The first thing Walker Carnathan (C ’26) says when he sees me is that it feels strange being the one interviewed. As the former Sports editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian, he’s far more used to asking questions than answering them. Now that the tables have turned, he’s adjusting—slowly, but willingly.
Walker’s career at the DP is arguably the least interesting thing about him. Walker is somehow also a theater kid, an a cappella singer, and a bouncer at Smokey Joe’s—he’s perhaps the only person on campus who might card you at the door and then sing at you later.
Walker’s roots in theater stretch back to his time at “a little Catholic school in Harrisburg,” where it was just “a fun thing to do.” He continued acting all throughout high school and arrived at Penn set on only one thing: doing college theater. He set his sights on the Pennsylvania Players specifically, drawn in by the fact that the group hires a professional director for both its fall musical and spring play. “It seemed like the most artistic, or most committed to the art of theater,” he says. After landing his first college role as the lead villain in Penn Players’ production of Cabaret, he was hooked for the rest of college. “Pretty much everyone else who was in it has graduated now, but there’s still such a mythos around that show,” Walker says. “It was just so fun and so good.”
Theater also nudged him towards singing—an art he had spent years actively avoiding. Back in Harrisburg, Walker played Peter Pan, then Captain Hook—and every time a song came up, he simply talked his way through it. “I was just like, that’s not a skill that I have,” Walker explains. However, toward the end of high school he decided to give singing a real shot, joining choir and trying out roles that demanded more from his voice.
That leap of faith eventually led him to join Off the Beat, one of Penn’s a cappella groups. After seeing their set at Student Performing Arts Night—the annual showcase that brings together over 50 performing arts groups for an audience of freshmen—Walker felt a calling to audition. It didn’t go well the first time; he was cut in the final round and remembers thinking, “OK, I guess this is just not for me.” But a friend in the group had other ideas and talked him into trying again the following year. That time, he made it.
Though the performing arts have defined Walker for most of his life, Penn has handed him a few new identities—including Smokes’ bouncer. He’s not much of a partier, he says, but being a bouncer gives him everything a night out would, without any of the downsides. “I get to interface with a lot of campus that I maybe already knew, but I get to see them again or meet them for the first time,” Walker explains.
The job has also, somewhat unexpectedly, turned him into a small talk expert. “Something it’s sort of helped me [realize] is just that small talk is not as hard as you think it is,” Walker says. Penn students, he thinks, have a tendency to overcomplicate casual interactions: turning a brief run–in on Locust Walk into a lengthy internal monologue on whether they said “hi” correctly, smiled the right amount, or handled the exchange in a socially appropriate way. But when you’re working a Smokes’ shift and cycling through hundreds of interactions a night, there’s not much room to agonize over the mechanics of saying hello—and eventually, you come to master the art of small talk. To Walker, that shared anxiety over small interactions is evidence that there’s more that unites Penn’s student body than separates it: “At the end of the day, we’re all at this school together at the same time, and we might all do a million different things, but there’s a certain unity to that [anxiety about small talk].”
That same unity could be found in Walker’s two identities. In both the performing arts and at Smokes’, Walker believes it’s important to connect with people. “What I’m always looking to do … is to make an impact on the audience, somehow, and to deliver a line or a note or something that leaves an impression,” Walker says of his performances. At Smokes’, he tries to impact people in a similar manner; he wants people to “feel welcome,” whether that means greeting them when they walk in or telling them to have a good night when they leave. He also draws a direct parallel to acting: “You’re playing a bit of a character,” Walker says, describing the way both theater and being a bouncer require him to step into a different role. There are nights at Smokes’ when he doesn’t feel especially cheery, but he still tries to smile at everyone; there are also moments when he has to quickly “flip the switch” and tell someone they’re not getting in.
Some nights, Walker comes straight from a show to his shift, and the audience unintentionally follows. People who watched him perform an hour earlier are suddenly handing him their IDs at the door, and they’ll sometimes recognize him. Walker thinks these moments demonstrate how unified Penn’s student body really is. “They were at this show, and now they’re at Smokes’,” he says. “I was at the show, and I’m also at Smokes’. It’s just like we’re all running around and figuring it out, having fun together.”
It’s clear that Walker is good at many things—at being a bouncer, a theater kid, and a singer—but his long–term goals are most closely tied to the performing arts. His “biggest dream” is to be a screenwriter. In some ways, that ambition connects back to his years at the DP, where he spent so much time observing, interviewing, and turning lived experiences into narratives. Most recently, he won a creative writing prize for a screenplay about college students covering sports for a school newspaper, a premise that feels especially on–the–nose given his time as the Sports editor of the DP.
And maybe his sports writing career isn’t quite finished yet. At the end of our conversation, Walker harkens back to his days writing for the DP and reflects on leaving that part of college behind. “It’s weird to think that it’s over, that I'll never cover another Penn basketball game,” he says. “Maybe I'll find a way to keep writing about basketball in some capacity.”
His advice for everyone else— the freshman watching SPAN, singers who just failed an audition, and anyone still figuring it out—is simple: “Give it a shot.”
