Biography for
Michael Biggins More at IMDbPro »

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Michael Biggins / AKA Blackout (originally born as Michael Bigansky) is an American film actor, writer, director, and radio and TV show host best known for performing under the name of Blackout in a wide variety of pranks, prank call recordings, radio and TV shows, films, and original characters created and performed under that performance name. Blackout is his alter ego trickster persona that he uses when performing in various works, and sometimes when he does technical roles. For instance, he might be credited as "Michael Biggins" as an actor, then credited again as "Blackout" as director or sound mixer in the same film or TV show where he performed multiple tasks or roles.

He starting performing very early on in kindergarten, and continued on in various plays in both public grade schools in New York City, and very strict private Catholic schools up until 8th grade, when he relocated to South Florida and joined the drama program at Piper High School in Fort Lauderdale.

That school was very rare in that it was and still is one of the very few high schools in the country to have a fully operational FM radio station with an over 40 mile large broadcasting radius broadcasting on 88.5 FM WKPX. His improvisation talent bloomed as a teen at Piper High, and he was given the role of production manager of the station, and his own improvisational show called "No Class". It is there and on that show that he first got his "Blackout" nickname, when during his first time on the air after passing the FCC license examination, lighting struck the station tower antenna while he was on, blacking out the entire school and station for several hours, and his teachers and fellow students affectionately started calling him "Blackout".

From there on, the name stuck and after high school he studied multiple disciplines at Broward Community College, going back and forth between the talent and technical sides of theater, film, and mass media and broadcast television. He was the lead in several of the college's major plays such as Bedroom Farce, Mousetrap, and Greater Tuna, but his true love was for film making.

He registered the website Blackout.com in 1995 and was the first person ever to put a streaming prank call on the Internet of that same year, and has maintained and on again off again love affair with radio while primarily pursuing film and television, and occasionally theater roles. His debut breakout film was in 2007's "Film Contest ?" in which oddly enough, he played an eccentric trickster talk radio show host. The film won the West Palm Beach Film Festival, and he then did one last play in Fort Lauderdale, playing the role of "SKYboy", the over the top black sheep artist of the family in the interactive audience participation hit - "Grandma Sylvia's Funeral" at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts.

In 2008 he relocated back to his birthplace, New York City, and remained relatively silent as he re-acquainted himself with the New York artistic scene, and became heavily involved in the independent film community there with the goal of being a triple threat actor / writer / director of his own films. He worked as a freelance sound mixer to support himself as digital cinema slowly matured, and he opened his own production companies - Blackout's Box Studios and Hathouse Films. His last freelance sound mixer position was on a 2010 short film "AWOL" which premiers at Sundance in January of 2011. He is working on several of his own projects as actor / writer / director set to premiere in 2011, including the world's first interactive television show "Blackout's Box LIVE" where he improvises characters live as the audience directs him and feeds him lines, and two feature film projects shot entirely in HD digital cinema - "Destiny Origin" and "Origin Destiny," a two part science fiction philosophical comedy about the new age movement and alien / occult involvement in the manipulation of human consciousness.