"I've always thought it's better to give up sanity. Settle down and admit you're crazy or you wouldn't want to act. When you find out what acting is like and what the odds are, and you still persist, the proof of your own insanity is inescapable. Accept it. Most actors make themselves unhappy by searching for sanity, by insisting on their normalcy; it's a grave mistake. The life of an actor is a bit easier to take if you admit you're bonkers."
-Audition by Michael Shurtleff
That's the best advice I've received all year! It's time to stop striving for piece of mind and start reveling in the ridiculous life I'm living. There's no denying: it's completely insane. You can go from your highest highs to your lowest lows all in the span of a few minutes. You think, "Oh, it's probably because I'm a 20-something and Buzzfeed seems to get it", but after talking to your non-performer friends, you realize that you're playing an entirely different ball game. There's no such thing as sanity in this league.
I'm learning that 'life as an actor' is more like 'life as an auditioner'. It makes up 90% of your efforts in the field. There's only one role and there are about a million people who want it, so you hear "No" a LOT. But you have to keep hustling, and searching, and showing up to those castings. You can't book any of the roles you don't audition for.
Auditioning is one of the silliest, cruelest, nerve-wracking experiences I feel I have to go through as an actor.
It entails showing up to Union auditions (or EPAs) as a Non-Union member, meaning you have to wake up at the crack of dawn to write your name on a list to maybe be seen-- if the creative team has time and piece of mind to do so. All the while, you're sitting in a tiny, windowless hallway with other crazy actor-folk all day, and passive-aggressively fighting over who gets to use the one outlet to charge their smartphone.
It entails preparing four extremely long sides-- or, selected material from the actual production you're auditioning for (as opposed to coming in with your own monologues)-- in a British dialect, which is quite the feat since you have other auditions, survival job(s), and general life-things to attend to, and when you show up to your appointment, the auditors hand you a paper with poorly scanned text and ask you to cold-read for a completely different character. Oh, and you need to sing the first half of it. Just make it up! Action!
It entails sitting in a studio lobby while another company is holding auditions for a baby formula commercial. New moms and their infants are crying and breastfeeding all around you, and all you want is to remember the words to that Chekhov piece you just memorized (last night). But you can't, because you're trying to figure out what the select newborns will have to prepare for their callback on Monday.
It entails lining up for open calls and having the guy at the front desk yell at you and 200 of your new closest friends through a megaphone, even though he's five feet away.
It entails bugging your roommates to read with you so that you can submit a video audition for a short film (which you pray to God you won't have to be naked in, but you'll cross that bridge when you come to it because you need a JOB, amiright?).
It's completely bonkers. But at the same time, it's kind of exciting. You feel the community of it all when you're in that tiny, windowless hallway or in line being shouted at at 5:30am. You can nail the audition if you just go for it, even though you have no idea what you're doing. You walk away with horrifically funny stories to tell you parents. You get great outtakes from that video shoot with your ADD roommate.
Sometimes what's happening off-screen is better than what's on it.
Some days it doesn't feel worth it. And some days it does. But no audition has ever made me wonder, "Should I just go back to school for Speech Pathology?" Ever.
Plus, I really get off on the times that the breast-feeding stage-moms grill me about commercial casting, then finish up their questions with, "... I figured you would know, since you're a model".
Yes. Yes I am.
