Darren Smith

Darren Gordon Smith (born November 20, 1962) is an American musician, composer, and actor. Smith is noted for co-writing and acting in Repo! The Genetic Opera, a rock opera released in 2008.

Smith was born to Gordon Smith, who worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Renee Corey Smith. Smith attended New York University (NYU), where he received a degree in music.

In the late 1990s, Smith met Terrance Zdunich in an acting class. The pair would collaborate on 10-minute operas at rock clubs around Los Angeles, where Smith would play many of the instruments and Zdunich would perform many of the acting roles. The pair would expand one of their 10-minute operas, “The Necromerchant’s Debt", into a full-length version of the show titled Repo! The Genetic Opera. According to Zdunich, the plight of one of Smith's friends, who was then undergoing bankruptcy, helped inspire the 10-minute opera.

In 2002, Smith and Zdunich would meet Darren Lynn Bousman, who would later direct Repo!'s cinematic adaptation. The film version of Repo! was released in 2008, and has since attained a cult following.[10][11] Smith himself has described the film as "Blade Runner meets Rocky Horror".[12]

In 2022, Smith's collaborative story with Staci Layne Wilson titled 'Phantom/Fandom' was made into a movie called The Second Age of Aquarius.[13] Principal photography for the film began in November 2019.[14] The film debuted at the Zed Fest Film Festival in North Hollywood, Los Angeles.[15]

In 2021, Variety highlighted Smith's literary work featured in ‘Rock & Roll Nightmares: Gory Days’, a horror audiobook.[16]