Ben Koldyke: From Football Coach to "How I Met Your Mother"

Episode Summary

How does it happen that an English teacher and sports coach becomes a renowned actor? Ben Koldyke – who played Don Frank on How I Met Your Mother and many other roles – tells us, along with cameo insights about Aaron Sorkin, Second City, and Dartmouth College.

Sydney Finkelstein 

Syd Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He holds a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Finkelstein has published 25 books and 90 articles, including the bestsellers Why Smart Executives Fail and Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, which LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman calls the “leadership guide for the Networked Age.” He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a consultant and speaker to leading companies around the world, and a top 25 on the Global Thinkers 50 list of top management gurus. Professor Finkelstein’s research and consulting work often relies on in-depth and personal interviews with hundreds of people, an experience that led him to create and host his own podcast, The Sydcast, to uncover and share the stories of all sorts of fascinating people in business, sports, entertainment, politics, academia, and everyday life.

Ben Koldyke

Ben Koldyke has worked on some of the most renowned comedy series, including THE GOOD PLACE, SILICON VALLEY, and CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM. He starred in the NBC comedy series MR. ROBINSON with Craig Robinson was featured in a series-long arc on MASTERS OF SEX with Michael Sheen. Before that, Koldyke was in Craig Gillespie’s THE FINEST HOURS for Disney opposite Chris Pine. He most recently appeared in Peacock’s RUTHERFORD FALLS opposite Ed Helms. He is based in LA.

Insights from this episode: 

• Ben Koldyke’s early days
• Challenges Ben has faced transitioning from an athletic aspect to the arts
• The ups and downs of an acting career
• Why he made the shift from sports to acting
• Learning how to act
• Using his sports background as an advantage in acting
• What it takes to be a good actor

Quotes from the show:

• “What’s interesting to me about sports and acting, when you are trained as an athlete, it’s challenging to take on an artistic sort of way of life” —Ben Koldyke [6:09]
• “This (acting) is an incredibly competitive environment, but if you are on the creative side there just has to be a temperance, there just has to be an understanding that this is not an all or nothing sort of thing; that opportunities will come and go and you just have keep a sort of middle ground, almost a meditative middle ground, that allows you to deal with the whims of what is a very up and down business” —Ben Koldyke [8:13]
• “At age 30, much my parents chagrin and utter confusion, I said I was going to go to California and teach at the Kipp School, in Inglewood and I was going to study how to be an actor and a writer; and that’s what I did!” —Ben Koldyke [13:08]
• “Instead of it being a hindrance (sports background), instead of it being something that I needed to overcome, he taught me to incorporate it, to use it, (…) I was taught to really cel