Advice for Actors: Get Working

This is the fourth part of my series of blogs on the stages of an acting career. Of course, all of us want to get working, that’s why we’re in it, we don’t do it for the training, or the auditioning, we want to be in roles working, treading the boards, or in make up at 5am and other ‘glamorous’ activities.

If you’re going to get working – you can’t use that time to get good, they already expect you to be good, and there’s enough competition out there to keep the good away from the mediocre.
Work is your chance to show people what you can do and to learn those on-the-job skills and pick up the vital on-the-job knowledge that only being on set or stage can bring you.

Working is also about building connections, it’s as much about networking as it is about the job you’re doing. Do you want to be asked back? Stow your inner diva.

Work is where you bring the practicalities of your training to the common sense of the job. All those stupid exercises about smelling coffee and feeling the warmth of the shower go out the window now, and you’ll know which parts of your training were useful or not, because they are the ones that are still useful now.

For an actor, work comes in different shapes and sizes, knowing which work is good for your career and which isn’t can be tough. Some actors will take anything, some will call it experience, I have a wee test to help:

1) Is the director any good, experienced, likely to go somewhere?
2) Is the script any good, is it well written?
3) Does this project fulfil a necessity? (Pay a bill, remind my agent I’m alive…)
4) How does this project move me towards my ultimate acting career goal?

You see, the reason that number 4 is so important, is that most actors are so glad to be working, they haven’t set for themselves real tangible goals for the future. And while some many be lucky enough to lurch from experience to experience, if you want the acting career you want, the acting career you imagine and have dreamed about – then you need to have a plan.