Proksch graduated from UW-Eau Claire with a degree in communication, with an emphasis in electronic media. Although, after graduating from high school in Onalaska, he says he really didn’t have a major in mind when he started looking at colleges.
“I kind of just followed some friends who were like-minded when it came to music and comedy, and followed them to Eau Claire,” Proksch remembers. “And it was honestly the best decision I ever made.”
Finding his people and professors
Proksch says it was here where he met other people who had similar tastes and similar interests, giving him the freedom to explore those things.
“I think if I had gone to NYU or USC or even Madison, I think it would have been a little more overwhelming,” Proksch says. “Whereas in Eau Claire you find the right five or six people and the world’s your oyster. We were certainly encouraged to pursue what we wanted to do, whether it was comedy or music, and there were always enough outlets provided by the university or the city to move forward with those ambitions.”
It wasn’t just his peers who helped Proksch find his path. He has fond memories of and keeps in touch with professors who had a profound influence on him.
“Jerry Connor, who was a professor (in communication and journalism) there at the time, and just a whirlwind of knowledge, a great guy who inspired me a lot,” Proksch recalls. “I really soaked up everything I could from him.”
When he wasn’t in the classroom, he worked at the campus theater for three years, showing two movies a night, Thursday through Sunday. Walking home to his house on First Avenue after work, he would think about the movies he had just seen, and how he wanted not to just show those movies, but to be in them. It was a few years after he graduated when the first major step to making that happen took place.
Proksch and a friend from college came up with the idea to take one of Proksch’s comedic characters he developed in college and start booking him on morning shows around the Midwest.
“My character was named Kenny ‘K-Strass’ Strasser. He was just a dim guy from the Midwest. He was a yo-yo champion going to local schools to teach kids about the environment,” Proksch says. “We were going to do 10 of them to create this story arc. We got through about six or seven of them before they started getting uploaded to YouTube.”
Once that happened, Proksch says a website called Grantland picked up the videos, and that led to a call that would change his life.
Getting called to ‘The Office’
Writers in Hollywood saw the videos, including writers from the NBC hit series “The Office,” and wanted to meet with him. The problem was, they couldn’t find him.
“They were trying to figure out who I was, but I had taken off all my information from social media. I wanted people to think my yo-yo character was real,” Proksch remembers. “One of the writers of ‘The Office,’ Amelie Gillette, finally figured out through a mutual connection who I was.”
That’s when one of the show’s writers, Paul Lieberstein, who also played Toby on the show, asked Proksch to come out to Los Angeles and meet with the writers. He was offered a recurring role on the show as Nate Nickerson, a part of Dunder Mifflin’s warehouse team.
It was a big move for Proksch, but it wasn’t the most seismic event that happened because of his discovery.
“Funny story is that the writer who figured out who I was, Amelie Gillette, is now my wife,” Proksch says. “So, if I hadn’t made a complete moron of myself on morning news, I would have never found my wife. So, it’s one of those strange Hollywood stories that just doesn’t happen too often anymore. But that’s the circuitous route that I took from Jerry Connor’s class to Hollywood.”
As it turns out, the role on “The Office” was just the first stop on that route.
