#032: On The Life Of An Actor

The very real highs and lows of an absolutely wild career choice, that we have both been doing for over a decade.

Hello hello,

Happy weekend all!

Seeing as we posted a midweek Saturday Morning Brew, we are sharing our main post today!

If you missed your fill of Saturday Morning Brew, here is this past week’s update; a lovely list of articles for you to peruse at your own leisure.

For anyone new here, welcome!

Aside from Jacob and I being an online couple sharing our lives together (I’m always cautious of calling ourselves content creators, though we certainly are at this point), our main job occupations, which we have been doing for about a decade now, are actors.

We both met while doing a west end show, and the rest is history, but a question we are often asked is, “what does it take to make a living as an actor, and what is really like?”.

Well, after many years of highs and lows, let me give you my two cents on it…

Where It All Began

It was my mum who orignally saw an ad in the local newspaper:

“Looking for local kids to star in this years Christmas pantomime, ‘Cinderella’”

I often wonder if my mum had never seen it, would I ever have been interested in becoming an actor at all?

Maybe I would have an illustrious career in finance by now, and be in some sort of situation like ‘Sucession’, I dont know.

At the time, I was only five years old and I remember the audition as if it were yesterday.

We had to get up on stage at the village theatre, and sing the chorus of ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’.

Obviously, I was one of the only boys to get up there in front of all of those people, and I can remember hearing a collective “awwwwwww”, as my tiny little self began to sing.

And that is where the infamous theatre bug began.

I performed in a couple of the village pantomimes, joined a theatre school in Glasgow, performed in my school’s productions of Aladdin and The Wizard of Oz, and eventually joined a college to study theatre.

From there, I auditioned for the only drama school of its kind from where I was from, known as the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

This place has seen many great Scottish actors through its doors; James MacAvoy, David Tennant, Sam Heughan, Richard Attenborough.

The drama school is also notorious for being a hard one to get into; they only take on about sixteen to eighteen students per new acting/ musical theatre year.

By some brush of pure luck, I got a place at just eighteen years old, and thus began my professional acting training at a place I had thought would be impossible to become a part of.

I spent the next three years doing all the usual cliché acting training stuff; studying animal behaviour, breaking down all my emotional walls and building them back up again, and reading Chekov plays as if I had any idea what the plot of them was.

After three long and incredible years, I left The Royal Conservatoire Of Scotland, feeling as though the world couldn’t touch me.

I was going to be the exception to the rule; acting jobs would come easily to me, I would never be unemployed, and would instead be plucked from obscurity to become the next, big thing.

In case you haven’t already clocked, that wasn’t quite how it all turned out.

Milestones From The Past Ten Years

The first time I ever got paid to be an actor was a monumental moment for me - I was actually going to get money for doing this?

Working at the Edinburgh Dungeons during the summer before graduation, which is a tourist attraction where you are paid to dress up as historic Scottish figures and scare people (literally like Monsters Inc.), I had been auditioning for a show in London called Floyd Collins.

This show would be on for a few months, considered to be Off - West End, (the West End being the UK equivalent of Broadway), and would be the job that would officially make me a professional actor if I got it.

Well anyway, one sweaty summers day scaring tourists in Edinburgh, I got the call from my newly signed agent that I had been cast, and had to move to London…in a matter of days.

I swear it was like something out of the movies.

With, “three bags, two bucks, and one me”, (please somebody get this reference), I was on the train down to London to live out my dreams.

Looking back on that job, where I think I was paid around £250 a week, I wonder how I ever survived.

That was when I quickly learned the lesson, as it hit me like a freight train: “you won’t earn lots of money as a working actor”.

Ofcourse, I didn’t care at the time, and kudos to me for making it through.

I suppose the next milestone for me came about six months later.

My first professional acting job was over, and after a stint back home in Glasgow in my first professional pantomime, which is still one of my most favourite jobs ever, I was back in London.

Hustling for money, and falling in love with a number of good looking men at the same time, my world was burst open, and there was no stopping me.

Then one day, my agent rang me, and told me that I had gotten the part I had been auditoning for for over a month.

“They want to cast you as Sky in Mamma Mia, on the West End”.

All I can remember is swearing at her in disbelief and then immediately apologising.

This dream, this huge thing in my head that I had wanted all my life, was going to happen to me, less than a year out of drama school.

After my initial shock wore off, and I had told every single person in my phone book, I knuckled down, started working out really hard in the gym, and counted down the days until rehearsals began.

The first day was in the very theatre itself, and we all gathered on the stage to have our first music rehearsal, surrounded by the famous ocean-blue backdrops, and greek taverna set pieces.

Again, my complete naietvy had me thinking that I was the exception to the rule.

“Oh this acting stuff is easy, I’m going to be one of the lucky ones”, and in a way, I had been.

People dream of being on Broadway or the West End all their lives, and I managed to do it at the tender age of twenty two.

The fact is not lost on me of how lucky I was to experience doing this as a full time job.

My summer consisted of rehearsals at Pineapple Dance Studios, costume fittings for swim briefs, and night outs in London town, where I definitely drank too much, but hey - I was in my early twenties.

We opened the show and I spent the next year as the romantic lead in one of the most long running, and well known shows in the West End, and for the most part, I had a wonderful time.

Being in a West End show meant I was paid a much better wage than my first job, or atleast I thought it was at the time, completely forgetting that I had to give 12.5% of my wage to my agent, and save around 20% for tax purposes.

But still, you couldn’t tell me any different: I had MADE it.

The other huge milestone in this same time period, was when I was cast in another West End show, Nine To Five, which would open at the Savoy, and where I would play the romantic lead in the original cast.

The monumental part of that contract was not that I was in another show, but the fact that I met Jacob, who had also been cast.

We have told the story many times, but this was the show that brought us together, and one that Jacob almost chose not to do.

Again, I wonder if he hadn’t done Nine to Five, would we ever have met and would we not be together now, all these many years later?

Then It All Stopped…

Not for Jacob.

Jacob had worked extensively before meeting me, and after.

He’s amazingly talented, but also an incredible human and company member, so people constantly want to work with him.

Jacob has been in Guys and Dolls, Frozen, The Witches, Strictly Ballroom, On The Town to name a few big time gigs, all in London, as well as turning down countless other productions that have wanted him to audition ( I swear to you, he didn’t pay me to write any of this).

For me, on the other hand, the luck and “the wave” I had been experiencing, all but stopped, when COVID struck.

I always get told I am a bit harsh on myself with this, as the industry itself completely stopped as well, and in some ways, is only starting to recover from it now.

But when it got back up and running again, I started to realise that harsh reality that every actor experiences in their lifetime; I was going to be unemployed.

That wasn’t for not trying; I would audition and get to the finals (the point where production are only picking between one or two people for the job) for Frozen, Wicked, Moulin Rouge, before being told that it “hadn’t gone my way”.

It was devastating to say the least, and poor Jacob would have to pick me up off the kerb and tell me that everything was going to be alright on numerous occassions.

What I started taking from the no’s and rejection, of which there started to be plenty, was that I was meant to align with something different.

Maybe I wasn’t to be part of musicals anymore? Maybe I should focus my attention of acting for screen? Maybe I should write my own thing? Maybe I should move to Los Angeles?

Quite impressively, I did or atleast started all of these things, and let me tell you…it was no mean feat.

I couldn’t get a look in for TV jobs, sending off literally hundreds of tapes and no responses.

I tried to change representation but nobody wanted me, with my favourite story being one agent telling me my look wasn’t in anymore, and that diversity was the only trend she was looking for now (?)

I struggled in Los Angeles working in a clothes store, with very little in my bank account, and could only afford to walk to and from work, to the point where my feet would bleed. Not to mention, being thousands of miles away from Jacob.

I started, and am still writing a novel, which most of you know about it.

My point is, I struggled for a very long time.

My purpose and direction felt lost, and when everyone around me seemed to be succeeding, I was drowning in an identity crisis.

How could I call myself an actor, when I hadn’t worked professionally in like three years?

If any apsiring actors are reading this, and relating to what I am talking about, I see you.

It’s an awful time, but what I know to be true of my own circumstance is, it will pass.

In the book ‘Greenlights’ by Mathew McConaughey, he speaks on how everything in life, whether you know it or not, is a series of greenlights.

He looks back on his early career, and success, and speaks on the fact that, at one point when he was earning millions in these romcom movies, he wasn’t happy.

He wanted better acting roles, he wanted challenges, he wanted to be in alignment with what he knew he was capable of.

For years, after turning down roles, and losing out on huge ammounts of money, he began to lose all hope and feared that he had made the completely wrong decision.

Then Dallas Buyers Club happened, and it won him his first Oscar.

This, among a strong support group of friends and family, got me through that period of my career stagnating.

I wanted to do more than commericial musical theatre, and not ONLY commercial musical theatre, and I had to make moves to make it happen.

Sitting here writing this now, in the past year or so, I have signed with a new agent, originated a piece of new writing, booked my first TV show as a lead character, and now booked a DREAM role of mine in an American classic play, not to mention, also building a a social media platform with Jacob that has lead to opportunities beyond my wildest dreams.

So after nearly ten years in the business, it’s fair to say I’ve been through it, and now finally, for the first time, maybe ever, I feel in alignment with exactly where I am supposed to be.

Realities And Advice To Aspiring Actors

Gosh, we would be here all day if I thought of everything I needed to tell apsiring actors, but some main ones would be:

1. Know that the majority of being an actor is unemployment and that is okay. Going from job to job to job is a pipedream, unless you choose to accept everything that comes your way, in which case, you will probably end up being unhappy. Carving an acting career is auditioning and accepting jobs that you WANT to do, and saying no to the ones you don’t (which obviously takes time to get to that point).

2. In which case, find an amazing B job. By that, I don’t mean you have to build a huge other career, in the hopes of get an acting job one day. I just mean find something that you enjoy doing enough, and that doesn’t distract too much from your main goal. For me, for a long time, that was being a spin/gym instructor. It gave me flexibility, it paid alright money, and wasn’t something I ever wanted to pursue as my number one career. If you find a good B job, you’ll last in the acting business for at least ten years (which I say from experience).

3. You will have to sacrifice things: your weekends, when three different casting offices ask you tape for something that must land in their inbox Monday morning; your friends weddings which you won’t be allowed time off for because it’s during your rehearsal schedule; your sanity at times, when it feels like every door in the world is closing to you and that no matter what you do, nothing will be good enough.

4. Fame is not the metric of having a good career. Most of us will not reach fame and notoritety as actors, but if you manage to build a life, filled with family and friends, and travel, and dinner parties, and whatever else that makes you happy, alongside working as an actor when the work comes, then you will have built a good career, in my opinion.

5. Find ways to constantly work your creative muscle. If you are an apsiring actor, or one in the business, you are inherently a creative person, and so when the work dries up, create something of your own that is your own, or go to classes, or watch the best 100 movies of all time. Never stop being creative, just because you might be out of work!

   

Final Thoughts

Has anyone resonated with this?

You don’t need to be an actor; maybe your own career or life has had similar ups and downs, rejections and questions of whether you are on the right path?

I’d love to hear them, so comment below so I can see.

I’ll leave you with this final anecdote:

We were at my friends for New Years Eve last year.

He’s an actor who did a similar 360 with his career, going from working in musicals, to carving out roles in TV and Film, where he impressively starred in ‘The Wheel of Time’ for Amazon, and as a lead in ‘Picture This’ for Amazon, which both released at the same time this year.

He asked me, “What is it that you want from your career?”

I pondered for a moment before answering.

“I want to be a working actor”.

He looked at me incredulously.

“You are.”

I blinked.

Of course I was.

What was I talking about?

“You have to get really specific about what you want next, or it will never come. You are already a working actor, that is who you are. Stop getting in the way of it, by thinking that you are not.”

That was some mind blowing advice to me at that moment, and I have since lead with absolute assuredness of what I want from my career, and where I want to get to.

Let’s see what the next decade holds, huh?

With love,

Chris (and Jacob) xx