Separate yourself!
On a podcast I listened to this week, the actor Greg Wise talked about how hard it can be to separate who we are as people from the work we do as actors. When we audition, the people making the decision are looking at our faces, listening to our voices and watching what we do with the material. Then they decide whether they want us for the role. I can see why the distinction might get a little blurry. Then he said something that felt especially familiar. “It can make you really grumpy not to get a job.” Yes, Greg. It absolutely can. Sometimes we want the job because we love the script. Sometimes we want it because we can already imagine how much fun we’d have with the people making it. And sometimes we’ve looked at the dates and mentally spent the money. By the time we hear they’ve gone another way, we’ve got a whole little future to give up. Some of that future was built during a twenty-minute train ride, which is quite impressive when you think about it. What’s hard is how quickly we...