Age: "26. And that's not a lie."
Currently: Getting rave reviews as Mark, "the sensitive one" of the five harmonizin', booty shakin' and soul-savin' members of the Altar Boyz
Hometown: New Carlisle, Ohio. "It was a lot of corn, a lot of farms and it basically smelled like pig crap," the hilariously deadpan actor reminisces. "They would have tractor pull races in our parking lot at school so we couldn't park there on certain days to make room for the Future Farmers of America. I obviously wasn't really a part of that,” he says coyly. "Instead I tried to talk our music director into doing Sondheim musicals."
"No Mom, Not Seaworld!": Watching Maynard's endlessly pep-filled performance in Altar Boyz, you can't imagine him doing anything but singing and dancing, but he insists that growing up, he had another profession in mind: Marine Biology. "My room was decorated like an aquarium," he says. "Then we went to Florida once and I realized that I was petrified of the ocean. So then I thought, ‘Well, I can sing I think…and I do enjoy it. Maybe I should do musical theater!'" And so he did.
Beat It: Maynard attended the University of Cincinnati's College Conservatory of Music and moved to New York shortly after graduation. He snapped his first job—not in Broadway show, but as a bellman at the uber-trendy, star-sighting Hudson Hotel. "I thought I was really cool because I was getting my picture taken," he remembers, "but then I was like, ‘Wait a minute. I'm getting my picture taken…opening their cab door.'" Luckily, he was quickly cast in the ensemble of Broadway's Mamma Mia! and moved on to a gig in the out-of-town production of Good Vibrations, where he "learned some Michael Jackson moves" from a man with some experience in the world of pop music—American Idol Season One's runner-up, Justin Guarini.
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