How Can I Become a Successful Working Actor?

I got an email message that asked ‘Do you think actors really need to read plays to be successful?’

This is my reply in blog form.

To my mind, actors still don’t read enough plays. I remember an actress when I was in Drama School (we’ll call her Claire) who told me that she went home most nights and read aloud to herself from parts in classical drama that she’d love to play. By doing this, Claire became easily comfortable with the language of all manner of different styles of plays from Ibsen and Chekhov, to Moliere and Shakespeare. I once told this story to a group of ‘acting students’ on a university course: they laughed, what a dork, what a geek, what a loser. Yes, but Claire is a successful working actress and most of those acting students now work in a supermarket or a cafe or something equally glamorous.

But that’s the thing, so many people TALK about wanting to be actors, so many people DREAM about it, but they never turn the FANTASY into REALITY. WHY? Because the fantasy is fun, it’s effortless, you can sit day dreaming about how your successful career will be without ever leaving your bed. BUT acting, becoming a working actor requires ACTION first. You need to get up and get out and GRAFT. It’s scary, it’s difficult and it’s disappointing and confusing. All these things are much more challenging than simply staying in bed and dreaming about it, or taking another kind of job and trying to convince everyone that you’re gonna be a big star some day. The action to make it happens requires GUTS and GRAFT.

The difference between dreaming and achieving can be found here: WHAT ARE YOU WILLING TO DO to make it happen?

What did you do TODAY to make it happen?

What steps did you actually take?

What MORE did you do? That’s right, before you congratulate yourself for taking the first step, what MORE can you do?

Acting students often ask what they can do to ‘make the break’. I often say this: ‘More than the next person is willing to do’.