Disorganised Time

It was nice to wake up on a Friday morning being offered an audition. Normally my morning emails consist of Groupon offers, a notification that a weird Twitter SEO specialist is following me and a woeful casting call notificatin. So, the message asking me to audition was a lovely addition to my early start.

They were asking me to audition over the weekend and wanted me to let them know when I was available. I had some things planned for the weekend so I quickly set about rearranging them and within half an hour I emailed back asking if I could be seen on Saturday morning. Brilliant. It wasn't even 11am and already I'd arranged an audition for the next day. I saw that they'd attached the script so once I was settled in at work, I opened it up. However, this wasn't an ordinary file and what I was instead faced with was pages and pages of hand-written storyboards wonkily scanned in. Although I was yet to hear back from them confirming that they were able to see me at the time requested, I sent off another message just to let them know that it seemed they'd sent me the wrong file. Either that I was expected to take on the form of a blob and hastily jump around the room for theirv viewing pleasure.

Lunchtime came and went and I was still to hear back from them. My afternoon at work dragged by slower than a student production of King Lear and still nothing. I went home convinced that they'd reply that evening. But no, nothing. It was now 15 hours since I'd replied to their message and I'd still heard nothing. Oh well, I thought. Maybe they'll contact me overnight. But, of course, it won't surprise you to hear that on waking up on Saturday morning it was just Groupon, weird Twitterers and dodgy casting calls. I toyed with the idea of just going along anyway but why should I? If they're not organised to confirm and audition and send a correct attachment then why the heck should I travel for over an hour across London only to find that the auditions probably weren't happening anyway. Plus, if you're unable to organise auditions properly then the chances that your shoot will be a tightly run affair about as likely as me not eating that bag of crisps.

Although mildly irritated by this lack of organisation, I set about my day. If anything, they'd freed up my morning on what was a gloriously sunny day and had made my travel plans a whole lot easier. I whined a bit about it to my mum, then I had an ice cream and forgot about the whole thing. That was until my phone buzzed at 5.30pm. It was a message from the director sending me the correct attachment. That was it. Nothing to acknowledge my audition slot request. No apologies for taking 31 hours to get back to me. In return, they got a rather blunt email and now all is quiet on the disorganised audition front.

Now, I should add that I was dealing with students. So I know they are still learning. Of course they're not going to get everything spot on otherwise they probably wouldn't be training in the first place. But surely you don't need to go to film school to learn everyday common sense? Plus, they don't know what I'd cancelled for that audition. I sometimes work on a Saturday and if an audition came up then I'd drop work like the drop of a hat with a very strong sense of gravity. I don't know how they operate but unnecessarily losing out on a day's pay just because a bunch of students don't understand the very basic workings of replying to an email puts me on the Watership Down level of unhappy bunny status.

Of course, this sort of thing sadly happens all the time. This is the first badly organised audition I've narrowly missed out on and it certainly won't be the last. If I had a pound for everytime an audition was cancelled last minute or I never heard back from a director or I was left waiting for over an hour to been then I'd have amassed a small fortune by now. Maybe that's what needs to happen. Every time a director or a producer or someone else messes an actor arond then they have to give everyone affected a pound. And, on the flip side, everytime an actor fails to turn up to an audition, they too have to give a pound to everyone whose day has been screwed up. Might be time for us all to start saving up.

Resting On The Job

I'm very in demand at the moment. Every day I'm getting emails from various people offering me work. And this would be bloody wonderful if these folk desperate to give me money in return for my services were directors and producers and generally people who would let me act like a fool for cash. But they're not. They're from the people that look the other way and smile pitifully when I talk about my life as an actor. They're my resting jobs.

Unless you're exceedingly lucky, exceptionally rich or went to Eton then it's highly likely that you'll have to take on a resting job while you pursue your wildly optimistic dream of uttering a single line at the Lyttelton. We all like to think that resting means a period of lounging around the house in silk pyjamas. However, the reality is more likely to contain a stint in a call centre, a spot of waitressing, some Front of House jaunting or a bit of drama teaching. They're a necessary evil but if you get it right then they can be just about bearable.

I currently do some work in a call centre. Amazingly, when I mentioned this on Twitter I got a few messages criticising me for doing such work. While I know that cold calls are immensely irritating, so is not having enough food to eat and pay your rent. That heart-sinking feeling you get when you pick up the phone and someone's trying to sell you something? Yeah, well I get that feeling when I look at my bank account and realise that if I live off rice and porridge for the week then I might just scrape by. I know the idea of suffering in a grimy bedsit, putting your art above your need to survive has been somehow romanticised but it's impractical and Quorn Pepperoni is expensive.So yes, that's why I and thousands of other people find themselves donning an extrememly uncomfortable headset everyday and calling people that generally don't want to be called. Funnily enough, none of us want to be there. Call centre work is not a career choice. It's a necessity. And not all call centres are terrible. If you look carefully and try and find the smaller ones then they're actually run rather nicely and don't insist that you're constantly hitting targets. They're flexible, don't mind too much when you drop them at an audition's notice and you often get access to the internet meaning that you can apply for acting jobs while you're working. Also, due to the sheer amount of strangers that you end up talking to, you learn more about humans than you ever thought possible. Just last night I spoke to a man who refused to believe I was calling to speak to his wife because she'd just gone out, a man who only left his house in Manchester to go to Nottingham and a man who had to ask if he needed to wear clothes to attend an interview. Just amazing.

I also do casual work for a company in their post room. I've found it's always worth letting people know that you're happy to do a few hours here and there as it's amazing just how many offices and companies could do with an extra pair of hands every so often. Again, the work is massively tedious but it's another job that allows me to be super flexible. Also, this work has lead to me being asked to do other jobs in the office and has turned into a nice little earner.

Other jobs I've found myself doing have been on the phones at a takeaway where I was constantly shouted at for the fact that we were constantly out of ribs and that our leafleters walked over someone's freshly concreted driveway, leaving large heavy footprints embedded in their front garden. Oh, and I also wasted police time by accidentally calling Holborn Police Station to tell them that we were unfortunately out of vine leaves. I've also worked as a software tester where the highlight of my time there was the fire drill that meant I got to sit outside in the sunshine for 20 minutes and in a clothing company packing factory where I got to fold up cashmere jumpers all day.

And then there are the other actors that you tend to meet when doing these jobs. I like to think that all actors are like all you lovely lot that I get to chat to everyday on Twitter. But they're really not. There's a whole sub-species of actor that, because your castings are wildly different, you would just never get to meet otherwise. There was an actor I met a while ago who refused to speak to actors who hadn't gone to drama school as they clearly didn't have as much to offer as those who had gone. The fact that, despite going to drama school, he was now being forced to work in a call centre seemed to completely pass him by. Then there was the actor who spent the whole training day taking the rest of the group through the long and arduous tale of all the benefits he receives and the very exact details of all the bus routes that he takes. Then, when the supervisor did manage to get a word in, he'd use that opportunity to tell him just where the company was going wrong and the numerous mistakes they'd made over the last twenty years.

These jobs might be soul destroying. They're not what we want to be doing. But, as stopgaps go, there's nothing more grounding than being threatened with legal action because you called someone up while they're trying to have their dinner...

Something Changed

Firstly, if you haven’t already done so, read this…

http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2012/09/a-letter-from-scared-actress.html

Pretty shocking, huh? The thought of being involved in a project only to find out that not only have they completely changed what you say but that they’ve also turned it into an anti-Islam film is not a good one. And it got me thinking. Of course, it’s pretty rare to find yourself in such a situation but it did make me realise just how much control we give up.

Now, before we start, I’m happy to say that I’ve never been involved in a film that has ended with me having anti-Islam propaganda dubbed over my ramblings. Far from it. In fact, I’ve only been dubbed once and that was because I’d wildly exaggerated my music playing abilities and the director wasn’t impressed with my quivering version of Three Blind Mice. However, once you’ve finished prancing around in front of the camera, you hand over control to the powers that be and your screen fate is in their twitchy hands. During filming you’ve had wonderful ideas in your head of how the final product will look. In your rose-tinted brain, you’re wonderfully lit and every shot is beautifully framed and captures your every thought and word perfectly. 

But we know that this isn’t the case. What usually happens is that during your main scene, the light was just a bit off or someone failed to spot that the Red Arrows were performing 12 flypasts and your moment to shine instead turns into showcasing you as a disembodied voice. What was once gorgeous showreel material is now far better suited to going on your voicereel . You should be on screen in full cinematic glory but instead you’re reduced to embarrassingly pointing out your arm coming into shot  and trying to work out whether that’s your ear on screen. 

However, what’s even worse is when the damn thing doesn’t see the light of day ever again. The first two commercials I was involved disappeared off the face of the earth, both clearly too awful to even be shown at 1am on Food Network. While neither advert demanded a great deal of my acting talents, I was still excited about being involved in something that might actually make it on to TV. Everyone I’d ever met was on high-alert looking out for it but, after a few months, it’s safe to say that their interest waned. Then, one evening, I saw an advert for one of the products. I shifted to the edge of my sofa and scrutinised the screen hoping to catch a glimpse of myself. Nothing. My mum rang. I just saw the advert on TV. You weren’t in it. I explained that it wasn’t the advert I’d shot and that none of the other people I was filming with were in it either. I convinced myself that it was still to come and held a vigil by my TV for months waiting for it. Finally, after a year, I had to face up to the realisation that it just wasn’t going to be seen by anyone.

But to see it and find that it’s been changed to something entirely different?  I count myself very lucky indeed.

Professional Conduct

It always amazes me when I see castings having to specify that they require actors who are capable of being professional on set. Professionalism shouldn’t be asked for. Like a bottle of water and an eagerly highlighted script, professionalism should be brought with you from day one. But, as anyone who has ever worked with anyone else knows, this often isn’t the case. 

Someone on Twitter mentioned this week that an actress was leaving a production just four days before the show was  to open. Now, I don’t know the ins and outs of this particular story so I won’t comment on it but I have been in productions where an actor has had to leave pretty last minute and being left in the lurch is bloody annoying. The couple of times that it’s happened, I really can’t say that I blamed the actor. They were involved in pretty terrible productions and instead of putting themselves through it, they took the wise decision to bail. However, it’s one thing realising a couple of days into rehearsal that a show is destined for the theatrical bargain bin and another thing waiting until you’re halfway through the tech rehearsal to hand in your scripted notice. Like I said, I understood on both occasions why they did they left. The first ditching happened because he got a paid job. Strangely he was sick and tired of being in a job that didn’t even offer expenses and mainly consisted of us all rehearsing in the dustiest room in north London. Instead of appearing in a show that was wrongly listed in Time Out, he chose to appear in a well-paid film. I was seconds away from hiding in his bag and living off his lucky air. And then the second incident happened because an actor found himself in a fairly horrible situation. There were too many actors with not enough money and we were all away from home. There was bitchiness, bullying and as a man of older years, I don’t blame him for deciding that he shouldn’t put up with such things.

However, the aftermath of these actions mean that everyone else is left picking up the pieces. The director gets a big ol’ kick in the teeth and the actors have to suddenly work a whole lot harder. Either they’re having to cover the role between them or they have to support a new cast member coming in at very late notice. The whole production starts running on panic mode and the atmosphere changes dramatically. Actors will start wondering whether they too should jump this rapidly sinking ship and the director and producer get the same look of desperation in their eyes as the captain of Titanic did.

But a bit of last minute escapism isn’t the only way an actor can be unprofessional. A moment that will always stick with me was during a rehearsal for the complicated final scene of a play I was in. It was at that point when everyone is ready to kill each other. We’d been rehearsing for hours, it was hot and every single line and movement was being agonised over. Suddenly a mobile phone rings. Normally you’d expect the owner of the phone to apologise profusely and switch it off. However, this actor was a pain in everyone’s arse. So, of course, he answered it. And he didn’t go to one side and deal with the call quickly. Oh no. He decided the best place to take the call was right in the middle of the scene. The director tried to ask him to finish the call or at least move elsewhere and the actor asked him to not interrupt his call. I know actors like to react to everything but I think even the least reactive hermit in the world would be aghast at such behaviour. How he kept his job, I’ll never know.

And then there’s all the other annoying things that actors do. They turn up late and destroy hours of rehearsal time. They don’t learn their lines and are still stumbling over them on the opening night. They appoint themselves as assistant director and take great pleasure in giving actors unconstructive notes. They turn up to rehearsals still drunk from the night before and despite having a kissing scene, they fail to brush their teeth. They get drunk and tell other cast members that they’re not very good actors. They tell the director/stage manager/costume designer/front of house how to do their job. They take costumes home and lose them. They upstage you just so that the scene works for them. 

They say you can’t choose your family but you can choose your friends. However, the saddest thing for an actor is that you can’t choose your fellow cast members. 

 

Drama School

About this time 9 years ago, I’d just started drama school. I still thought that practice skirts mattered and that as long as I read every single acting theory book on the planet, I’d be employed for the rest of my life. I had my leotard, my character shoes, a copy of Keith Johnstone’s Impro and I was ready to take on the world (or at least a very poor staged version of Antony and Cleopatra.)

It’s very interesting to see that the actress Clare Higgins is in the process of setting up a free drama school for those who are unable to support themselves through training. It’s a great initiative because drama school fees are crippling. They hurt you to the very depths of your bank balance and will pull on purse strings that you didn’t even know existed. And you don’t even have a guarantee of making that money back any time soon. If you’re lucky you might get a wonderful role as soon as you leave and you’ll never have to worry about those pesky fees ever again. However, it’s far more likely that, 9 years on, you’re still nowhere near paying back your student loan and that the money you’ve made so far might come somewhere close to paying back a year’s worth of fees if you’re seriously lucky. Of course, you can get a part time job but the ridiculous hours of drama school make this seriously difficult. When you start adding a part time job to a full time course with more overtime than a boss cheating on his wife, you soon get to the point where you never  get a moment to yourself. And oh my, if you’ve been to drama school then you will understand just how important time away from other people is.

Living in a bubble for three years is tough. You spend over 40 hours a week with the same 30 or so people and, very soon, you start to go mildly insane. It starts with wanting to go on your own to lunch and soon descends into having terrible thoughts about clumsy classmates and strategically placed cheese wire. Personalities and mannerisms that at first seemed so fun quickly become more irritating than someone scratching their nails down a blackboard while you wear a mohair jumper and bite down on a towel. The way they say ‘theatre’ will start to grate on you and it won’t be long before you’re getting into an argument with someone over the fact that they refuse to highlight their lines.

I thought drama school would be a bloody blast. I knew it would be hard work but I thought much of my time would be filled with laughter. And it was fun. But it was bloody tedious too though.  There’s a lot of time spent watching other people struggle through lines, make poor character decisions and have their voice/posture/self esteem ripped to shreds. You see, the problem is that you go to drama school thinking that this is finally your chance to take the limelight for three years but instead it’s just a good education in how the rest of your life is likely to pan out. Drama school is just the first step in teaching you that most of the time you’ll be sharing the limelight with a whole load of other attention-desperate people which means that you’ll actually spend a lot of time lurking in the shadows wondering why you didn’t do a law degree instead. 

The problem is that everyone wants their moment of attention and, because rarely are there projects where you’ll be working solo, they get it. Although I learnt many valuable lessons while at drama school (Don’t get through nearly a whole bottle of vodka the night before a dance showing. You won’t be able to walk after doing two hours of capoiera in bare feet.  And, regardless of what you say, you do care about your casting in every bloody show) the main thing I learnt is every single hang up everyone else in my year had. It’s tedious, tiresome but it’s also a necessary evil. There are thirty five actors/lapsed actors out there and I know every single one of their foibles. I know the ones with sibilant s’s, the ones who can’t read and the ones who are secretly from Birmingham. And the problem is that, unless you’re the pushiest of all the pushy people, you’ll find that there’s someone who is pushier than you. This means that most classes will become about those few people. All this calls for is a deep breath, a loud voice and the guts to annoy people for a few years. I wish I’d done it more and I tell you now, you won’t regret it 

The pushiest people are, I’m afraid, the ones who do well at drama school. They’ll end up being the ones that are helped that bit more and get all the breaks. I spoke to a director at an audition a few months ago and he admitted that he now refuses to direct third year drama school shows because of the politics involved. He told me that although students are told it’s the director making the casting decisions, it’s actually the year heads and acting tutors. They would essentially tell him who to cast in the lead roles, regardless of whether they were suitable or not and it became about which actors they wanted to be seen rather than which ones deserved to be noticed.

But of course, if you asked me if I’d enjoyed drama school then I’d say that yes, I did. If you’re going to drama school this year or next year or any other years that come after that then, chances are, you’ll absolutely love it. There will be days when you’ll to make a tent out of your character skirt and cry under it all day. And then there will be days when you’ll want to run down the street naked screaming to the world about how lucky you are to be spending three years doing something you love in such a protective bubble. But mostly, there will be days whether you really need character shoes in the outside world.

Finding Myself

According to Phil and Kirsty, it’s all about location. If you’re an actor then you’ll have auditioned in all manner of places and will probably have learnt the art of judging a casting but its location. We’ve all frequented Soho’s dizzying array of casting studios and I’m sure most of us have found ourselves in the American Church on Tottenham Court Road. But it’s the other places. Those back rooms in bars. The dusty church halls. The creepy director’s basement. They’re the ones that make us wonder what on earth we’re doing with our lives.

I know I’ve written before about my ridiculous audition in Notting Hill McDonalds so I won’t be regaling it with you again. Should you wish to have a little look at it and shake your head at my woeful attempts to perform amidst Happy Meals then you can so here:

http://professionallyresting.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/location-location-location.html

 

But what I wanted to write about is the experience of auditioning somewhere. Somewhere that you don’t know. Firstly, and I can’t repeat this enough, if you invite actors to an audition, please add some bloody details about where actors need to head to when they arrive. The amount of times I’ve found myself aimlessly wandering around a faceless arts centre and questioning clueless box office staff, I’m amazed I’m not on a Lost Actors Most Wanted List. Going to an audition is very much like navigating around someone else’s kitchen for the first time. Just because you think it makes sense to have utensils and pans in the cupboard next to the oven, that doesn’t mean that others think the same. And, just because we all think a box office or reception desk should be the first thing you see in a building, there are many companies that think a fancy sculpture or a pool table are far more important. 

A few weeks ago I had a casting at a law school. I was fine with that. It was in an easy to find location and, you’d presume, pretty simple to navigate when you got there. But how wrong I was. I should’ve known things weren’t going to go according to plan when I stood at the sliding doors outside for a good 20 seconds before I realised you had to buzz yourself in. Once in, I found myself having to traipse through countless waiting areas until I found a woman hidden behind a plant at the reception desk. I stood in front of her and she pretended to busy scribbling numbers in a notebook. I opened with the traditional “Excuse me.” Her eyes flicked up to me for about as long as the casting director considered me for the role in Hollyoaks that I went up for in 2008. Back to her numeric doodling. 

“Hi. I’m here for the audition with-“

“2 2.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You want 2 2.”

“Where’s that?”

“On the 2^nd floor.” (I’m fairly certain, if she could’ve got away with it, she’d have ended this sentence with the word ‘stupid.’)

So I headed up to the 2^nd floor presuming that all would become clear once I'd recovered from optimistically thinking I could skip up two flights of stairs. Once there, after a frantic search from a comfy seat and some gas and air, I spotted some doors that looked like they probably lead the way to the rooms on that floor. Of course I was completely wrong. Instead I burst in on seminar and was faced by a sea of bemused foreign students. I backed out and headed for the next promising looking door. This time I managed to creep my way into yet another seminar. Exasperated and wondering just how many law seminars one building needed, I desperately searched for a sign that possibly tell me where on earth I was meant to go. Finally I found one about the size of a postage stamp that seemed to vaguely point me in a director.

I headed down a corridor and found the elusive ‘2 2’ and sat on the solitary seat outside. Due to the lockers that lined the corridor, I found myself sat slap bang in the middle of the hallway, leading to numerous students and cleaners asking if I was alright. I told them that I was but I had no idea. Here’s another tip if you’re holding auditions: Put a bloody sign outside to let people know they’re in the right place and that they either need to knock or just wait outside. Despite what we may have put on our CV, actors are not mind readers and should never have been treated as such. Yes we have common sense and we’re not as dim as people like to make us out to be but a bit of help never goes amiss. Or make sure that, when I'm trying to peer through the tiny window in your soundproof door, I can see more than your red socked foot tapping impatiently. That tells me that despite arriving 15 minutes early, I'm running late. That puts me in a position where I'm nanoseconds away from clumsily bursting in on someone else's audition.

Or maybe they do it deliberately. Maybe navigating a building is our first test. If we make it to the audition room then we’re worth considering. Maybe we should be thankful of the services these ridiculous buildings provide in weeding out the opposition. Or maybe I should just learn to read signs properly.