Category: acting

No comments

How to Thrive as an Unemployed Actor

  By

by Douglas Taurel

Acting is the only profession in which you will always be in a constant state of unemployment, always,  you will always be looking for work. You book a TV series, a film, a play or a tour, and when that project ends and it will end at some point, you’ll need to find work again. This is the harsh reality of being an actor but you can not only survive in this constant state of unpredictability, you can thrive. 

The key is to having a goal, having something to aim at. During times of unemployment, goals support and protect us. Goals keeps you sharp and they opens doors for you but most importantly, they give you a purpose as an artist.  You need a goal that inspires you to do more, and to improve every single day. Even if it’s only by a small percentage.  Be a better actor today than you were yesterday. Strive to do more today than what you did yesterday. 

Sitting around waiting to be booked on an acting job, or hoping that your agent or manager finds you work, is aimless and hopeless. And is what causes such large amounts of depression in actors.  You feel like you have no control over your artistic life but you do have control. You have so much more control than you think. 

Go to work on a monologue that needs to be sharpened, learn a new monologue, learn twenty monologues or create a project for yourself. Always be improving and creating every single day that you call yourself an actor. It is not only the best strategy, it is the only strategy you have. 

Improving your craft as an actor gives you a strong sense of purpose and direction, it invigorates you. It keeps you moving forward towards something a target, and that action will always open doors for you – and there’s a practical reason for this. 

Read the rest of the article at DouglasTaurel.com…

No comments

How Connecting To Reality Can Further Your Creative Dreams

  By

by Mihaela Ivan Holtz

How Connecting To Reality Can Further Your Creative Dreams

As an artist, you live in a dreamworld. It’s a world filled with creative ideas, passion, and fantasy. In that world you meet characters, you hear music, you envision the stories that you want to create.

You love your dreamworld. It’s where all your creative ideas are born and where your big career dreams come to light. This is where you feel most at home.

Living in the dreamworld comes naturally, but that might mean that reality feels like a strange and challenging territory, for you.



The arts world is a particularly big reality to take on. It’s a world filled with uncertainty, unknowns, and competition. Rejection lurks around every corner. It can take a lot to be seen and valued for your real worth. And then there’s the potential for mistreatment and abuse…

So, you may be inclined to avoid reality – not only because you love your dream world so much, but also because the arts world can be harsh and challenging.

Is Avoiding Reality Actually Helping You Achieve Your Creative Dreams?

What would happen if you dared to see and face reality? What if reckoning with reality could move your artistic career forward? What if there is power in working with the reality?

It’s important to understand that even if you deny reality, reality doesn’t go anywhere. Whatever you wish to avoid is still there to challenge you. In fact, being in denial makes you less able to face your challenges. It can make you more emotionally reactive, overwhelmed, or terrified of the things that you need to face. Denial steals your ability to consciously work within reality. When ignored, reality has a way of taking over and controlling you.

In this emotionally clouded place you can lose your connection to your talents and skills. You’re less likely to put your efforts where they belong. It becomes harder for you to see possibilities and opportunities as they emerge.

There’s a common misconception that your artistic dreamworld needs to be at odds with the practical, mundane, difficult aspects of life. In fact, it is possible to live in your artistic realm while staying grounded in reality.

When you acknowledge and work with reality you become actively engaged in building your career dreams and deepening your creative life.

How Can You Help Yourself Stay Grounded in Reality While You Still Honor Your Dreamworld?

Read the rest of the article at Stage 32…

No comments

Why Am I NOT ‘In-The-Moment’?

  By

by Daniel Bradford

‘Being In the Moment’

Most actors began their journey by getting high – not in the pharmaceutical sense but in the raw, natural experience of ‘flow’ and ‘self-transcendence’. It’s the kind of natural high that comes from the confluence of certain conditions, allowing one to completely let go of one’s ego and sail into the void of effortless being. One could even say that many modern drugs seek to trigger this same kind of experience artificially. A loss of self, an alteration in consciousness, a letting go of the doing mind into the being mind, the allowing mind.

You might not know it or even remember it consciously, but chances are there was a time in your past, early on in your creative journey, when you experienced this kind of high. And you’ve been chasing it ever since. Of course, there are other reasons people start acting – fame, validation, love – and indeed those egoic tendencies are likely worming their way into your intentions too. But, those who really love the art began their journey in a moment of real self-transcendence. We call this experience being ‘in the moment’.

During this experience, we had no trouble concentrating or focusing on what was most important. In fact, the very possibility of not focusing would seem like a distant possibility. One feels both completely in control yet at the same time that control itself seems completely irrelevant. Everything is simply happening on its own as if we were merely a conduit for something greater to work through. Yet try as we might, we rarely find our way back to this state of being truly in the moment.

From Self-Obsession to Self-Transcendence

Like many things being in the moment isn’t necessarily a black and white issue. The journey to full self-transcendence could be seen as a spectrum. With one being more or less present and engaged with the conditions that eventually lead to the full peak experience itself. That being said, there is a clear experiential difference once one does tick over into the various degrees of the ‘self-less’ world.

Read the rest of the article at Mindful Acting…

No comments

The Totally Uncensored List of Casting Director Pet Peeves

  By

by Marci Liroff

The Totally Uncensored Casting Director

By Marci Liroff

It’s that time of year again. During the summer break my casting director colleagues get together and celebrate the end of pilot season before episodic casting starts up again. Inevitably, we get to talking about our pet peeves in the audition room. Amid the cocktails, we regale each other with hilarious tales mixed with some scary ones.

In the interest of education, I’d like to share them with you so that you’re not “that guy” who’s making a bad name for himself in offices throughout the town.

Don’t wear perfume or cologne. Year after year this seems to be the #1 peeve from my colleagues. Please remember that we have to sit in an often small and cramped room without ventilation for hours on end. When you come in wearing your girlfriend/boyfriend’s favorite scent we have to live with it for the next several hours. Some of us are highly sensitive and allergic to perfume and get migraines and nausea. Think of the casting office like you would a doctor’s office. Don’t do it!

No weapons, not even fake ones. I’ve had actors pull fake guns and knives on me – it was very traumatic. If a scene asks you to pull a knife out of your jacket … please don’t do that in an audition. Especially if you don’t tell the CD before hand. This could lead to furniture being toppled and a big producer putting you in a choke hold.”

This one is very simple. Wear underpants.

This seems so basic I hesitate to even share it, but, make sure your picture and resume are stapled together before you arrive at the casting office. Don’t ask to borrow my stapler or my assistant’s stapler. Make sure your contact info and agent/mgr. is written on the photos and your resume in case they get separated – which happens all the time. When I ask you for your picture, don’t hand me three different choices and ask me to pick which one – make a choice beforehand.

Excuses. Leave them home. Actors that preface their audition with an excuse, “I was tired, sick – all it says to me is, “get ready, I am going to be really bad today.”

Coming in with a bad attitude. Never underestimate the effect being pleasant has on everyone.

Don’t prop yourself up with props. Don’t use a prop in a scene unless you are totally comfortable with it. I’ve seen props totally befuddle some people. A phone is fine. Just don’t set up a one-person show – unless you’re Carrot Top.

If it’s a driving scene, you don’t have to pretend to actually “drive” the car.

For The Men: I’m not going to have sex with you so don’t even TRY to seduce me into thinking you are a better actor than you are. Charm is good. Wit. Personality. But flirting in a creepy way is…well.. creepy.

Be nice and courteous to everyone. You never know: that receptionist could end-up being a director or producer some day. And the interns definitely “rat-you-out” when you leave. The guy who used to clean my toilets was nominated for an Oscar ten years later.

Read the rest of the article at MarciLiroff.com…

No comments

Actors Beware of These “Manager” Contracts!

  By

by Paul Russell Casting

When it comes to the profession of representing talent the profession of personal manager is unfortunately the most fraught with shady characters. Individuals operating scams that at worst defraud actors. At best create a lopsided arrangement. One that is less an advisor-n-artist partnership but where the “manager” is a self-serving predator. Managers are not regulated by actor unions and/or local and state government oversight as are agents. Yes, there are reputable, respected managers. Their industrious support of actors is overshadowed by opportunists tagging themselves unjustly as a “personal manager.”

The largest red flag demarcating a “manager” of questionable integrity from a reputable personal manager is the ethically challenged “manager’s” manager-actor contract.

Answers for Actors reviewed one such eyebrow raising manager-actor contract littered with dubious clauses. Binding terms that are not in the best interest of the actor.

For identification purposes this management’s operation will be given hereinafter the fictitious moniker Management Extraordinaire: M.E. as an abbreviation.

“Answers for Actors calls, B.S. on such a broad, and open clause.”


Actors beware of the following.

Commission:

First some good news. Some industry respected managers collect 10 percent commission on actor salaries derived from projects of which the actor participates as talent. It’s the same percentage that agents collect as regulated by performing artists’ unions. A larger number of managers collect 15 percent. Not so good news? Being that there is no government or union regulation or oversight of managers a manager can collect whatever percentage they choose, that an actor is willing to sign away. Management Extraordinaire collects 20 percent. Above the norm. An actor going into an agreement with a manager should not part with more than 10 – 15 percent commission.

To Management Extraordinaire’s credit—unlike one greedy “manager”—they don’t collect commission from the actor’s survival job(s).

Bilking the Actor:

Slipped slyly into Management Extraordinaire’s terms for commission is this:

“Artist agrees to pay or reimburse Manager for all out-of-pocket expenses which Manager incurs from time to time on behalf of Artist.”

Answers for Actors calls, B.S. on such a broad, and open clause. The “manager” could claim anything as “out-of-pocket expenses.” Agents are not permitted to invoke such a swindle.

Read the rest of the article at AnswersForActors.net…

No comments

Pronoia and Willful Blindness

  By

by Bonnie Gillespie

I have a question for you.

It’s about your setpoint.

Do you believe that someone is always running game on you? Out to get you? Taking advantage of you?

Or do you believe that everything is always working out for you? That even if something doesn’t go the way you want it to in the moment, the long-term best for you is what’s happening?

Here’s why I ask this: Over the past few weeks, we’ve had a CRUSH of customer service emails. Like, three times the volume of what we generally receive.

No surprise there; we advertised for the first time, invited hundreds of new people into our world, held a TON of free live trainings, and welcomed in the first class of 2020 for our enoughness membership.

That’s a lot of activity and with activity comes questions.

And while questions are expected, it’s fascinating to see the difference in tone.

Among the FAR more innocuous and typical, “I can’t seem to get my download of your audiobook to work. Please help?” (the fix is easy, BTW. We even spell it out right on the page from which you buy it. You can’t download it on a gadget, only on a computer using a web browser. And many people exhaust the link by trying so many times ON a phone or a tablet, which won’t extract a ZIP file… which we explain on the sales page itself… so… yeah), there are also the, “You’ve stolen my money. This link doesn’t work because you’re a crook. You’re withholding something from me. Tell me EXACTLY why this is happening and what you’re going to do about it,” ones. There’s, “Someone’s getting a better deal than I am; defend that to my satisfaction.” And there’s, “This reminds me of that one time someone ELSE did me dirty so that means you are too so you will PAY for my falling for it again,” which is truly confounding. Because different people. Different circumstances. Different time in life. Different YOU going through it all.

Yet when we are certain we’re getting the short end of the stick, we have VERY strong muscles for going right to the accusation, right to the, “See! I told you the world is filled with bad people doing bad things TO ME!” mindset… and we choose to be blind to the evidence that none of this is what’s *actually* going on.

It’s a phenomenon called willful blindness (and there’s an amazing book on this subject if you’re a geek like me and want to read more from Margaret Heffernan about all the things our brains will discount, disregard, and simply NOT SEE out of simple evolutionary efficiency). BTW, we ALL engage in this at some point in life.

I prefer pronoia as a setpoint, personally. This is the opposite of paranoia (everyone is out to get me) and instead focuses on all the ways things are working out for me.

Read the rest of the article at BonnieGillespie.com…