Miles Mussenden: The Guy Who Was In…

By Robert Green Atlanta Trend

• Dec 31, 2024

A familiar face around Atlanta is becoming a familiar face on screens all over the world. Miles Mussenden, with substantial parts in numerous movies and tv shows, has called Atlanta home for well over 20 years. Currently a recurring character on Tulsa King and with two years on Marvel’s superhero show “Cloak & Dagger, Miles has become well known both in the industry and among viewers. “I’ve done work all over the world, but I especially like to do projects from home,” he says. “Tulsa King is filmed in Atlanta.”

Born in London, Miles moved with his family at age five to Brooklyn, New York. He began acting in musical theatre at nine years old and at 14, he was admitted to the Academy of Dramatic Arts.  “I loved it,” he said, “but acting wasn’t a cool thing to do in the neighborhood that I came from, so I had trouble embracing it.” 

Miles still liked the arts, however, and pivoted toward producing records with friends while at the same time owning and running a barber shop. “I loved the music business and on several occasions, I learned just how close you can come to having a big hit, only to suffer disappointment,” he said. “It finally got to me.” When his father, who owned a group of McDonald’s restaurants, asked Miles to run them for him so that he could scale back his involvement, he said yes.

Making good use of the drama skills he loved to employ, Miles’s employee training “skits” were so successful that McDonald’s corporate headquarters in Chicago sent teams of people to learn how to make use of them for the entire company.

In 1996, Miles attended the Olympics in Atlanta and was impressed by what he saw. “I saw a beautiful, diverse city, where many types of people were thriving,” he said. After returning home to work for several more years, he decided to make a change. Leaving the restaurant business, he moved to Atlanta and became a real estate developer in 2002.

He bought land and built single family homes on lots as well as some townhome developments in town. He was very successful for five to six years. “In 2008, the bottom fell out. The financial crisis forced banks to stop making home loans. Sales dried up,” he said. “Everything stopped.”

Though unpleasant, this juncture gave Miles the time he needed to decide what he really wanted to do. “I knew I needed to pivot, to adapt to new circumstances,” he said, “so I decided to move into something that I thought I would love doing.”

Miles had been acting in a number of church plays while engaged in the real estate business and found that he really enjoyed it. In contrast to his teenage years, no one thought being an actor was weird or strange. “I hired an agent and never looked back,” he says.

He started getting hired to do commercials almost immediately. Additionally, he did a lot of script read “run through” work. “Script read run throughs are where a group of people, often including actors and crew, get together to read the script out loud,” say Miles. “Frequently, not all the actors can make the group script read, so they hire people – it’s not a lot of money – to fill in for them. I made it known that I was always available for that type of work.”

While he learned a lot about the movie and television business by way of script read run through work, he also found it to be a double-edged sword. “Actors and directors liked that I put more “oomph” into my reads than the average readers and it helped me to become better,” he said. 

“A few Atlanta casting directors would sometimes frown on me when I would audition for a role, saying ‘aren’t you a run through reader?’ But many others were supportive,” he says. Miles made significant breakthroughs from casting directors in the southeast, like Meagan Lewis. Who was instrumental in introducing his work to the Marvel family.

To expand his search for roles, Miles hired agents in Los Angeles, New York, the Carolinas and elsewhere. He began to do a lot of auditions out of town and received many roles out of town. “For me, being a actor based in Atlanta wasn’t especially convenient because of my particular problem, but now I get many roles in Atlanta and lots of other places as well,” he says.

Over the years, Miles has worked on a number of interesting projects with numerous interesting people. He worked with Robert Zemeckis and Denzel Washington in Flight, Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson in Ballers, Ethan Hawke in The Good Lord Bird, Shirley MacLaine and Jessica Lange in Wild Oats, Sylvester Stallone in Tulsa King, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan in The Walking Dead. “I was also a series regular in Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger,” he says.

Currently, Miles is playing the lead role in a thriller movie called Croatoan. He stars as a small-town detective who finds himself caught up in solving a paranormal nightmare and learning of the supernatural legend of Croatoan.

The movie title offers the only clue regarding the plot, bringing to mind the historic “Lost Colony” of Roanoke, Virginia, established in 1585. One hundred colonists had disappeared without a trace when a ship arrived in 1590 to find the colony abandoned with only the cryptic word “Croatoan” carved into a tree. Writer Stephen King, among others, have previously explored the paranormal possibilities for the disappearance of the colony.

He is also appearing in an NBC television show The Irrational, in January, playing Detective Sam Brown in two episodes. The Irrational stars Jesse L. Martin, who played Detective Ed Green for nine years on Law & Order and starred as Tom Collins in the Broadway Musical Rent.

All in all, Miles is delighted to be an actor who lives in Atlanta. “There’s plenty of work to do in Atlanta and it’s easy to travel to work in other parts of the country. Plus, Atlanta has been instrumental in helping me explore producing my own film projects. The city’s talented actors and crew, along with local studios, have made it possible to begin bringing my productions to life,” he says.