Douglas Taurel: Getting to know the filmmaker and his career
Douglas Taurel works as producer, director, writer, and lead actor on the series Landing Home. He built a long career as a professional actor in New York before the urge to shape stories from behind the camera took hold. The transition came naturally once he started making short films on family trips and posting them online, and that early practice gave him the technical confidence to move into bigger projects.
Landing Home remains the clearest expression of that shift. The seven-part series follows a combat veteran who leaves the Army only to discover that the hardest battles begin after he returns home. The story examines the invisible wounds carried by service members and their families, and it draws directly from the letters and experiences Taurel collected while touring his one-man play The American Soldier.
Reception and Awards for Landing Home
Landing Home earned Best Drama at the GI Film Festival. Taurel received nominations for Best Actor and Best First Time Director at the same event. The recognition highlighted both the performances by the large veteran cast and the decision to keep the production grounded in real readjustment struggles rather than dramatic spectacle. Audiences responded to the series' quiet focus on everyday moments that suddenly feel impossible after deployment, and the festival win helped the project reach viewers who might otherwise have missed it.
Recent Stage Performances of The American Soldier
The American Soldier continues to find new audiences. In December 2025 the show played a run at The Gural Theatre at A.R.T./New York Theatres. Earlier that year, in June, Taurel performed at the American Revolution Museum at Yorktown. These dates extend the six-year national tour mentioned in earlier interviews and confirm that the material still resonates with both military families and general theatergoers. Each new venue brings fresh letters and conversations that feed back into Taurel's approach to the story on screen and on stage.
Additional Acting Credits Post-Landing Home
While building Landing Home, Taurel continued to take on-camera work. He played Joe Petito opposite Thora Birch in the Lifetime film The Gabby Petito Story. The role kept him active in front of the camera even as he shouldered multiple production hats on his own series. It also placed him in a high-profile project that reached a wide television audience, showing how his acting career and directing ambitions now run side by side.
Current Online Presence and Resources
Taurel keeps an active site at douglastaurel.com that lists credits, news, and a blog aimed at actors who want practical advice. Landing Home streams on Amazon Prime Video, Apple, Vudu, Tubi, and Google Play, so viewers can watch the complete series without hunting for physical media. Social accounts on the major platforms remain the quickest way to track new stage dates or production updates.
Landing Home now sits on those platforms ready for new viewers. The series still centers on the moment a veteran steps off the plane and realizes the war has followed him home. Simple scenes, such as a child's birthday party, become tests of whether the soldier can stay present or whether the past pulls him away. The cast includes more than twenty veterans alongside New York actors such as Ylfa Edelstein, J.W. Cortez, Robert C. Kirk, and Denny Dale Bess. Their combined experience shaped the tone and kept the dialogue honest.
The project grew from an Off-Broadway solo show into a full production with a real budget and crew. Taurel's cinematographer Robert Cauble captured the final frame and noted that the director had just completed his first feature-length work. That moment marked the end of a learning curve that began with a three-hundred-dollar weekend short called Siesta and continued through years of balancing acting jobs with late-night script revisions.
Taurel still describes himself first as an actor who caught the filmmaking bug. He listens to everything from Frank Sinatra to Depeche Mode while writing, and he keeps storyboards close because they force him to see the film before the camera rolls. Preparation, he says, is the only defense against the inevitable problems that appear on set. He also stresses finishing the project no matter how long it takes, because too many scripts stay on hard drives and never reach an audience.
His list of favorite films remains steady. The Shawshank Redemption shows how a strong voice-over can carry an entire story. The Godfather demonstrates what an actor can achieve with total commitment to a character. Twelve Angry Men taught him to move performers around the lens instead of moving the lens around the performers, and he used that lesson during several extended scenes with Edelstein in Landing Home. The approach keeps the camera alive without drawing attention to itself.
Advice for anyone starting out stays practical. Research the craft, stay organized, and accept that sleepless nights come with the territory. People will let you down, budgets will shrink, and weather will ruin a planned shot, yet the work still gets finished when the director refuses to hand the vision to anyone else. Taurel found a cinematographer and editor who supported his choices without trying to rewrite them, and he now recommends that first-time directors seek mentors who will give honest notes over coffee rather than empty praise.
Landing Home stands as proof that a personal story about veterans can travel from a solo stage piece to a streaming series without losing its center. The awards and the continued stage life of The American Soldier show that audiences still want those stories told with care. Taurel keeps working on both fronts, actor and filmmaker, and the results keep arriving on screens and in theaters for anyone ready to watch.
