He's come a long way since the storm and so has his family. "All My Children" star Adam Mayfield describes the rough road traveled these past two years.
He plays Scott Chandler, the son of Stuart Chandler, the brother of the powerful and wealthy Adam Chandler of Pine Valley, Pennsylvania.
Mayfield is a self-described average guy from Texas who had a dream.
"I'm just your regular, run of the mill suburban kid who wanted to do this and got lucky," he said.
When we first met Mayfield, it was two years ago in the days following Hurricane Ike.
"My heart just sank. She just said, 'We lost the house,'" he said.
Adam helped his mother and step-father clean up what was left of their San Leon home right on Galveston Bay. At the time, he was a struggling actor, tending bar on the weekend.
"You get a lot of rejection," said Mayfield.
He was searching for the next gig. Even as a child the 34-year-old seemed to enjoy playing someone else. But it wasn't until he enrolled at Houston's High School for the Performing and Visual Arts that the acting bug really bit.
The yearbook pages show a teen starring on stage from the taming of the shrew to 42nd Street.
"You had everything from Sondheim to Shakespeare," he said.
After graduating from DePaul Theater School in Chicago, like a scripted movie scene he took off with $1,000 in his pocket.
"I bought a motorcycle and I rode out to Los Angeles," said Mayfield. "I just knew that's where I wanted to be."
But the success from the HPSPV stage to the set of "All My Children" wasn't overnight.
"I booked a guest starring role on one episode of a show called "Boston Public" and I thought I had arrived," he said.
It was several more years before Mayfield was casted as Chandler.
"No, the guest roles did not keep coming," he said.
The phone call came in 2009, a long way from the devastation of Ike.
"Everything was gone. This was gone, the marina was gone, all the piers were gone," said Mayfield.
And his family...
"It's kind of funny how that all paralleled. I got a little success and my mom got this beautiful new place," he said.
The months following Ike were a real turning point for all of them. But there are still reminders of the path to here.
"Ironically enough, it survived intact," he said.
A part of the old house, and memories of tending bar between countless auditions.
"After you struggled for a while out there, after you really struggle, you are just happy to be working," he said.
Now he's shooting 120 pages of script a day, roughly the size of a film script, it's something Mayfield welcomes. And a trip home is cherished, too.
