Briony Rawle
Trawling the casting websites for work is an actor’s daily ritual. Each day, another musical will need an “Understudy/Assistant Stage Manager”, another music video will need a lubed-up honey in her pants, and another tampon commercial will need a fun-loving girl who doesn’t let her period get her down. A cornucopia of acting dreams, no? In amongst these treasures you might occasionally find something you’re suitable for, as opposed to “Obese Hispanic woman, 50-65, must be fluent in Portuguese and a qualified lifeguard”.
But these websites can be quite a scary world. They make you think things like “well, shaving my head wouldn’t be so bad if it meant I got a shot at the Royal Court”. They make you hate yourself for not being a trained stilt-walker and for not speaking Cantonese. They certainly make you wish you were thinner, taller and hotter. The websites are a Generation Game carousel of ‘things you could have been’ if you’d lived for 500 years and had penchants for unusual hobbies and cosmetic surgery. They also sometimes give us a pretty depressing insight into the tastes of the media.
The depths of sexism, exploitation and creative famine in the modern media that some casting briefs demonstrate are beautifully chronicled in @ProResting’s Tumblr blog, Casting Call Woe. Here you will find, for example, evidence of producers looking for actresses who “must be comfortable flaunting a tacky, provocative appearance which implies questionable sexual hygiene and morality” and “individuals to dress up in an oversized female genitalia costume.” Ooh, pick me, pick me.
But when you come across a brief for a part entitled ‘Hot Girl’, and the brief specifies that the actress must be over 16 for legal reasons but “should look younger”, you have to stop for a moment and wonder what kind of environment the media have created where a brief like this will slip unchallenged onto the web? I saw this brief on one of the biggest UK casting sites recently, and tagged the website in a tweet, flagging it up. Of course, when the website responded by saying they’d passed on my ‘feedback’ to the casting director who had posted it (and it was a big casting director) I thought, “Bugger, I’m toast. Should have kept my mouth shut.” As it turned out, the casting director sent a very reasonable ‘mea culpa’ email back and offered to apologise personally for the oversight. The website informed me that they are already in the process of installing a ‘report’ button so that things like this can be dealt with efficiently and anonymously, which I think is a great idea.
But the experience gave me an uncomfortable feeling; by using some other websites that feature briefs such as “A fully naked young silent girl. Nudity is for full nude death scene”, are actors legitimising the depressing bin juice of politically and morally questionable material that soaks film and TV nowadays? When an actress applies for “Girl with skirt so short you feel raped just walking past her” (yep, someone really wrote it) simply because she’s broke and the film offers a £100 fee, is she playing a role in the propagation of these icky, creepy, artistically void, demeaning and unethical productions?
I suspect the answer is “yes, but what a tiny, walk-on, barely-even-in-shot role she’s playing in the grand scheme of it all”. This stink is coming from all around us, and it’s getting worse.
Photo by Flickr user DanDeluca
under a Creative Commons licence.
