Blog: An actor writes – Why do we do it?

Like many people, I trust my mum to be the supreme arbiter of many things in my life, such as how to dump someone (“Stop texting him back”), whether the nose piercing was a good idea (“Not sure Nana will like it”), and when I start to sound a bit douchey in my writing.

She mentioned to me the other day that my blog posts were perhaps getting a bit grim, just a bit depressing, and although being an actor can sometimes suck harder than a souped-up Dyson, I don’t want this to turn into a pity party. We have enough of those at drama school reunions. So I gathered a panel of industry experts (my Facebook friends) to talk about what it is about acting (or working in the arts) that makes us stick at it rather than caving in to nine-to-five security.

“I do it for the money and the chicks,” said my friend D. “It’s a larf, innit?” said S, and they both chuckled wryly together. In my head. “Come on guys, be serious,” I chided. “Then stop writing this as if we actually had a real-life conversation,” retorted S, as he gazed wistfully out of the window at the sea.

Many people’s answer was that they simply couldn’t endure the idea of doing a ‘safe’ job they don’t like instead of what they really wanted to do. H said, “It’d be like dating someone you find really boring.” Several other people talked about the awful commute and the tedium of the work, although in my opinion much of the behind-the-scenes work of an actor or arts freelancer can be logistically nightmareish and hyperbolically tedious. Of course, most do have a secondary job to pay the rent which fits into the ‘proper job’ bracket: a compromise which T says “makes me a sell out who is very, very bad at her sell-out job.” As G said, frankly, “I can’t pretend to care about stuff that I don’t care about.”

Another surprising and discomforting response that I got from this rigorous research was that, although many of us (including me) had previous ‘back-up’ qualifications, we’re not in fact qualified to do anything else and would need to spend many more years and thousands more pounds training ourselves up for a different career. This is probably due to both the growing competition for jobs in recent years and to the gradual devaluation of academic qualifications, and means that the ‘back-up’ that I smugly spent three years acquiring is about as good a back-up as the lifeboats on the Titanic. It seems that I am in acting stepped in so far that should I wade no more, becoming a teacher were as tedious as go o’er.

But that’s all theoretical anyway. The reason we’re actors (or arts freelancers) is that we can’t help but do it. There is no reason why we stay in this often miserable industry if we thought there was anything else that would make us feel half as fulfilled. M put it nicely: “Quite simply (and perhaps overdramatically), I would be adrift and lost if I gave up acting. It’s perhaps selfish, but it’s something I feel my ‘soul’ (whatever that is) needs to survive.” When many people struggle to figure out what they want to do with their lives, we should count ourselves lucky that there is something that makes us so happy we’ll put up with all the crap that comes with working in the arts. Plus, as N wisely remarked, “You can play Candycrush in a dressing room or a film set. You can’t in an office.”

Photo by Flickr user David Guo under a Creative Commons Licence.