Jason McCune decided he was no longer going to act full-time after he started a family in Los Angeles. He applied to Point Park University’s MFA program and the Culinary and Hospitality Institute of Chicago. He was accepted to both.

“I had a choice to make and I chose the MFA,” McCune said in a phone interview Friday. “So if I chose the other one maybe I’d be a chef right now, I don’t know.”

McCune now teaches part-time at Point Park while still maintaining an acting career. “I can’t give up or quit being an actor,” he said.

The professor has performed in a wide variety of roles, including those in film, television, plays and musicals. Recently, he played a recurring character in the television series “Outsiders” in both 2016 and 2017. He also had a role in “Fathers and Daughters,” a 2015 film starring Russell Crowe and Amanda Seyfried.

In 2013, he was part of the musical “1776” staged by the Pittsburgh Public Theater. The last time McCune, who graduated from Hanover College in 1992, did any musical acting was in high school.

He had to rack his brain when thinking back to high school. “Gosh,” he said. “That was a long time ago.”

Still, he was able to remember what it was like acting in high school.

“It’s funny, I don’t remember being nervous or scared,” he said. “I remember being excited and thinking, even back then, ‘this is great.’”

It seemed to him, at the time, that he found his calling.

“It was also the first thing I tried my hand at that I seemed to have any talent doing,” he said. “I was kind of a skinny kid. I was relatively coordinated but I wasn’t an athlete. This was something I just sort of naturally gravitated toward.”