Rough and tough crew leader of The Pogues, John B, is portrayed by Outer Banks leading star Chase Stokes. Beyond being charismatic and affable, Stokes and the character that he plays don’t share too many similarities, one brilliant example of this being the difference in their education level.
Chase Stokes attended the University of Central Florida. When he graduated in 2015, he received a Master of Business Administration degree, the same year that his acting career began to take off.
It seems that Stokes hasn’t had much of a reason to use his MBA yet, since he dove immediately into his blossoming acting career in the year following his graduation from University.
Diverging Paths
Stokes was clearly intent on laying out some more reliable foundations for himself with the obtaining of an MBA. He hasn’t spoken much about what plan B looked like if the acting career that he has pursued didn’t turn out the way he wanted.
With the opportunities born of the successes he has had, he hasn’t had much cause to think about a plan B either. The show that gave him his first big break, Outer Banks, saw positive reception from critics and fans alike and gave way to even more opportunities.
One of the new avenues that the heartthrob opened up from his work on Outer Banks was an entirely new show, with Stokes cast at the center of the lineup. It’s a show that looks set to take advantage of Stokes’ appeal to the young adult audience, based on the best-selling book One Of Us Is Lying.
Stokes describes it as Breakfast Club meets Pretty Little Liars, a concept that sounds like it’s perfectly poised to take advantage of his rising star amongst Outer Banks’ target demographic.
Using The MBA
Due to his steadily growing acting career, Stokes didn’t even have much of a chance to use his MBA if he had wanted to. The young actor has been hopping from one gig to the next since late 2014, with each part growing in size and scope.
Much of the success that he has been met can doubtlessly be attributed to his role in Outer Banks as John B. If things had gone a little differently, then maybe the Chase Stokes that we’ve come to know from the show may have been pursuing an entirely different career.
It certainly doesn’t seem outside of the realms of possibility either, seeing as how Stokes almost passed up the opportunity to star in the show.
He has briefly spoken about the potentially missed opportunity on occasion in interviews, but never as in-depth as he went on the Chicks in the Office podcast. During the five-ish minute segment of the nearly 2-hour long podcast, Stokes and his co-star Madelyn Cline discuss the show, where Stokes eventually dropped the bombshell that he wasn’t on board with the show at all in a preliminary reading of the script.
According to Stokes, when he was first handed a rough draft of the show’s script, he wasn’t impressed. Stokes’ issue with the plot and characters was that it was pitched to him in the form of a Goonies-Esque treasure hunt adventure.
Clearly, Stokes has a lot of love for that classic piece of American cinema, because as soon as he had that image of Outer Banks being a Goonies rip-off in his mind, he completely shut down the idea of ever appearing in the show.
That’s a pretty impressive dedication to his desire to not have any hand in the production of something that would potentially reboot and stain the legacy of an all-time classic. Stokes described the thought of being involved in a project that did that as being one of his worst nightmares.
Unfortunately, despite his MBA, Stokes was actually unemployed at the time, so he was feeling a little bit of pressure to at least try out for a role in the show.
It was a good thing that he did, as he quickly realized that Outer Banks was a well-written show that stood on its own merits, anything but a cheap reboot of a beloved movie. It’s brought him enormous success, as well as a seemingly bulletproof relationship with his co-star Madelyn Cline!