Angus McNellie
By: Gabrielle White
Senior Angus McNellie, one of this year’s Editor-in-Chiefs of the Spyglass journalism team has been described as someone with, “Energy that when you're around him you just can’t help but feel better than you did before,” by Claire Wilson, last year’s journalism editor, as well as McNellie’s best friend. Wilson’s words only begin to cover the basis of who McNellie is as a person, as she passes her role of editor down to him. McNellie is incredibly theatrically inclined, he can do anything he puts his mind to, and truthfully, you can’t help but laugh when you're with him.
McNellie joined journalism in the second semester of his junior year to pursue Plundercast, a podcast with Wilson in which they discussed anything from trending things that are going on, all the way to their shared love of Gilmore Girls. Wilson and McNellie clicked almost immediately, meeting in the backroom of what was the current theater director's classroom while Wilson was upset, and McNellie sat down to comfort her. “He’s always there for his friends, and he really cares about his friends, they are very important to him,” Wilson said.
As he starts his senior year, he bargains with the same questions that each and every senior has to battle with: Where to next? “Everything is such a gamble of if I really want to stay here for the next two years, or am I moving to the other side of the country?” Although he wonders where he’ll wind up next year, McNellie knows what he wants to do: Theater. Ever since McNellie was eleven and performing his theater debut in his middle school’s production of The Lion King, he knew exactly what he wanted for himself, to perform on stage. By the time of his first high school play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he felt immensely pulled towards performing. McNellie said, “Walking onto the stage for my first scene I wasn’t nervous at all and I knew that this is something that I am meant to do, this is my calling.”
“I have a type cast of a little boy that gets hit on stage, which I've done multiple times,” he said. McNellie has played roles that show this such as Pugsley Addams in The Addams Family Musical, a little boy whose sister is quickly growing up, and desperately wants to keep her away from her boyfriend, to Lefou in Beauty and the Beast, a silly little guy who worships Gaston. “It was a role I could do 100 more times,” he said when discussing his past roles, and how they have made him into the actor he is today. McNellie has a true gift for making people really feel his acting when he’s on stage, making them wholeheartedly feel the emotion he has put into his role, being able to easily tell that he has prepared for months.
McNellie puts effort and attention into each little bit of his life. Whether it be his friendships with people, preparing for a role and performing it on stage, or being a journalism editor, he has so much care and drive for whatever he puts his mind to. Theater at Morro Bay High and the Spyglass truly wouldn’t be the same without Angus McNellie.
Angus McNellie | February 27, 2024
