Preaching and Practicing
During my busy 2016, I was always the one to offer advice to actors that weren’t booking as much as they though they should. Now, it’s my turn to take my own advice, and it’s not as easy as I believed a mere twelve months ago to practice what I preach.
Since January, I have been to just seven auditions. Through this long, hot, smoky summer I have been trapped inside the house, almost begging for some ‘Agent attention’. This feeling of abandonment has been exacerbated not only with a busy year to look back on, but also with my earning full Union membership. I realised that this would mean less auditions, but higher paying work when I get a role, but where are these auditions?
The real reasons for this lack of action are simple enough, and they have nothing to do with me: There aren’t any current opportunities for actors of my age, the Television recording season appears to have had a later start than usual. The list goes on, but this doesn’t ease my own sense that “I’ll never work again.” (The Actor’s usual fear: No-one thinks you can do this at this level, and your career is suddenly over without warning.) Even a Social Media post enquiring how everyone’s year was going in mid-July a flood of replies from my cohort stating: ‘Nothing, simply nothing.’, and ‘Worst year of my career’, gained from actors with many more years of credits than I have. Despite all of this, though, we blame ourselves for some reason, don’t we?
For the last few years, I have been accustomed to performing in two unpaid theatre projects per year. These are a pretty heavy time commitment, and I was always a little concerned that I would receive a film role that would force me to abandon a theatre performance without warning. It never happened, but I felt lucky that it didn’t. My agent was concerned that Union membership would cut down on the amount of auditions he could send me to, so I decided not to let anything get in the way of any chance of a paid job. Theatre is so important to me and my ‘craft’, but to deliberately pass up acting roles offered to me without audition has seemed so self-destructive to me.
My major problem this year, though, has been my day job. I lost it in March, so have been earning nothing at all for the summer. My working life is spent working from home, so I have been imprisoned in my Global HQ (the spare bedroom), trying to get paid work that would allow me the time to get to an audition… being immediately reminded that there were no auditions. It is times like this that I understood the frustrated online remarks of unemployed actors blaming everything around them for the stagnancy of their careers. We see these all day, every day, from someone or other, but in my current mood, I tend to believe them more.
But what was I ‘preaching’ last year, when I was working a lot? It’s not you - it’s because of things out of your control. Do you have talent? Yes, otherwise you wouldn’t have passed auditions before. Do you have an agent looking for work for you? Yes, because he or she believes that you can earn them money – otherwise you wouldn’t be on their books. Are you still checking any possible avenue you can, daily, to find work on your own? Yes, all of my alerts are still set up, they simply aren’t replying. Are you still doing your Theatre exercises that improve your breath control, stamina, accents, vocal elasticity, and memory? Yes, I choose one afternoon per week to insure I am peak condition and learn new audition monologues, just in case work does come down the pike to me. Is my marketing up to date? Yes. Well, you just have to be ready when things do change, because they will.
It takes a daily devotional effort on my part to tell myself this, and – lately – it hasn’t made any difference to my feeling of inadequacy. However, I am reminded of the last third of Olivier’s famous rules on how to make a success of an acting career: “…and it takes stamina to ensure that when you find yourself in the right position at the right time, you have the ability to use that luck and talent that you have to its utmost.” Sometimes that stamina is of the mental variety, too.
And then, suddenly……
Last Thursday, I got a TV audition; an actual character, with a four-page script, a dramatic arc and within my age playing talent. It went very well and I could still learn the script before I delivered it, because of the work I had done over the summer. My lone V/O credit from the year (recorded last week, also.) has been bolstered by another audition request I have to finish today, and I have found out today that I have a Movie audition on Friday.
I have already done two TV auditions in the first two days of the week. Even my old Background Agent has contacted my about availability tomorrow. The dam has burst, and we are back in business, and I don’t know why. All I know is: I can make good jobs of these opportunities, due to the solo work I have done this year. Life is suddenly a lot better, but I’m aware that this could end at any second for no reason that I can alter. You see, I have always known that things would turn around. The only question was could I still continue live before it did. Perhaps reaching that point is the preaching I should be doing, and do a better job of practicing it myself.
