Lance Guest's family lived on an 11-acre prune ranch in the then-rural Saratoga, California for most of the 1950s. He was born in 1960, when his father, a Navy fighter pilot, moved the family to a larger house with running water. At a young age, he was memorizing the comedy records of Bill Cosby, Stan Freberg, Allan Sherman, and Mel Brooks, as well as all the early 60's Bob Dylan records. He learned to play guitar at age 10 and was performing plays in junior high school.
At 15, his friend Michael Gurley asked him to join his garage band, Stillwater, for their first and only gig in the summer of 1975. He was cast in plays all throughout high school, his first being Nathan Detroit, and knowing nothing of New York, other than TV detectives, performed the entire role as Mel Brooks. He then trained in the summers at an intensive workshop created by former members of ACT in San Francisco.
Planning to attend ACT and work at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, his acting teacher convinced him to attend college at UCLA instead. After two years of back-to-back college theatre, and garnering the school's Shakespeare award in 1980, Guest, upon discovering that they made films and TV shows in LA, made a plan to acquire an agent by his senior year and moved out of the dorm and into a 2-bedroom apartment with 5 other roommates, including fellow students and future screenwriters Ed Solomon and Shane Black.
He worked two part-time jobs, attended UCLA, and began rehearsals for "Transgressor", an original play developed the previous year at school. Within weeks, he had attended his first open call for the TV show "Fame", and though not initially cast, received a call from an agent the next day inviting him to come in for a meeting. Guest was then sent out on auditions so much over the next few months that he had to quit UCLA by the end of the fall term to pursue acting full-time.
Within the next year, he had a recurring role on "Lou Grant", a pilot, 2 screen tests, an after-school special, some episodic TV, and a role opposite Jamie Lee Curtis in the horror cult classic "Halloween 2". The Writer/producer of Halloween 2, John Carpenter, was going over the film before its release and Carpenter's friend, Nick Castle, took note of the young actor and remembered him for his current project in development, "Centauri's Recruit", later to be called "The Last Starfighter".
More television movies, recurring roles, and small film roles followed, and Guest visited NYC for the first time. He came back to LA, inspired by the theater, and ready to move back east, when he was called in by Castle for what became "The Last Starfighter". Principal photography was completed in the spring of 1983, a couple of months shy of his 23rd birthday.
He was then cast as the protagonist in "The Roommate", an American Playhouse production, also starring Barry Miller and John Cameron Mitchell, based on a John Updike short story, which later won the grand prize at the LA Film Festival (1985). After wrapping "The Roommate", Guest escaped to New York and lived there for the first half of 1984 seeking theatre roles.
