Miss L: "I Hadn't Left The House For 3 Days."

You may remember a couple of weeks ago we interviewed Miss L on her life as an actor. Well, since then, questions have come flooding in (we think someone asked us in the pub the other night anyway) about how she is such a successful rester. So, we’re meeting Miss L again in the hope that she can pass on some pearls of wisdom without passing on the persistent cough she’s picked up from her damp-ridden house…

We ask if we can meet Miss L at 9am. She goes silent for a few minutes. We check if she’s ok. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean,” she admits. “Is 9am a bar?” We tell her not to worry and that we’ll come to her again. “Bring crisps,” she orders us. Again.

So we’re back in Miss L’s abode, so humble it does actually smell of pie. “They were on offer,” she explains, “Two pies for a pound. I bought ten.” Today, Miss L is resplendent in her dressing gown. She spots that we’ve noticed. “Tammy Girl,” she announces, proudly.

We settle down on her sofa. A few out-dated copies of The Stage litter her coffee table. So, how did Miss L get started in the world of resting? “Well it began when I realised I hadn’t left the house for 3 days yet I was still OK. That’s when I really knew. I’d managed to put together a meal from broken bits of pasta, a tin of olives and an orange I found behind the microwave. I thought, if I can do this then why don’t I try doing this professionally?”

Did she experience any difficulty when she was first starting out in the world of resting? “Oh definitely. There’s a lot of competition out there, especially from university students. So I had to work really hard at first to really make sure I was at the top of my game.” She takes a gulp of cold tea from a cracked Doctor Who mug, “I lost a lot of friends in the first year because I was dedicating so much time to it. Of course they understood but it was a really tough. I made myself go for a week just living off onions, chickpeas and value vodka and only read the stage section of The Guardian. That’s the closest I came to giving up.”

But now at the top of her game, does Miss L still struggle to remain professional at all times? “You have no idea,” she laughs, changing her slippers from formal to novelty. “There are times when I get to say 1 or 2pm and I’ll get an urge to do some work. That can be really difficult. I usually try and distract myself by watching Man vs Food or, if it’s really bad, then I’ll go up to the shop and get a Kit Kat Chunky. Usually by 3pm, the need to be productive has gone. I’m very lucky that I’ve learnt how to deal with it. I know others who still have real problems with this and have applied for up to three jobs in one single day. I feel for them. I really do.”

And what of Miss L’s hopes for the future? “If I can maintain the level I’m at now then I’m happy. There are still a lot of issues I have to deal with on a daily basis and unfortunately the need to leave the house will always be there. I try to make sure the only times I go outside are to go to a soul-destroying job or to go and watch other actors be far more successful than I am. Those things really help me focus on my goals and encourage me to strive for resting perfection.” She pauses for a moment and smiles fondly, “The postman told me the other day how impressed he was that I’m always in during the day. That was such a proud moment as I realised my resting is having a positive impact on other people’s lives. That’s all I could really ask for.”

Miss L’s top tips on how to be a perfect rester:

1.  Comfy pyjamas. You’ll never be a true rester without them. Being comfortable on the sofa means you’re comfortable with who you are.

2. Be open-minded about what you consider a meal. If you won’t accept frozen peas and banana as a suitable breakfast then you need to seriously consider whether the world of resting is really for you.

3. Tea. You will never be able to rest without it. If you don’t like tea then diet Coke or coffee are the only other acceptable substitutes.

4. If you must earn money then make sure it’s at the worst place possible. You need to go somewhere that makes you want to tear your soul into tiny pieces so that you can truly appreciate the joy of resting. Call centres and promo work are particularly good for this.

5. Let others know what you’re doing. Not everyone understands how resting works so make sure you explain to everyone around you why you’re doing this. This will help stop them from trying to ruin things for you by attempting to find you acting work.

Proactively Acting

We were often reminded at drama school how lucky we were to be there. How we had been picked over the countless other individuals who had applied and that we should never take our coveted positions for granted. I'm sure much of this was propaganda to stop us from complaining when we had to do another class on the sound of the letter 'e' (I often wonder if my drama school is otherwise known as the Sesame Street Academy) and ensure that we didn't just use Alexander Technique classes as a chance to sleep off our hangover. I once remember reading that based on applications made to the number of spaces available, getting into an accredited drama school is more competitive than getting into Oxbridge. This type of statistic horrifies me because not only am I very uncompetitive but it really shouldn't be harder to get into somewhere that teaches you how to accurately portray a cow than somewhere that teaches you how to single-handedly save the world (I assume this is all they teach there...)

However, once you've been through drama school you realise that it's the bit on the other side that's the tough part. And this wonderful article in The Guardian yesterday explains this better than I ever could. I firmly believe that drama schools do need to do more to prepare their students for the outside world. Apart from one particular drama school, I think the rest are guilty of making their students believe that the path of a graduated thesp are paved with castings, auditions and roles galore. Of course it's not. It's bloody tough and unless you land yourself with a damn good agent, you walk out feeling as alone as The Lone Ranger after being dumped the day before Valentine's Day. Most drama school students have very little experience of the acting industry and you're therefore lead to believe that some big casting director in the sky will wave their magic wand on the day you leave and that the rest of your life will be  a whirlwind of West End shows, independent films and BAFTA winning TV appearances. No one explains that the experience for most actors is that you'll feel lucky when a student who is younger than you offers you three lines in their 10 minute film in return for a bag of crisps and a cup of tea (to be fair, I will do most things for crisps and tea.) After a few months of emailing yourself, checking your voicemail constantly and having a morning battle with your postman, you realise that in fact that they're all functioning normally and it's just you that isn't working. Although I should add that not long after graduating, my voicemail stopped working for about two weeks. It miraculously started working again and I found, amongst the countless messages from friends asking if I was going out that night/where did I fancy meeting that night/where did I disappear to at the end of the night, a message offering me what would have been my first professional role. The date for the job had been and gone by this point and a lifetime's supply of swears was dispatched in 5 seconds flat.

But the truth is that drama schools need to be realistic with their students. Just because it's always been well documented that there's a lack of work out there doesn't mean that that's a legitimate excuse to thrust their graduates, shaking and clueless, in the big bad world of unemployment. Surely there should be an emphasis on teaching actors to add more strings to their poorly working one-stringed bow. The skills to write, direct and produce have become just as important now if you decide that you can wait no longer for the magic job fairy to come knocking at the door and therefore need to start making your own work. Sadly the year I left drama school, there was very much a feel of 'screw you guys, I'm off to make myself famous and I look forward to trampling on all of you while I'm at it.' And while that competitive spirit is partly necessary, it also makes you a horrible human being and has actually lead to a lot of my year falling by the wayside and were left flailing around in the ditches of the acting industry. Now this could of course be more down to my particular year (which was so combative that stage fighting classes were almost deemed unnecessary) but not once during our training were we encouraged to get out there and do our own thing. We were never told that we could create our own work and were instead taught that we were precious, talented beings who would be constantly fought over.

Of course, writing this blog should mean that I'm now myself encouraged to get out and create my own work. But then there's also the chance that my big break is just around the corner so there's no need. Let me just check my email's working one more time...