Actor from the Valley rewrote the ending of a life turned tragic

Jonathan Eldell messaged me the other day. The Warren native and actor was home for the holidays and wanted to talk about his life and career. He implied the story would be worth it.

So we sat down at a local restaurant, and he told me what had transpired.

It was not at all what I was expecting to hear. It was stunning and harrowing.

The year started with months of deep misery for Eldell, followed by a life-changing reversal. He hit bottom, and then bounced back higher than ever.

Eldell, now 32, had been an actor in the Youngstown area, appearing in TV commercials and the locally made film “Fine-Tune.” He also appeared in the films “Unspeakable” and “She’s Out of My League.”

But about a year ago, the Warren JFK High School graduate (he also attended YSU and Trumbull Business College) and his girlfriend took off for Los Angeles.

It was where they wanted to be. With a few hundred bucks and barely a goodbye, they took off.

But the two were on drugs, and things quickly went wrong.

They lived in cheap hotels for a while, but that quickly fell apart for Eldell when his girlfriend hooked up with her heroin dealer and left him.

Suddenly alone and homeless, and addicted to crack and meth, Eldell spent months in squalor in LA.

During that time, he saw it all, and every bad thing you can imagine happened to him.

He was beaten, dragged and robbed of everything he owned. He was forced to steal food to survive. He roamed the streets all day and slept on concrete, or on the beach with scores of other homeless people. He was arrested several times.

He recalled walking around the city once for three straight days until he wore holes in the soles of his boots.

At times, he lived on a candy bar a day.

Despite being from a fairly well-off family, he never called home for help.

“Anything that can happen to you happened to me, many times over,” he said. “I’ve seen and done everything.”

Once he saw a man dying from a heroin overdose. He was unconscious, with the needle still stuck in his arm. Eldell called police, who quickly arrived and revived him. Eldell is certain he saved that man’s life.

His own life began to change when he started sleeping in a parking garage next to ESPN headquarters.

He befriended the guards and some employees at ESPN, who later introduced him to some higher-ups in the building.

Through those connections, he was able to get a ticket to the MTV Awards. That’s when his drug-induced haze lifted, and he remembered why he came to LA in the first place.

He got motivated to get off drugs, then started going to auditions.

To prepare, he would sneak into cheap hotels to take a shower – sometimes getting chased out.

Somehow he landed work. Commercials. Student films. Ultra-low-budget films.

Around this time, Eldell also began to document his life on Facebook. Many people in the Mahoning Valley and around the country began to take notice.

“I feel like I’ve been inspiring people,” he said, basing it on comments he has received on social media. “I never saw that coming.”

In LA, he was making progress, but his turnaround wasn’t quite complete. He was still looked down upon, and was asked to leave one party because of his less-than-polished appearance. The guard thought he had snuck in, but Eldell was able to show him his invitation.

His comeback took a huge leap when he landed a job as a video jockey for “REVOLT Live,” a daily music-video program on Time Warner Cable’s REVOLT network, which is owned by Sean Combs.

Known by his stage name Ethan Eldell, he appears on the show Mondays and Wednesdays. Eldell will head back to LA after the holidays to resume shooting.

I am not sure what the moral of his story is, or if there is one. Maybe it’s that redemption is always possible.

Or maybe, as Eldell believes, it’s that you never know what you are capable of until you are out of options.

“I am not a role model,” he said. “And never in a million years did I ever think that any of this would happen to me.

“But sometimes you can shock yourself when you run out of choices, and you have to eat. Sometimes you have to die before you can live.”