Mini-Biography
Jacob Kogan became interested in acting at the age of four, when a casting director, the mother of another child in his playgroup, asked him to audition for a Lasse Hallstrom film. He made it to the final round of callbacks, but then the film lost its financing, and Kogan’s parents lost interest in the whole idea of Jacob Kogan, child actor. The boy, however, did not. From that day on, he kept asking to try out for other films, and his parents kept saying no, until one day, when he was seven years old and quite adamant, his parents relented.
Reluctantly, they agreed to let him go on auditions with four basic caveats: 1) no commercials; 2) no dumb TV; 3) no bad films; 4) no anything that would relocate him to Los Angeles. Within a year, he landed various roles on Wonder showzen, an MTV comedy that was shooting in his native New York. Then along came Joshua, first role in a film. He has been Nominated for a Young Artist Award for his role In Joshua for BEST PERFORMANCE IN A FEATURE FILM Leading Young Actor.
Kogan comes by his acting bug honestly. His father Paul (née Pavel), a technology executive at Microsoft, became a child actor in his native Moscow, starring in the Rolan Bykov film TELEGRAMMA and various other Soviet films after his single mother lost her job (became a refusnik) while applying for political asylum under Brezhnev. Kogan’s mother, Deborah, bestselling author of Shutterbabe (Random House, 2002) and Motherwood (Algonquin, 2008), had a small part as a teenager in the film KEY EXCHANGE.
Kogan’s great love, like Joshua’s, is music, and though he trained with a Julliard professor to play the classical piano pieces in the film, he is an electric guitar player at heart; he’s the lead singer and guitarist in his band, Flake, which won the Battle of the Bands at the Bloomingdale School of Music in Manhattan in spring of 2006.
Kogan was ten years old during the filming of Joshua, he will next appear in the 2008 film Wherever You Are.
