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 can turn a casting decision into a review of our entire career. We start with wishing we’d got the part and somehow end up re-examining a choice we made in a self-tape three years ago. All on the strength of the phrase, “Thanks so much for coming in.”

There are auditions we’d happily do again because we know we could have listened better or given ourselves more time to settle. It helps to look at our work that way. There’s something we can actually do with it. On other days, we did a scene we were proud of and someone else got the part. That one can take a little longer to put down.

That’s what makes hearing Greg say both things feel so familiar. He’s learned to separate himself from his work, and he still gets grumpy. In class, we spend a lot of time practising letting ourselves be affected by what happens in a scene. It would be a bit odd to expect ourselves to be completely unmoved by something we wanted in our own lives.

Maybe we can give ourselves a little more room to admit how much we wanted that one. We can say it to someone when they ask how our day was. We can be a bit quiet while we make dinner. And by the time we’re doing the washing up, we might even be thinking about something else.

Keep up the great work 

Mark :) 

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