During the mid-1990s Austin St. John could be seen playing Jason, the Red Ranger and leader on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. After the show he became an EMT, spent time in the Middle East, and in recent years, joined the convention circuit and got back into acting. Following the Great Philadelphia Comic Con, Scoop talked to St. John about upcoming projects, including Black Salt, life during the Power Rangers, convention experiences, working in emergency medicine, and martial arts.

Scoop: You are an actor, martial artist, and EMT. What other hats do you wear? Are you also secretly a tattoo artist or a geologist?
Austin St. John (ASJ): Nope. I love anthropology and archaeology but, nothing off the cuff. EMT is just a prefix. It’s what follows the EMT that designates training, level of training, and education, so EMTB, EMTI – there are many designations.

I spent about fifteen years as a paramedic, I just retired. So, I let my certifications go for the first time in sixteen years, now. Well, at least one of them. I’ve done training through NIMS, which is National Incident Management, through FEMA and through the military IS-75 Resource Integration. Between those two it sets me up to run events like Hurricane Katrina or an F-5 tornado, amongst other national response network and logistics providers. All sorts of things, everything from logistics to operations to command and finance and everything that goes into them when you get these big monstrosities, like major events.

Right now I’m executive producing some projects, I’m working as a producer on other projects. I was just asked to play a father in a film called Monster Busters, which will be a fun kid flick. They’ve already done quite a few films that are designed towards kids. I have my own babies, so I love stuff like that. They hit me up last minute. The film was already financed, they had everybody cast, and I guess, something fell through with the guy that was going to be the father, so they asked me to do it. So, I’m going to go help them out for a couple of days.

I’m working with films like Black Salt, I’m working with Gideon’s Frontier, I’m working with Survival’s End. I’ve got several other projects in the works that I can’t talk about just yet. [Editor's note: this interview took place before the announcement of The Order.]

But they all take time. One of them I’ve been working on for over a year. While I’m capable of many things, having been a paramedic for sixteen years, I’m not rich, so I can’t finance my own films. But, I’m reaching out to people. I’m making leeway and connections, learning how to develop better business plans that aren’t 911-oriented and go from there.

On some other pages I spent four years in the Middle East as a medic attached to military operations. I’ve got medical operations training and certifications, I’m weapons qualified.

So, yeah, lots of things. I don’t normally think about them in a catalog sort of way.

Scoop: I found that interesting as I was doing some research on you. You’ve got a lot going on.
ASJ: Yeah, I really do and I have for a long time. I’m pretty aggressive when it comes to my work management. Being gone for twenty years from the entertainment business I had a lot to commit to when I came back. If I wasn’t going to commit to it, and dive in and create my own production company and my own business entity, ASJ Enterprises, and set up a tax shelter in the business and everything that goes with it, then really I was wasting my time. I wasn’t going to come back and just start auditioning and be an actor – not in today’s digital era where it’s so much easier to build my own projects.

Scoop: How long have you been studying martial arts and are you still actively involved?
ASJ: I started in martial arts when I was five years old, so a little over 35 years. Not active during all of it. Probably the last seven years-ish I wasn’t actively training just because I was focusing on so many other things – going to college, time in the Middle East, finishing up my degrees, things along those lines. I am now currently under Sifu Shane Lear near Lima, Ohio, Lear’s martial arts. He does Gen Yuan Kempo Quan Fa style. So I am now training with him. In fact, I’ll be out there this summer at his studio where I’m going to shut off my phone, ignore everything on social media and just train.

Next April we are planning on taking people to China, 30 to 40 people, to go train at a two thousand-year-old temple. We were planning a trip in October, but I may be filming another project at that time, so we may push it to April next year. I’ll probably be putting out more information on that soon.

And then Sifu Robinson, who is a member of the Black Dragons – which is the elite of the elite of the martial arts world – he and I are going to be working on some pretty cool stuff. But it’s not really stuff that I like to… I’m not the braggadocios type. I think there’s a lot of that in the martial arts community today and it’s not how I was raised. But, yes, I’m all over it and there will be a lot more to come, probably this year. I’ll be putting things out there with a bit more information anyway. But really, the driving factors and things behind it are things I keep close to the vest.

Scoop: You’re currently working on the movie Black Salt. What is the movie about?
ASJ: Essentially they are creating the first black James Bond-type of cool character. He’s a buff guy, the ladies tend to think he’s pretty good looking, he’s a pretty good fighter. They’re bringing in a Kung Fu kind of mix in genre to the movie. So you’ll see a lot of people from the old martial arts-Kung Fu movies throughout the entire project. If you watch the fifty-minute mini film you’ll see some faces in there, if you watched any of the old martial arts movies, that you’ll go, “Oh yeah!” And some of the newer ones. There are some well known Chinese actors and actresses in there. And of course, they make the Yakuza the bad guy, and then there’s a CIA-element and there’s spooky cool gunfights, swordfights, energy blasting, pretty cool concept.

They’ve got a comic book that’s out. Owen Ratliff is producing for Ratti Entertainment, Ben Ramsey is directing. They are getting ready to put out the seventh volume of their comic book series, where they’re going to try to figure out how to introduce my character. What am I going to be, really. That vote is going on Twitter and various other social media places where we’re asking people, should I be good or evil. The vote is actually really close, within a point or two of each other, from start to finish – people cannot decide. So, I’ve got people mixed up pretty well, it seems.

Scoop: You gave fans the chance to choose if you’d play a hero or villain in the movie. Why did you and the filmmakers decide to put that decision in the hands of your fans?
ASJ: Number one it’s engagement. The producers wanted to see who really was interested. I mean, I’ve been gone twenty years. Who cares, right? That was something I brought to them. They were like, “Well, we can’t figure out whether to make you good or evil.” I said, “Let’s put it out to my fans. I guarantee you they have an opinion, and they won’t be shy about it.” For all of the people we have voting, we know that there are significantly more that are looking at their feeds and following along but don’t go vote. Out of the people that are voting, we know that that’s just the tip of the iceberg of people who are paying attention. And we see that, of course, through the analytics. There are people following pages that have never been friendly to me, that are still following what’s going on with my vote. So, we know that what’s going on is far beyond just my social media. It’s kind of been an interesting learning process. I mean, Power Ranger fans are diehard, they are diehard. They remember what they remember and I’ll be damned if they want to remember anything else. It’s nostalgic and it’s kind of cool and a little bit scary.

Scoop: How did you get involved with Black Salt?
ASJ: They reached out to me through a charity. I’ve always had a soft spot for charities, I’ve worked with quite a few. You don’t get into emergency medicine because you lack compassion. The name of this one was Healthy Choices for Hungry Children and it’s run by Sifu Robinson, I didn’t know that at the time. I got an email and we were going back and forth, he said “Hey, I’m a 501(c)(3), I’m a legitimate tax shelter, verified organization. Give me a call, I want to see if you’ll come out to this event.” So, somebody that he knew, I knew, had shared information and he had gotten my email. I’m a little leery of these things at first. So I said, “Okay, you’re a 501(c)(3), send me your EIN.” Which, usually, most people are like, “My what?” and I think, “Yeah, okay, you have no idea what you are talking about.” So he sent his EIN number and was like, “Here I am, here’s my website, I’m legitimate, here’s what I’m doing, here’s my purpose, here’s my mission statement.” Now, I know I’ve got somebody legitimate. So, I said “What are you doing?” He said, “Well, we’re doing a charity drive for this function, but we’re also doing a premiere for a film that I’m one of the executive producers on. I do all of the artwork illustrations, I manage the comic books. It would be great if you would come up and we could basically use your name to pull people in to our film.” I thought, okay, I have no problem being used for a good cause.

So, we got that figured out and told him to let me come check it out. We hit it off. I handed over the cash I made from autograph signings that day and the next day I went out to help with the premiere, which was at the University of Florida. They had a good showing and afterwards he asked, if I’d like to be involved in the project. So it kind of went from there. I was like, “Yeah, let’s check it out.”

Scoop: Will it be stylized like Kung Fu movies of the 1970s, more modern ones, or both?
ASJ: It’s got a pretty cool blend of newer technology, but when you come back to Kung Fu, it really is a style of its own. You can do it in outer space in 3016 and still takes you back thousands of years. There are definitely throwbacks to training at temples. There’s traditional garb, traditional movement, traditional premise when we speak of the arts, or when you see them being performed, for the most part. So you’ll definitely get a nostalgia from the old movies, but you’ll see it mixed and used in other places in real life timeframes and settings. So, it’s pretty cool.

Scoop: Can you announce if you are playing a hero or villain?
ASJ: It’s still in the polls, we’re actually drawing up a synopsis right now. Brian Robinson is putting together different iterations and variations that we discussed. I have a good idea, but I’m not going to throw it out there just yet. We’ll see.

Scoop: Either way, I assume you’ll have an action role?
ASJ: Oh yeah. You’ll see me back to action.

Scoop: What did you like about being on the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers?
ASJ: At the time, I was 18, shortly after we signed the contract we started filming. It was definitely one of those shows that I knew, as a child, I would’ve watched. But, as a young adult I was struggling with being too cool to be a part of something like that. I thought, “This is really cheesy.” My cool teenager self just couldn’t comprehend what I was doing. Then I started meeting fans and little ones and I started realizing the impact we were really having. That’s what really started making me fall in love with the show. I was blown away by how much we were loved and supported.

Scoop: In addition to being heroes, the teens on Power Rangers were also upstanding, straight-laced kids. How did you feel about being a role model for young viewers?
ASJ: It was intimidating. Nothing like feeling global pressure to do it right. It was an immense weight for me. The producers weren’t shy about telling us, “Go out get drunk, do drugs, do something stupid and you’re out.” They were all over us about that stuff. And long before they said anything about it, each of us could feel the weight of it, certainly. It was intimidating, humbling, and pretty cool. I felt like I had a million little brothers and sisters, probably a hundred million or so. It was pretty intense, no matter which way you took it.

Scoop: You were in over 80 episodes from 1993 to 1994. How challenging was that shooting schedule?
ASJ: Insane. It was insane. We were doing twelve to eighteen-hour days, 4 AM set calls, fights, three-camera unit, two to three episodes a week. Six days a week I was working on that show the first year. We finally got a week off for Christmas and I think I slept two out of the five days.

Scoop: It was probably good that you were all about eighteen years old so you had the energy to do it.
ASJ: Yeah. It was a lot of work, but it was worth it.

Scoop: Okay, very important question: did you ever get tired of wearing red t-shirts, tank tops, and shorts?
ASJ: Probably for years, like a decade after the show I wouldn’t go anywhere near red. At all. Because, I hadn’t grown out the beard, so it was hard enough for me to blend in anywhere. The last damn thing I was going to do was put on red and make it that much easier for people. I have a few things now that have some red in them, but not many. I’m very careful about where I wear it.

If anything I get a lot of BS sometimes if I show up in a blue sweatshirt – one I’ve worn for ten years, it’s comfy, I like the way it fits. But, people say, “What are you wearing blue for, that’s not your color. You trying to be Billy now, is there a Blue Ranger episode coming up? Is that a secret, is this something you’re not telling us?” I’m like, “Man, it’s a blue sweatshirt, that’s all. I promise, there’s no conspiracy theory.”

Scoop: What was it like returning to the Power Rangers as the Gold Ranger?
ASJ: Well, for me it was pretty brief it was seventeen episodes. I came in, I did my job and I was out. I had no idea until fifteen years later what a huge response it got in the ratings. Then, two years after that I came back to the fandom and started hearing about the impact that it had amongst the fans. So, apparently it was a big deal on a lot of scales. I was the last one to know, naturally. I’ve learned more about Power Rangers since I’ve come back to the show than I ever did on the show. I mean, I know a lot of behind the scenes stuff, but not the stats and everything else that goes with it. I have fans that come up and just start rattling off and cataloging and they’re like “I’ll prove it,” and I’m like, “We’re good man, I got you.” So I hear some really cool stuff traveling the world and meeting hundreds of thousands over the last two years. There’s a lot of passion out there. Not just for guys and gals your age who are within my age range for the fandom, but your parents. I have a lot of parents who come up and tell me how much they loved the show. And I have a lot of your children now looking up at me from across the table. Your children, if you have any. They’re just stupefied. There’s three, in some cases, four generations that are pretty attached. It’s pretty neat.  

Scoop: Power Rangers was a big part of your acting career. How has it affected you personally?
ASJ: I think indirectly it’s kind of what inspired me to save lives for real – or to try. I knew I was acting as a superhero, I knew I was pretending I had superpowers. Then I would see these little ones come up with absolute trust and faith in this all powerful thing that I am and I kind of felt like it was a bit misplaced. Because there was no supersuit, there was no tyrannosaurus in my backyard. So I felt like I wanted to head out that way and find a way to do it for real. I come from a long line of public servants – mom was a cop, dad was a marine, brother’s a marine, my brother’s now a cop in LA. So, we’re a long line of family servants and I finally found my place.

Scoop: You’re also working on A Gift of the Heart. Tell me about that project.
ASJ: It was written by Andrew Heller, he is an executive producer on the film, as am I. He asked me to come on and play a character by the name of Sam Goldberg. Sam Goldberg is a racist prick, he’s a real jerk. His last name is Goldberg, he’s of Jewish decent. He’s this apex predator attorney, he’s just a beast, he destroys everybody. He’s rising to the top, he’s a monster in the courtroom. He has an amazing career, incredible reputation, but his wife and his daughter and his home life are almost nonexistent. And he’s clueless to it because he’s so work driven.

His school aged child comes home one day and says, “Daddy, I met this little boy and he’s really cool and I want to hang out with him.” And I ask her what’s his name and the name has a Latin ring to it and I’m like, “Absolutely not, you deserve better. I work too hard for you to hang out with people like this.” It wasn’t super hateful, but clearly he’s a discriminatory jerk.

Meanwhile my wife allows this, she’s like, “Don’t worry about your daddy. He’s doing his job, he’s working. You go be friends, we’ll take are of this.” So, they end up building this really deep bond. To make a long story short, my daughter has an irreversible heart problem with a super rare blood type and needs a transplant and we can’t find anybody – nobody is on the lists. Her problem is getting worse and she doesn’t have long.

Well, this little boy that she becomes friends with, who is literally and figuratively from the other side of the tracks, ends up with another type of medical problem and – without giving away too much of the story line – what I can tell you is that there’s a match made and at the end of the story, well, there won’t be a dry eye in the room. My character is left standing there looking at everything he has thought and done and said and kind of forced to have that man in the mirror moment and it’s pretty intense. You walk away feeling good, hurt – it’s a sappy film, absolutely.

But, it addresses things like organ transplantation, it addresses things like discrimination. Specifically, these immigrants come over from Cuba. The opening of the film, the mom, dad, and newborn baby get in an inner tube in Cuba to come to America. Fast forward only father and son arrive at the beach, so we never discuss what happened. But, in the first seconds, there’s loss and the film goes on from there. There’s quite a few really cool characters involved.

It’s an indy film. We’re at about half a million and whether it takes a year or six years to get it financed, we will. It’ll be a really good film. If we do it right, I’m hoping we can get it up for some rewards at the film festivals. We’ll see. It’s a good project.

Scoop: With your martial arts skills and action acting background have you considered getting into superhero movies or TV shows?
ASJ: Well, Black Salt is exactly that. Superheroes, supervillains, something like that – absolutely. I would have to see what else is out there, because I’m not going through the mainstream Hollywood channels. I refuse to do that. I’m more interested in – even if it takes years – developing my own projects and doing it on purpose. So, I don’t know. There may be a way to do that, I’m just not sure as of yet. I’ve got some survival films, I’ve got some action stuff, some heartfelt stuff.

I’m in the beginnings of building a feature film with the Autism Society of America – we’re going to do a documentary for them. If I have my way, we’ll have the script written and shoot the documentary while we shoot the film and put something out that’s both informative about autism and Asperger’s, where people are on the spectrum. Because there’s a lot of people who just don’t know a thing about it and it affects a lot of people, and it’s not just children. Some hold jobs and function in society, some need caregivers – it depends on where they are in the spectrum. So we’re working on stuff like that.

A Walk with Grace is a romantic comedy, that I’d love to see come to fruition – that’s kind of fun. I’m looking at all sorts of projects, because I don’t want to just be in one type anymore.

Scoop: You have become a regular on the convention circuit. What’s your most memorable fan interaction?
ASJ: You know everything, from some of the comical ones where people come up and I watch them spontaneously combust. It’s like a supernova, they just start vibrating. Then they just get faster and faster, explode over the top [waves arms around] and go nuts. Or they explode the other way – grown men and women just snot and tears everywhere. Those are comical and fun and cute all at the same time. So those are always good. Sometimes I end up with snot down my shirt and it makes me feel like I’m at home with my little ones. That’s pretty good.

I’ve signed some very interesting body parts.

Scoop: You told me a bit about that at Great Philadelphia Comic Con.
ASJ: Yeah, I’ve had other parts that have been tattooed. And they’ll tell me. They’ll say, “Hey man, can you sign right here, just right across here.” They’ll lift up their shirts and there’s a list of famous people from various shows that they’ve met. They’re like “I saved this spot for you,” and I’m like “Great, I got the upper right butt cheek, yes!” [laughs] Then I say, “Do me a favor, take a picture and put it up on my Facebook page.” I love to see this stuff. I think it’s kind of cool. I’ve had my name tattooed on quite a few people, or my Zord, or my face. The face thing is a bit much, I’m like “This might qualify as a super stalker, I’m not sure, but we’ll come back to that. But, if I find you in my bushes, we’re going to have a problem.” I’ve had some very private places presented for me to sign.

The kids are great, I love seeing the kids. Moms and dads are like, “I made them start from the beginning” and I’m like, “Okay, you go on!” I hear it all. I hear some tearful stories, some laughter stories. I’ve done some dear mama videos, “I’m so sorry I made your son break your lamp when he was five, at home, because he jumped off the couch being me. I’m sorry I broke your vase, mama.”

Scoop: That’s great!
ASJ: Oh man, the dude that asked me to do it was this huge black guy. When he walked into the room I thought, if this guy gave Hulk Hogan a hug he’d squish Hulk Hogan like a bug. I hope he doesn’t decide to hug me. I’m not Hulk Hogan. This guy’s got biceps bigger around than my head. He goes, “Hey, I want to know if you’ll do a dear mama video for me.” So I ask, “What’s a dear mama video?” He says, “Well, when I was five years old I jumped off the couch and broke my mama’s favorite vase and I was playing Jason, the Red Ranger, in the part where you jump on the Tyrannasaurous, that’s what I was doing and I broke the vase. Will you shoot a dear mama video?” I said, “Okay, let’s do this.” So we shot the dear mama video and he wrapped me up in this big bear hug, I think he broke three ribs and he’s just grinning like his five-year-old self again. I still wasn’t sure what just happened to me. So, there’s all kinds of cool stories out there.

Scoop: At this point you’ve had a few careers. What are your plans for the next few years?
ASJ: If I have my way I’ll be out of the comic con circuit, well not out, but less over the next few years so I can spend more time focusing on producing, directing, and writing. This is a pretty simple economic system we live in – supply and demand – the more you work, the more you’re in demand. I need to get some new projects out there and I need to grow, ultimately, outside of Power Rangers. I’ll never leave it behind, but, I don’t want to be pigeon-holed into just being that. In the world of the entertainment industry, you’re not going to live long there. Which is why you don’t see many of the Ranger actors, especially those who stayed a long time, doing a lot of other things. A few have, but, most kind of disappear off to the wayside. So, who knows, that may happen to me too, but, I’m done with bullets and Band-Aids, I’m done saving lives for now, I’m done watching people die. I’m on to creating projects and getting stories out there, at my own pace in my own control. For the most part.

Scoop: Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
ASJ: Well, in the next thirty days, hopefully, I’ll have my new website out and released. I’m trying to get some things done where you can go and see everything that I have going on, instead of finding it in a Facebook feed. So you can look at blogs that I’ll have running. There will be stores, galleries with martial arts photos and things that I’m going to put up over the next few years. They’ll get the page developed from the ground up. It’ll be more a process of watching it grow than anything else. And it is not a Power Rangers page, it’s more about Austin. There will be a lot of things on there. Bios that I’ll put up for people like agents, stuff like that. There will be a press page with stories, as I find them or as they’re sent to me, I’ll put them up and people can talk about them. But the blog is one of the things I’ll go over the most. I’ve never run a blog and I have a lot to learn, so I’ll be on that and have my moderators helping me so that I can maintain a presence. I’m hoping to have it moving in different languages. My Facebook page will be in different languages soon. Then we’ll go from there.