing. My cabin. And of course, LongView Tennis Court!