Get Craft

Some people are lucky, they can just do it. They don’t really know how they do it. If they’re asked to talk about it, they mainly speak nonsense, but they can do it and no one cares. For the rest of us, there’s CRAFT. The actor’s craft is highly disputed, but one things for sure, if you have no craft, if you’re a purely instinct person, you’re great when the going’s good, but a nightmare when it doesn’t come spontaneously. You need to get CRAFT. CRAFT isn’t insurance, it won’t protect you if it all goes wrong, but it will give you a stable set of tools to work with and THAT is sadly missing from the British/Scottish acting industry that I work within. Without craft, you’re just lucky and luck has a habit of coming and going.

Craft is something that can be learned over the years, but not by just repeating the same mistakes. I never trust someone who tells me they have 20 years of experience, I instinctively worry that they’ve spent 20 years making the same mistakes. Craft requires testing, an element of deliberate practice and it really helps if you are able to learn it, test it, learn some more test it, etc. You may be an actor without getting craft, but I don’t expect you to have a long career, of course, there are always those that have the knack, they develop their own kind of personal craft, that is okay too, as long as it works and it works consistently and it makes you a better artist, a better collaborator perhaps even a better person.

I’ve always thought that our craft was built on graft, hard work, working harder than anyone else, working longer than anyone else. Craft can learned in a classroom but it requires performance to test it. Performance puts us in crisis mode and everything that’s not nailed down, will go out of the window in the moment. Craft is what sticks.