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Tadeo Martinez (B.F.A. ’19) is this week’s featured alum in our new Alumni Spotlight series for the This Week at Meadows e-newsletter. Each week, a different Meadows alum will be highlighted for their accomplishments post-graduation.

The Meadows School of the Arts hopes each student graduates feeling artistically transformed and armed with the necessary skills to succeed in their chosen profession. Theatre alum Tadeo Martinez, who earned a B.F.A. in Acting, is now a member of England’s revered Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and he credits his time at Meadows with helping to launch his current career as an actor.

“Meadows gave me the foundation for my acting technique, so everything I've learned since has only expanded the core principles that Meadows instilled in me,” explains Martinez, who still speaks with current and past faculty members often. “[My] professors would play us RSC videos on YouTube during class to explain and unpack acting techniques or methods from time to time so to actually now be here on that same stage is such a wild, full circle moment.”

He not only established his acting skills at Meadows, but also the discipline required for the life of an actor, especially at a company with the caliber of RSC. The production schedule and pace is not a leisurely one, with Martinez now performing in his third show with RSC since last summer. In 2024 he performed in The Merry Wives of Windsor and The School for Scandal in Rep, and he is currently performing in a production of Hamlet.

Martinez (center) acts opposite Jared Harris (right) and Chase Brown (left) as Guildenstern in RSC's 2024 production of "Hamlet." Photo by Ikin Yum.

“One of the thrilling, and also terrifying, things about actor training is how it requires you to show up as your full self, which is quite hard to know who you are when you're 18 years old,” says Martinez of his transformative time in the program. “Meadows gave me space to discover and begin unpack that; who I was when I got there and who I was when I left were two very different people.”

The self-discovery journey that Martinez embarked on during his time at Meadows has allowed him to bring his personal experience to a historic and established stage like RSC. During his productions, he has been given the opportunity to re-imagine and explore multiple classic British characters through the lens of being a queer Latino man.

And even at this level of his craft, he still refers back to the extensive notes he took in his Meadows theatre classes, while also constantly learning new things about the art form and about himself. Understanding and believing that it is a privilege to be an artist is a lesson that Martinez learned in the program and has not taken for granted.

“Fail greatly and unapologetically; you are in drama school to learn and to grow, not to impress,” he encourages current and future students. “Be yourself and the work that is for you and meant for you will come, because no one else on this earth can do what you do.”