Assemble, spooky ghouls and ghoulettes! Brought to you by the month of October and the letter ‘H,’ I give to you a post in the Halloween Spirit. As actors, we get the privilege of living a sort of permanent Halloween for our work. Some of us even work Halloween itself…there is no shortage of haunted […]
Actors are simultaneously asked to be readily in touch with their most vulnerable emotional selves, and to have the hide of a rhinoceros. We must bare our souls and brush the rejection off our shoulders. But the myth is that this skill should somehow be inherent, that it doesn’t take work, that actors who make […]
In the age of self-tapes and market saturation, auditions can come fast and furious. Especially if you live in a major film city, keeping up with every show, pilot, miniseries and web series can feel like trying to count grains of sand as they sift through your fingers. Free yourself from this expectation now: there […]
There is a lot of romance and mysticism surrounding careers in the arts. An actor’s life is often packaged by society to reflect the experience of Hollywood A-listers, or else the vague stereotype of the “starving artist.” The problem is, there is not a lot of consistent practical advice on how to achieve one […]
Hey. You’ll never be ready. You’ll never have the training to tackle Hamlet. You’ll never be ready for your first feature. You’ll never have the charisma to carry an AMC series and you can’t afford home studio equipment. You won’t be skinny enough to book that commercial. You won’t have the star power […]
Burnout claims us all eventually. The uncertain nature of the entertainment industry often means actors are overloaded with day jobs, multiple overlapping projects, and the daily stress of survival with little job security. We’re afraid to say no to any gig in case it will be our last. We take on extra shifts and extra […]
“Don’t make perfect the enemy of the good.” It’s something my mom says a lot, and something I, in the tradition of daughters everywhere, frequently ignore to my detriment. I think a lot of artists struggle with lurking demons of perfectionism. The subjectivity of the entertainment industry makes it easy to fall into self-loathing echo […]
Believe me, I get it. As an actor, funds tend to be not so much tight as barely existent. The unfortunate thing is, acting is an expensive business, and unless you have some sort of Victorian benefactor, it’s up to each of us to fund our own ventures. With an endless influx of advice on […]
Trust is a tricky thing at the best of times. When given professionally, though, misplaced trust can have financial and career-based consequences. What makes it extra difficult to navigate is the fact that we operate in a field that is steeped in emotion and personal relationships, even depends on them. Combine that with the attending […]
Actors, and especially those that are new to the industry or lack connections, are often counseled to say yes to everything. The more projects you take on, the more you learn, the more exposure you get, and the more you exercise your acting muscles, right? Often that is the case. But in acting, as […]