At age 43, Joe Sernio has already been acting for 20 years. Starting in soap operas and small productions, it was his high school pal Kevin Interdonato’s role in The Sopranos that gave him his first inspiration.
“I saw him. I was oh wow, that’s pretty cool,” he recalls. “I’ve always obviously always wanted to do it. I started talking to Kevin about it and I just kind of started getting into it little by little in my early 20s, 21, 22. I started going to a lot of acting classes, meeting a lot of people in New York and kind of taking it from there.”
But the acting jobs weren’t paying well enough to make a living. He realized, as many actors do early on, that he’d need steady work doing something else to make a living.
“I actually graduated, um, wound up getting two degrees at the Chubb Institute. I slowly got into building websites. And I saw the potential that it had and I just kind of built it up from there. I’ve always been into networking. The website stuff was brand new at the time, it was up and coming, you know.”
His company, Shoreline Media Marketing Solutions, is going strong after 14 years with a large client base, a dozen employees and a newly renovated headquarters in Asbury Park.
And his acting career had a breakthrough in 2023 with his intense performance in the film short Loved, being shown at film festivals worldwide, a feature film coming out in late summer of 2023 called The Bastard Sons and a TV pilot in the works. For Joe Sernio, so far, so good. Listen to our conversation in this episode of Type. Tune. Tint.