Seymour's Calahan Skogman talks his debut novel, how his role on 'Shadow and Bone' changed his life and his love for small-town Wisconsin

When Calahan Skogman needs to refuel from the craziness that comes with life as an actor in Los Angeles, he comes back home to Wisconsin.

He grew up in Seymour, and even for someone with a hit Netflix series and an upcoming movie with Margot Robbie on his resume, there’s something about a long talk with his parents out on the water, a backyard bonfire with close friends, a beer at a familiar bar or just some of “that good, fresh Wisconsin air” that fills him up.

“I always go back and feel ready to take on the world again after my time there,” he said. “Then I’ll go throw myself into the madness and the chaos a bit and go chase down some of my dreams and passions.”

When he returns to northeast Wisconsin this week it’s as a published author. His debut novel, “Blue Graffiti,” comes out Tuesday from Unnamed Press. He’s making three stops — Monday in Seymour, Tuesday in Stevens Point and Wednesday in Green Bay — to kick off a book tour that will also take him to Chicago, New York, Denver and, of course, LA.

As with most everything Skogman does, “Blue Graffiti” proudly shows his Wisconsin roots.

Set in Johnston, Wisconsin, a fictional “small town in the middle-of-nowhere Midwestern America” during a summer in the 1990s, it follows Cash, a painter and construction worker abandoned by his father and living in the house he inherited from his mother. He’s never known anything beyond the fields of Johnston, or necessarily wanted to, but when a stranger named Rose shows up one evening at his favorite bar, everything changes.

Praise for the novel, with its warm affection for small-town fixtures like the corner bar, local diner and old car shop, is already pretty heady stuff.

Kirkus Reviews calls it “a love letter to barstool philosophizing and a tender portrait of small-town life with a simple but powerful message: There’s always something special about home.”

Bestselling author Jodi Picoult wrote this: “You’ll feel echoes of (Jack) Kerouac and ‘The Outsiders’ in this poetic debut novel about fathers and sons, of boys becoming men, of what it feels like to be caught between the helium of dreams and the ceiling of small-town American reality.”

Skogman, a 2011 graduate of Seymour Community High School who played football and was a standout basketball player, had long felt the pull of Hollywood and the movies, but he could never have scripted how the adventure would unfold — both as an actor and an author.

He talked recently by phone about the book, his love for his hometown and the Midwest, how “Shadow and Bone” changed his life and why being cast in “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” with his favorite actress felt almost too good to be true.

He wrote 'Blue Graffiti' with no intention of it ever being released to the public

“I wrote it to share it with my family and my best friends, but I didn’t write it with any illusions that one day it would be on shelves, in bookstores or airports or audio books or whatever,” he said. “It’s just been pretty sensational, and I’m just kind of riding the wave, to be honest."

Friends and family told him how quickly they tore through the early version and how much it moved them, but it wasn’t until a significant amount of time later, after his acting manager gave it a read, that it started getting shopped to major publishers and eventually landed in the hands of Unnamed.

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Johnston is not Seymour and he's not Cash, but both are lovingly woven in.

Nothing in “Blue Graffiti” is a direct replica of any one person or place, but certainly many of Skogman’s own wanderings, longings and perspectives are prominently threaded throughout the story.

“It's a very, very close-to-home portrait of my soul and my way of thinking and my dreams and kind of the way I grew up,” he said. “Kind of a love letter to everything that I saw and everything that I took in growing up as a kid in the middle-of-nowhere America, the middle-of-nowhere Wisconsin — Seymour, Wisconsin.

“But in the same way, it’s a love letter to all of those places, all of the small towns in the state or the entire Midwest that I frequented so often growing up. Just the fabric of what made them so beautiful to me and special to me and something I was able to sit with in a real poignant way long after I had left at 18 years old.

“It’s a love story to that part of America. It’s a love story to that part of my life,” he said. “It’s just a conglomeration of all of the beautiful people I came in contact with and kind of a tapestry made up of all of them and kind of mixing them and mashing them together and kind of telling a story that feels very truthful and feels very authentic to the place that I’m from.”

He counts being from Seymour and as one of his biggest blessings

Skogman credits being raised where he was, the way he was, for giving him the foundation that has steadied and supported him as he set off into the great unknown of Hollywood. Looking back at age 31, he has an even greater appreciation.

“It became so apparent to me that some of my favorite traits about myself were forged and kind of watered and given life as a direct result of where I was from. Kind of that groundedness and my love for family and my loyalty for friendship and my faith and my work ethic. Everything that I was able to foster and kind of double down on throughout all those formative years of my youth. It was so important that I was from Seymour, Wisconsin.

“It allowed me to leave Seymour and now be all over the world doing ridiculous things that young Calahan, if you would have told him that I’d be doing some of these things, it would have really blown his (expletive) mind, to be honest. It’s given me a perspective that I cannot overstate as how important it’s been for me to kind of go forward in my life and to able to take on all this chaos and these big dreams and everything but still feel rooted to something very solid and very substantial.”

“I count it as one of my biggest blessings, I really do,” he said.

Playing Matthias Helvar on Netflix's 'Shadow and Bone' changed his life.

It’s not lost on Skogman how lucky he was to have his first professional acting job be as big as “Shadow and Bone.” He was just a few months out of college with a master of fine arts degree in acting when he landed the role in 2019 and jetted off to Budapest, Hungary, to film.

The Emmy Award-nominated epic fantasy drama ran for two seasons and was canceled in 2023, despite still drawing a sizable audience. The role brought Skogman more attention than he could have imagined and swelled his Instagram following to 386,000 followers.

“It was life-changing thing as an artist just to be on those big sets and to act with that kind of pressure ... knowing that you were going to be seen by millions of people. That was an incredible, incredible experience and sensation,” he said.

“I made some best friends on that show, and to this day, l can’t really stomach the fact that we went out the way we did, because we had so much more of that story to tell and I knew how passionate the fanbase was. ... But that’s life, and it keeps rolling. It doesn’t wait for anybody and you kind of have to move on.”

Look for him next in 'A Big Bold Beautiful Journey' with Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell.

Landing any acting role is difficult, Skogman said, and whenever it happens, it’s always surprising. Take a few months ago, when the call came that he got a part in Sony Pictures' “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” (a release date has not yet been announced) and would be acting across from Robbie, fresh off the monster success of “Barbie.”

“That’s an incredibly surreal moment. where its like, ‘OK, she’s literally my favorite actress in the world,'" Skogman said.

After the first day of filming, a night shoot that went until 6 a.m., he awoke the next afternoon thinking it all had been a dream. He had to remind himself it was really happening.

Sometimes, that’s how his whole life feels.

“It’s a dream come true. I just want to do good things with it. I want to be able to be a light in the world and just be ready for whatever opportunities come way and always remain in a place of gratitude for them and do my best work.”

Here are his Wisconsin book stops this week for 'Blue Graffiti.'

6-9 p.m. Monday at Seymour Community High School auditorium, Seymour, for a conversation about the book with with principal and former head football coach Matt Molle. Tickets are free but registration is required at boundtohappenbooks.com/events/39014 . He'll also sign copies purchased through Bound to Happen Books.

6-9 p.m. Tuesday at District 1 Brewing Co., Stevens Point, for a conversation with local author Patrick Rothfuss. Tickets required. Each $28 ticket admits two people and includes one copy of the book: boundtohappenbooks.com/events/39015 .

6 p.m. Wednesday at Barnes & Noble, Ashwaubenon, for a conversation with Amy E. Reichert. Call the store at 920-490-1770 or stop in to reserve a copy of the book for the signing. More info at stores.barnesandnoble.com/event/9780062172130-0 .

Kendra Meinert is an entertainment and feature writer at the Green Bay Press-Gazette. Contact her at 920-431-8347 or kmeinert@greenbay.gannett.com . Follow her on X @KendraMeinert .

This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Seymour's Calahan Skogman talks his debut novel, how his role on 'Shadow and Bone' changed his life and his love for small-town Wisconsin