Meet Marc Cotter: The Actor, Writer And Filmmaker Who Stumbled Into Verticals And Decided To Build Something Bigger

Marc Cotter has never been interested in picking one lane. The first-generation Irish American grew up between Irish castles and Long Island sailboats, interned in Manhattan as a teenager, and co-founded Water Street Films in 2015. Then, while working catering shifts at the Getty, he booked the lead on his very first vertical audition.

Since then, he has starred in NetShort’s Love in the Fast Lane and FlareFlow’s After His Affair I Slept with His Best Friend, sold nearly ten verticals with writing partner Joe Bilella, and is now up for a CMA for writing the dialogue in Ella Langley’s Choosin’ Texas music video. In this conversation, Marc talks family, ambition, and why verticals are a proving ground, not a destination.

Let’s take a step back into your early years. How was your childhood growing up? Are there any memories, stories, or moments from that time that shaped you and that you’d love to share with the fans, anything you think they would be interested to learn about the boy you once were? Marc: My childhood was a bit of a fairytale. I’m a first-generation Irish American who grew up in the Hamptons, but we spent a lot of time in Ireland visiting family. So my childhood was this crazy juxtaposition of medieval castles and the Irish countryside one month, and sailing around Long Island the next. It gave my imagination plenty to work with.

My parents are still my greatest role models. They came to America with very little and built a life and a family from the ground up. To me, they really embody the American dream. But they never put a definition on what success had to look like. They always told me, “We don’t care what you do, as long as you’re happy.” At the same time, quitting was never really part of our vocabulary.

My childhood changed dramatically when I was ten and my younger brother, Evan, was born with Trisomy 13… a rare form of Down syndrome. Suddenly our home became almost like a miniature nursing facility, with around-the-clock care. Doctors had very limited expectations for what his life would look like, and Evan has spent his entire life defying them. He’s still here, still fighting, and he remains one of the greatest inspirations in my life.

What really affected me at that age was how people reacted. I remember people telling our family, “I’m so sorry,” almost as though this dark cloud had descended over us. I hated that. Evan wasn’t something to be sorry about. Watching him fight, and watching my parents refuse to feel sorry for themselves, put a certain fire in me pretty early.

By high school, I was desperate to see what existed beyond Long Island. As a freshman at Westhampton Beach, I landed an internship at a music studio on Park Avenue South in Manhattan. My dad was working jobs in the city at the time, so a few days a week we’d make that drive together after school. We’d listen to everything from U2 and classic rock to Gorillaz and talk about life and what I wanted to do with mine.

I didn’t realize how formative those drives were until much later. New York City became my education outside of school. That first internship led to assistant jobs around music, film, fashion and entertainment. At one point, while I was still in high school, I was escorting runway models around Manhattan to Fashion Week castings. That’s actually how I learned the subway system… although I think I spent everything I made that day on taxis and Frappuccinos trying to impress the models. Financially, a disaster. Socially, according to my high school friends, an enormous success.

Originally, I only wanted to be an actor. Joe Bilella, who I was interning for at the time, had produced Richie Rich with Macaulay Culkin and had a long history working with talent. The first time I met him, instead of telling me how talented I was or that I was going to be a star, he basically gave me every reason why I shouldn’t go into the entertainment business.

Ironically, that made me trust him. Eventually Joe told me, “If you want to act, create your own vehicle.” That stuck with me. Growing up in the Hamptons, you meet plenty of people willing to tell you you’re great and deserve the world. I’ve learned that sometimes the people willing to challenge you are doing you the bigger favor.

What started as a high-school internship turned into years of commuting back and forth to New York City and learning every part of the business I could. Eventually, I somehow convinced Joe to jump back into the film business with me, and in 2015 we started Water Street Films together.

So when I look back, I think the connective tissue was imagination, curiosity and probably a little stubbornness. I grew up believing life could be a fairytale. I also learned pretty young that fairytales aren’t interesting because nothing goes wrong. They’re interesting because of what people do when it does.

Imagine for a moment that you’re face to face with your 10-year-old self, that young version of you who was still discovering the world and his own dreams. What would you say to him now, with everything you’ve experienced and the success you’ve built? What message, reassurance, or wisdom would you want him to hear from the man you’ve become?

Marc: I think I’d tell him, “Don’t be in such a hurry.” At ten, I had this enormous imagination and absolutely no concept of what was realistic. And honestly, that was probably one of my greatest strengths. Eventually the world starts teaching you about odds, rejection, money and all the reasons something might not work. At ten, you don’t know any of that yet. You just know what excites you. I’d tell him to protect that.

I’d also tell him that almost nothing is going to happen exactly the way he thinks it will, and that’s okay. Doors will close. People will disappoint you. There will be times when you feel behind or wonder whether you chose the right path. But some of the things that feel like disappointments at the time will end up sending you somewhere you never dreamed possible. More than anything, I’d tell him to slow down and pay attention to the people around him.

Listen to your parents’ stories. Enjoy those drives with your dad. Be present with your brother. When you’re young, you’re so focused on where you’re trying to go that you don’t realize you’re already living moments you’ll eventually wish you could go back to. And that’s something I’m still learning.

There will always be another job, another opportunity, another goal. The finish line keeps moving. If you’re constantly waiting for the next thing to make you happy, you can miss a lot of what’s happening right in front of you. So keep dreaming ridiculously big, and most importantly… Work your ass off.

Marc, what does success truly mean to you? Is it defined by career milestones, personal growth, the impact you leave on others, or something entirely different?

Marc: My definition of success has definitely changed as I’ve gotten older. When I was younger, it was much easier to quantify. I wanted the big opportunity, the recognition, the ability to point to something and say, “I made that.”

And I’d be lying if I said I don’t still want those things. I’m incredibly ambitious. There are endless films I want to make, stories I want to tell, music I want people to hear, and rooms I haven’t walked into yet. I don’t think that part of me is going anywhere. But today, I think success is really about freedom.

The freedom to spend my life creating things I believe in. To take something that only exists in my imagination and somehow make it real. To work with people I love and respect. And hopefully to reach a point financially where I can choose a project because I believe in it, not because I have to take it.

I also care a lot more now about who I’m becoming while I pursue all of this. You can collect credits, money, accolades and opportunities, but if you lose your curiosity, your relationships or yourself along the way, I’m not sure you’ve actually won anything. So I’m still chasing some pretty enormous dreams. I just don’t want to be so busy chasing them that I miss the life happening around me. To me, success is having the freedom to keep dreaming big without sacrificing the people and the things that made you want to dream in the first place.

Before the vertical work, before the screenwriting, there was a moment when you decided to become a performer. What was it, and who or what shaped you early on? Looking back, does the actor you are today resemble the one you imagined becoming when you started?

Marc: Ironically, before I wanted to be an actor or filmmaker, I wanted to race motorcycles. I was obsessed with dirt bikes… still am. I used to build trails through the woods near my house and genuinely thought that was going to be my life.

There was some family history behind it, too. My grandfather, Kevin Cotter, raced the Isle of Man TT, one of the most dangerous motorcycle races in the world. It’s nearly 38 miles of public roads through towns and across a mountain, with riders flying past stone walls, houses and telephone poles. There’s almost no margin for error.

He raced in this world populated by guys who seemed almost mythical to me growing up, people like Joey Dunlop, the “King of the Roads.” I think that gave me a romantic idea of people who weren’t afraid of danger. Adrenaline seekers. People willing to push themselves beyond what felt comfortable. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world.

And weirdly, I think some of that eventually found its way into performing. On a motorcycle, you have to commit. Hesitation can sometimes be more dangerous than making a decision and going for it. Acting obviously has much lower stakes, but there’s something similar about walking onto a stage. You have to trust your instincts. You have to be willing to look stupid, fail publicly and completely commit to something even when you’re scared.

It probably helps that I’m pretty goofy in real life. I love making people laugh, and I’m not particularly afraid of making a fool of myself. Maybe that’s the Irish in me. As for whether I became the actor I imagined when I started? Probably not. And I’m glad I didn’t.

When I was younger, I thought “being an actor” was the destination. What I eventually figured out was that I love storytelling in pretty much every form. Acting led me to writing, writing led to producing and filmmaking, and music has always been running alongside all of it. I don’t really feel the need anymore to choose one label. But I think the kid racing dirt bikes and the performer I am today probably have one thing in common: when you’re going to do something, commit to it. Basically, perform like your life depends on it. Hopefully with slightly lower stakes than the Isle of Man TT.

Most actors in verticals say they found the format by chance: a casting notice, a friend’s recommendation, a gap between bigger jobs. How did it happen for you? Was it a deliberate choice, or did you walk into it and realize partway through that it could be something bigger than you expected?

Marc: I definitely found verticals by accident. During COVID, circa 2024, I was working as a catering waiter at the Getty Museum while writing historical docudramas between shifts. I love history, so strangely enough, it became one of the best social experiences of my life. Thousands of people come through those doors from every imaginable background, and I was constantly talking to strangers, reading the room, figuring out how to connect with people. Honestly, I probably learned more about pitching myself there than I ever did in a classroom.

But I was also working constantly, sometimes close to seven days a week, and barely scraping by. I had very little time or energy left to be creative, which was the entire reason I’d moved to Los Angeles in the first place. Eventually I hit a point where something had to change. I missed taking risks. So I opened a Backstage account and started submitting myself.

Within a few days, I found something called a “mobisode” titled After His Divorce, I Owned Three Billionaires. I had absolutely no idea what a vertical was. The title sounded insane. But the money seemed real, so I figured, what do I have to lose? I submitted, auditioned and somehow booked the lead. My first vertical audition ever.

I later found out part of the reason the client took a gamble on me was because I was “cheap.” I think I made about $300 a day. At the time, I thought I’d hit the jackpot. We shot for eight days, and suddenly I’d made roughly twice what I was making in an entire month catering. The math wasn’t particularly complicated, so I kept going.

There was definitely an ego adjustment at first. Verticals weren’t exactly considered prestigious. My friends gave me endless shit about how ridiculous and “cringe” some of them were. And to be fair, sometimes they weren’t wrong. But I started noticing something. There was an audience. There was real money being invested. People were watching. And, most importantly for me at the time, there was opportunity. That’s when I stopped asking whether verticals were “cool” and started wondering what they could become.

Eventually I stopped looking at them as just acting jobs and started thinking about them as a filmmaker. How do we make the writing better? How do we elevate the performances? How do you take what works about traditional film and television and adapt it to a completely different format?

That curiosity eventually pulled me into writing and developing them as well. And I’m genuinely grateful for what verticals have given me. They’ve put me on sets, introduced me to great collaborators, taught me an enormous amount about writing and given me opportunities I might not have gotten otherwise.

At the same time, I don’t want to be known simply as a “vertical actor.” I never saw that as the destination. I want to make films, television, music, write, produce, act… all of it. Verticals are one chapter of a much bigger creative life I’m building.

But I’ll never look down on the chapter just because I want to keep turning the pages. And there’s a funny full-circle element to all of this. Some of the same friends who used to make fun of me for doing verticals now call and ask, “Hey, can you get me a job?” I don’t plan on abusing that power. Too much. 😉

In 2022, Deadline announced Big Men, the limited series you co-created with Joe Bilella about Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain and the NBA’s role in the civil rights movement. Where did the idea come from, and why did you feel this story hadn’t been told yet? What can you share about where the project stands today?

Marc: On August 28, 2019, my writing partner Joe Bilella and I met composer Jonathan Elias at Orto in Santa Monica. You may not know Jonathan by name, but you definitely know his work. He’s one of the legendary figures in audio branding, the mind behind sounds and campaigns associated with Yahoo!, “We Are Farmers,” Liberty Mutual, and the Columbia Pictures fanfare. He also happens to be an incredible storyteller.

We were there to pitch him a completely different project: a massive 17th-century period drama we’d been developing about the birth of modern democracy and the origins of the two-party system. It’s a project we’ll make at the right time with the right people. Mark my words.

But as we were explaining it, Jonathan was looking at us like somebody slowly falling asleep in history class. He loved the material, but he had no idea how he was going to help two relatively unknown writers get something that ambitious off the ground.

Then, in classic Jonathan fashion, he cut through all of it with a brutally practical piece of Hollywood logic. He said something to the effect of, “Look, most of the guys running Hollywood are in their sixties and Jewish. And what do a lot of Jewish guys in their sixties love? Basketball. You want to get something made? Give them basketball.”

Joe and I started laughing. Then Jonathan told us he happened to control rights connected to the story of Wilt Chamberlain’s legendary 100-point game. Suddenly, we weren’t laughing anymore. He gave us the material to read and initially we thought that was the story. Then we started researching. And we realized the 100-point game was only the tip of the iceberg.

The real story was Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell. Here were two of the most extraordinary athletes America had ever produced, friends, rivals and complete opposites in so many ways, whose careers unfolded against one of the most turbulent periods in American history. They weren’t simply watching the country change from the sidelines. Their lives were intersecting with it.

Russell was sitting in the front row at the March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered “I Have a Dream.” He had been personally invited by King and was even asked to speak, but declined. He would later stand beside Muhammad Ali when Ali refused induction into the military. Wilt, meanwhile, arrived in Kansas in the 1950s and was confronted with segregation almost immediately. His celebrity became a kind of battering ram against racial barriers. Suddenly we weren’t writing a basketball story anymore. We were looking at America through basketball. That became the revelation behind Big Men.

Bill and Wilt’s rivalry helped redefine the sport, but their lives also give you this extraordinary window into race, celebrity, politics, masculinity and the changing identity of America. And basketball itself was evolving alongside them into something much closer to the cultural institution we recognize today. That’s when Joe and I committed fully. Over 43 books and two dozen magazine articles, this project remains one of our most prized endeavors. We’ve continued to put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into making sure this story is told.

And importantly, our vision has always been bigger than just Wilt and Bill. They’re the foundation, but there’s an extraordinary constellation of athletes, activists, entertainers and political figures whose lives intersected with this world. The deeper we researched it, the bigger the canvas became.

As far as where Big Men stands today, I have to be somewhat careful about what I say. Projects of this scale can have long lives and take unexpected turns. But I can say that the story is very much alive, our ambition for it has only grown, and there are developments I can’t discuss publicly yet. So I’ll leave it at this… stay tuned.

Take me onto the set of Love in the Fast Lane. What did a typical day look like, from call time to wrap? What surprised you most about how a NetShort production runs compared with the traditional sets you’d worked on or studied?

Marc: First off, Love in the Fast Lane ultimately led to my first interview with The Hollywood Reporter, so that production will always have a special place in my heart. A typical day on a vertical moves incredibly fast.

You arrive in the morning, get through hair, makeup and wardrobe, and then you’re off to the races… quite literally on this one. You’re shooting an enormous amount of material every day, so there isn’t the luxury of endlessly dissecting a scene or doing twenty takes. You have to arrive prepared, know your character, trust your instincts and go. Our director, Michael Reich and I developed a strong friendship on this production.

Michael arrived on set every day with the heart of a champion. His energy was infectious. When you’re moving at that speed, the director sets the tone for everybody, and he somehow kept the machine moving while still giving us room to play. And we really did move like a rocket. What surprised me most was the ambition. We had car stunts. We had a wedding inside an auto garage, which was certainly a first for me.

Our wardrobe team, Viktoria and Sergei were pushing the boundaries of what was considered safe in the vertical space. And I got to work alongside an amazing cast; including Denise Trepat, Aaron Oberst and Grant Holleman. There was this feeling that everybody understood the assignment, but also wanted to see how far we could push it.

That was probably the first micro drama production where I really felt the format beginning to expand beyond its traditional tropes. NetShort wasn’t afraid to take risks. There was an awareness that, yes, we were making something designed to be watched vertically on a phone, but that doesn’t mean it has to feel small.

That’s something I’ve carried with me ever since. Traditional filmmaking can give you more time and resources, but verticals teach you another incredibly valuable skill… decisiveness. You can’t overthink everything. You prepare, make a choice, commit to it and move forward. There’s an adrenaline to that style of filmmaking that I actually really enjoy.

More than anything, though, I remember how much fun we had. There are productions where you’re counting the hours until wrap, and there are productions where you’re exhausted, but genuinely don’t want the experience to end. This was the latter. I’d work with Michael and that entire team again in a heartbeat… Putting it out there!

Vertical productions are known for moving at an intense pace, with long days, tight schedules and very few takes per scene. How do you prepare for that? How much of the character do you build before you arrive, and how much do you discover in the moment because there’s no time to search for it on set?

Marc: Every show asks something different of you. Whether I’m playing the leading man, a supporting character, the good guy or the villain, I always do my homework. Know your character. The challenge for me has become finding something that makes each character feel unique.

Vertical storytelling often works with recognizable archetypes… the billionaire, the bad boy, the romantic lead, the villain, but an archetype doesn’t have to become a stereotype. I’m always looking for some small behavioral choice, sense of humor, physicality or contradiction that makes the character feel like an actual person rather than another version of somebody I’ve already played.

But I’ve also learned not to over-engineer it. You can arrive with this brilliant idea of who the character is, and then you meet your scene partner, talk to the director, step onto the location and realize, “Oh, none of that works.” You have to be willing to throw it away. That’s actually one of my favorite things about acting.

Every cast and crew develops its own little culture, and every actor brings a unique energy. Sometimes another performer gives you something completely unexpected and suddenly the scene becomes better than what you rehearsed in your head. I want to be prepared enough that I can actually respond to that rather than being trapped inside a performance I’ve already decided on.

Verticals really sharpen that muscle because there isn’t much time to search on set. You make a choice, see if it works, adjust and go again. Sometimes the adjustment has to happen in seconds. Prepare… Have ideas… Make strong choices, but don’t fall so in love with any of them that you stop listening to what’s actually happening in front of you.

There’s still a lot of skepticism about verticals in traditional Hollywood. Some see them as low-budget soap operas, others as a threat to the way things are done. From inside the industry, what’s the biggest misconception people have? What would you want a skeptical casting director or showrunner to understand about this work?

Marc: The biggest misconception is trying to judge verticals by the rules of traditional film and television. Verticals are a separate class and medium of filmmaking, with their own unique language, rhythm and relationship with the audience.

Are some of them ridiculous? Absolutely. But I think dismissing the entire format as a low-budget soap opera misses what’s actually happening underneath it. Verticals are designed around personal desire and immediate emotional response. The storytelling has an incredibly specific rhythm.

In some ways, I compare it to stand-up comedy, not because verticals are necessarily funny, but because timing is everything. A comedian understands the setup, the beat and the punchline. Vertical writers have to understand the setup, escalation and cliffhanger. You’re constantly building toward the next emotional turn that makes someone need to keep watching.

Having now now sold nearly 10 verticals that Joe and I have written, I’ve developed a much deeper respect for how difficult that structure actually is. You’re writing in incredibly compressed windows. There isn’t much room for indulgence. Every scene has to accomplish something, and every episode has to create enough momentum to earn the next one.

I think that’s also why the format is so collaborative. There’s an old saying that film is a director’s medium and television is a writer’s medium. I think verticals might be one of the first formats that truly lives somewhere in between, or maybe somewhere completely different.

The writer creates the hook. The director has to communicate it visually, often incredibly quickly. The actor has to sell an emotional truth without any setup. Editorial has to understand rhythm. Music, wardrobe, cinematography and production design all have to communicate information almost instantaneously. If one piece isn’t working, you feel it immediately.

I also believe verticals are going to become an important gateway into the future of filmmaking. For generations, one of the hardest parts of breaking into this business has simply been getting onto a professional set and learning how the machine actually works.

Verticals are creating an enormous amount of production, which means more actors, writers, directors, cinematographers and crew members are getting the opportunity to work alongside professionals and learn by actually doing it.

There’s no film school that can completely replicate being on set when you’re losing daylight, you’re behind schedule, something isn’t working and two dozen people have to figure out the solution together. That’s where you learn filmmaking. Those answers could come from any department, and it’s worth understanding (and respecting) them all.

So I don’t necessarily see verticals as the destination for everyone. I see them as an incredible proving ground. Someone shooting a vertical today could be directing a studio feature tomorrow. An actor learning how to carry 12 pages on an eight-day shoot is developing muscles and confidence they’ll take into television and film. A crew member can accumulate years’ worth of practical experience in under a week.

If I were talking to a skeptical casting director or showrunner, I wouldn’t try to convince them that verticals are replacing traditional film and television. They’re not. I’d say they’re teaching us something about where filmmaking, and audiences, are going.

We’re living in an era where a filmmaker isn’t only competing with another television show for someone’s attention. You’re competing with everything on their phone. Vertical storytelling is essentially a laboratory for understanding what makes somebody stop scrolling, emotionally invest and keep watching. You don’t have to love the format to recognize that there’s something worth learning from it.

After His Affair I Slept with His Best Friend is a title that tells you the whole emotional premise before a single scene plays. When the setup is that heightened, how do you keep the character grounded and believable? Where do you personally draw the line between leaning into the melodrama and playing it truthfully?

Marc: Well… with a title like “After His Affair…”, subtlety isn’t the objective. That’s part of the fun. The circumstances can be completely outrageous, but as an actor, you can’t play them like they’re outrageous. My character doesn’t know he’s in a vertical drama. To him, this is actually happening, and he thinks he can get away with it.

I’ll embrace the heightened circumstances, the sexuality, the confrontations, all the things the genre wants. But I still have to understand why this person is behaving this way. The second I start winking at the audience or judging the material, I think you lose them.

Tess Dinerstein, our lead actress and an incredible scene partner, once described verticals to me as a kind of modern-day Shakespeare. That really stuck with me, because Shakespeare wasn’t exactly subtle either. Forbidden love, betrayal, revenge, murder, mistaken identities, secret marriages, people making completely insane decisions because they’re in love, jealous, angry or terrified.

The circumstances are enormous. The emotions underneath them are very human. I think that’s the trick with verticals. There’s a difference between playing something big and playing something false. That’s especially true with romance and sexuality.

You can’t walk into a scene thinking, “Okay, now I have to be sexy.” That’s death. You have to play what the person actually wants. Does he want to be loved? Is he jealous? Is this revenge? Is all that confidence actually insecurity? Once you understand the need underneath it, you don’t have to manufacture the rest.

And weirdly, After His Affair became one of my favorite projects I’ve worked on. The turnaround was insane. We wrapped, and less than a week later it was already released. In traditional film and television, you can wait months or even years to see something you made.

My understanding at the time was that FlareFlow wasn’t necessarily expecting it to be a major breakout, which made the response even more interesting. That’s another thing this medium keeps teaching me: nobody completely knows what’s going to connect.

Kasey Esser is another great example. He came out of this world and has continued expanding into other opportunities. That’s exciting to me because I don’t think labels like “vertical actor,” “television actor,” “film actor” or “creator” matter nearly as much as they used to. Talent can come from anywhere.

So my rule is pretty simple: respect the world you’re in. Don’t make fun of the material from inside the performance. Commit to it completely. The audience already knows the title is crazy. My job is to make them believe the people aren’t.

Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter in 2025, you said verticals are evolving rapidly and will eventually reach the quality Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman promised with Quibi, and that they were simply ahead of their time. That was a bold position when many in Hollywood were dismissing the format. More than a year later, do you still believe it? What have you seen since then that either confirms or challenges that prediction?

Marc: I absolutely still believe it, but my opinion of what that evolution looks like has changed. Years before I ever acted in a vertical, Joe and I were actually developing our own micro drama concept. I remember sitting at The Grill on the Alley in Beverly Hills, and Jeffrey Katzenberg was having lunch with Patrick Whitesell at the next table.

This was right around the time Quibi was acquiring content. And I’ll admit it… I was completely eavesdropping. I’d always admired Katzenberg. Look at what he helped build at Disney and then DreamWorks. He’s a maverick. So when somebody with that track record was betting that heavily on short-form entertainment designed for your phone, I paid attention.

The problem was, nobody really knew what this new format was supposed to be yet… including us. How long should an episode be? How short is too short? Or were they just repurposing existing content. We always thought it would be smart for film & TV to treat micro dramas as companion pieces to existing franchises and content.

Quibi was asking the right questions. I just think they were asking them before the audience behavior and business model had fully caught up. That’s why I said they were ahead of their time, and I still believe that. Quibi disappeared, but the behavior they were betting on didn’t. People didn’t stop watching their phones. If anything, the opposite happened.

What came next was fascinating. Chinese companies became much more aggressive about experimenting with shorter episodes, lower budgets, cliffhanger-driven storytelling and mobile-first distribution, expanding from the Tik Tok train of thought. Eventually, that model found its way back into the American market in a completely different form.

And now there’s an actual industry around it. Actors, writers, directors and crews are making a living. Studios are being built around it. Money is moving through locations, wardrobe, equipment and post-production. Whatever you think of the content creatively, an ecosystem exists now that didn’t exist a few years ago. Where my thinking has changed is around the platforms themselves. Frankly, I think there are too many.

I don’t believe we’re going to have this many standalone vertical platforms forever. Some will disappear. Some will merge. Some will be acquired. A smaller group will figure out the right combination of content, audience, economics and become the major players. But I don’t see consolidation as evidence that the format failed. That’s what happens when something stops being an experiment and starts becoming an industry.

In a strange way, verticals remind me of spaghetti Westerns. They were made quickly, cheaply and in huge numbers. A lot of people dismissed them as disposable entertainment. But out of that machine came extraordinary filmmakers, actors, techniques and eventually films that had a lasting influence on cinema.

I think verticals could have a similar evolutionary effect. Will every vertical suddenly become premium entertainment? Of course not. Nor should it. But eventually somebody is going to take everything this first generation has learned: the hooks, speed, cliffhangers, mobile framing, understanding of audience behavior, and combine it with exceptional writing, directing, acting and real production value.

That’s the moment I’m waiting for. Because when that happens consistently, I think we’ll end up surprisingly close to what Katzenberg and Meg Whitman were imagining with Quibi. They may not have been wrong about where we were going. They may have just gotten there too early.

If you had the power to change one thing about how verticals are made, whether that’s pay, schedules, scripts, crew conditions, how actors are credited, or something else entirely, what would it be and why? What would that change mean for the quality of what ends up on screen?

Marc: If I could change one thing… I’d change the stigma. What bothers me is the idea that working in an emerging medium somehow makes you less of an actor, writer, director or filmmaker. I’ve watched incredibly talented people shoot an insane amount of material under ridiculous time constraints and make it work. That takes real skill. Hollywood also has a funny relationship with new media. People mocked Vine, YouTube creators and TikTok, until those creators built massive audiences. Then suddenly everybody wanted to sign them.

I think verticals are going through a version of that same cycle. I’m also very conscious of not wanting to be pigeonholed as “the vertical guy.” I’m incredibly grateful for what the medium has given me, but my ambitions extend far beyond it.

What does love mean to you today, and how has your understanding of it evolved as you’ve grown both personally and professionally?

Marc: I think when you’re younger, you confuse love with intensity. The butterflies, the chase, the chemistry, the dramatic moments, that feeling that somebody has completely turned your world upside down. As I’ve gotten older, I think love has become much quieter and, in some ways, much more meaningful.

Love is consistency. It’s showing up when there isn’t an audience. It’s knowing somebody’s flaws and not trying to rewrite them into the person you want them to be.

I’ve also realized love isn’t exclusively romantic. I see it in my parents and what they’ve built together. I see it in my relationship with my brother and my sister. I see it in friendships that have survived different chapters of my life. And creatively, I think you have to love what you do enough to stay with it when nobody is applauding.

When you look ten years into the future, Marc, where do you see yourself, both in your career and in the life you hope to be living? Do you picture yourself mainly as an actor, a writer, a producer, or some mix of all three? Will verticals still be part of that picture, or will they be the chapter that led you somewhere else?

Marc: If you had told me a year ago that I’d be up for a CMA for writing the dialogue in Ella Langley’s Choosin’ Texas music video, I probably wouldn’t have believed you.

And that’s what’s exciting about my life right now. Every day feels like a new adventure, and some of the best opportunities I’ve had have come completely out of left field. A few years ago, I made a promise to myself to stop having expectations. Not goals, expectations. There’s a difference.

Goals give you something to move toward. Expectations convince you that you already know what the journey is supposed to look like. And whenever I’ve tried to map my life out too specifically, life has usually had a much better idea.

Ten years from now, I don’t necessarily want to be able to tell you exactly what my title is: Actor, writer, producer, filmmaker, musician, I hope I’m still doing some combination of all of it. More than anything, I want to preserve the creative hunger I have right now.

To conclude, what message would you like to share with your fans, the people who believe in you, and the friends who’ve stood by you throughout your journey?

Marc: Thank you… I’ll always remember the people who were there before anybody was paying attention. I’m incredibly grateful for everyone who’s been part of the story so far. And I say “so far” very intentionally. We’re only just getting started.

From dirt-bike trails to film sets, Marc Cotter’s story keeps returning to one instinct: commit to it. Goals, yes. Expectations, no. Verticals are one chapter of a much bigger creative life, and he has no plans to look down on it just because he wants to keep turning the pages.

As for what comes next, he chose his words carefully.

“We’re only just getting started.”

Marc Cotter’s Social Media:

• Instagram: @marccotter
• IMDb: Marc Cotter