Eileen Sugameli remembers her first performance at Encore Stage & Studio was in “The Hobbit.” She played an elf. Then on to 14 more Encore performances and Yorktown High School drama, and then to NYU. She has played everything from a mother to a daughter to a wild rabbit, a chicken and Cinderella which received a review predicting she was a veteran at 16 and would be on Broadway someday. Now she is living in

Manhattan and has 15 credits to her name for her work in film, features, shorts and web series. 

Sugameli was back in Arlington on Saturday, Nov. 16 for the screening of her new satire, “Three Mercedes.” She describes it as the story of Melissa, played by Sugameli, who uses her skills as a used car salesman to convince the admissions officer to admit her to college in exchange for three Mercedes. She says the 13-minute film was shot in one day in the director’s house about an hour and a half from New York City. The character gets asked all of the standard questions, check the boxes. But she says, “I’m not going to do it that way.”

The screening was held in the Arlington Unitarian Church to a full house. “It was really cool to see so many people in the same room from when I was a kid and graduated from Yorktown in 2010. It was fun to see the film but it’s a strange experience seeing it with everyone else for the first time.”

Day to day life for Sugameli in New York City is networking, a lot of auditions, working on her performances and a couple of times a month performing a magic show. She is always looking for the next thing. She says the most difficult thing for her is when she doesn’t get the audition in the first place so she can show what she can do. “It can be really lonely. But I had to audition eight times at Encore before I got my first children’s role. And my mom always said you can be sad for a day and then move on to the next thing. It taught me to be tough.”

She says her biggest challenge is to accept the industry where it is, where appearance instead of talent plays such a major role. “It can be tough to be in this industry when you’re told you’re not attractive enough or if you’d just look a little bit dumpy you could get those roles. You say ‘I hear you but I’m not going to do that.’ You have to be tough to stay mentally healthy and remember who you are.”

Sugameli remembers that when she was in Encore performances she always thought it was the greatest thing ever. But in high school she started to reflect. “I thought this is something I want to do but also that I wanted to do something important.” When she played the daughter in the award winning “Nora’s Lost,” it put things in place for her and solidified that she had made the right decision to pursue acting. Nora was the story of a woman who had Alzheimer’s and got lost on a cold night looking for her husband. “After the show a person came up and told me he had decided to visit his mother with Alzheimer’s after 15 years. I saw what I did could make a difference.”

She remembers probably the most challenging time so far has been the year she played back to back incredibly dramatic roles of people who had been through severe trauma. “I had to be able to step in and step out of the roles to be myself again.”

Sugameli says her father traces her acting career back to when she was 1-1/2 years old, and he was dancing with her at a wedding. When they opened the buffet, everyone headed to the food except Sugameli who just kept dancing. “He says he looked at my face and saw me saying ‘this is something I can do.’”

As they drove to the screening of “Three Mercedes” Sugameli says, “A really funny thing happened. I realized the location of the screening was close to where I’d performed so many times and we were taking the exact same route as going to Encore.”