'The Bang Bang Club'star Taylor Kitsch turned dire early days in New York into TV and movie success

What a difference a few years can make.

Less than a decade ago,Taylor Kitschwas a struggling acting student fresh off the plane fromVancouver, living in a shoebox apartment inSpanish Harlemfor more than a month without electricity. A borrowed blowup mattress was his only furniture and a handful of candles his only source of light.

One night a loud pounding on the door woke him up in a cold sweat.

"It was the police,"says the"Friday Night Lights"star."One of the neighbors thought my apartment was on fire because I fell asleep with the candles on. It was a trip."

Last week, the 30-year-old actor arrived back inNew Yorkfor the red-carpet premiere at theTribeca Film Festivalfor his latest film,"The Bang Bang Club."

The film traces the real-life band of fourSouth Africanphotographers who covered the violence that tore their country apart in the early 1990s.

To playKevin Carter, a photographer who notched aPulitzer Prizebefore imploding in a haze of drugs and depression,
Kitsch dropped 37 pounds in just two months.

Director Steven Silverfilmed his re-creation of the violence that raged in the waning days of apartheid in the actual neighborhoods— reopening some old wounds in the process.

A scene where the photographers pass through a field strewn with bodies was shot on the same field inSowetowhere a real-life massacre took place in 1990, says Kitsch.

"One lady thought it was actually happening again. She came out and she was just incredibly upset,"he says."It was tough for everyone. But I think it would have been an injustice to do it anywhere else."

Kitsch has come a long way since he left New York for Hollywood. He ended up inAustin, Tex., where he became the star player— on and off the screen — on"Friday Night Lights"as a high school fullback who struggles with life off the field.

And after his tour of duty in South Africa for"The Bang Bang Club,"Kitsch travels outside Earth's orbit as the title hero in next year's"John Carterof Mars,"the start of a potential franchise based on theEdgar Rice Burroughsnovels.

Last week at least, he was back on terra firma in New York, enjoying a reunion with his old acting coach,Sheila Gray, who gave him free lessons— the only kind he could afford back when he often spent nights sleeping on subway trains.

"It feels very full circle,"says Kitsch of his Big Apple return."I mean, this is really where it all started."

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