Acting like an actor...

Went for ANOTHER casting today. Must be my fifteenth one since hitting this town and still not a whiff of a bastard booking! L

The project was code-named as they sometimes are. Companies do this sometimes because the product they’re shooting usually hasn’t come out on the market yet and they want to keep it all hush hush, so I had no idea what it was for.

Had a new experience though. In this casting I was tag teamed with another actor. A taller guy with a beard and shoulder length hair. He had been assigned the director role and I was trying out for the driver. It seemed we were attempting to give the impression we were shooting a commercial WITHIN a commercial so they needed an actor to play a director, and one to play a driver. An actor playing an actor playing a director and an actor playing an actor playing a driver! I was already bloody confused and I hadn’t even walked through the door yet!

Turns out it was pretty straightforward. You really don’t need to be a brain surgeon or even a good actor to do well in these things. You just have to have confidence and charisma. Some days you have it, and some days you don’t. The castings I tend to get call backs for are the ones I walk into relaxed and feeling happy regardless of the outcome. In other words, carrying the knowledge into that room with me that my happiness does not rely on whether I bag the job or not. And I guess that’s true of everything we try for. Ultimately there is nothing in this world which, once attained, will make us truly happy from bone to balls forever! Because everything changes, and NOTHING is permanent. The only true happiness comes from deep within us and is something that never changes. Buddha taught me that! Well, he didn’t actually teach it to me. He pointed the way with his jolly, golden finger. The rest I had to do myself. I wish I could say I DID it, found IT, and now everything’s a piece of cake. Turns out it’s an ongoing project. Bollocks!! I can hear Buddha laughing now!

Anyway, there I was behind a steering wheel in front of a camera acting like an actor acting like a driver. And there was this other actor sitting behind a screen acting like an actor acting like a director. With all these double identities I kind of forgot who I was for a moment, which I suppose is a good thing in acting. I’d pretend to drive, he’d say cut, then come over and make like a director and direct me a bit in how to act like a driver. Having already shot a BMW commercial in San Francisco last year I already had some knowledge of the bullshit that’s involved in these things and so I made like an actor asking the director where to look and requesting some kind of marker be fixed in front of me for something to fix my eyes on.

            The other actor seemed pretty nervous and rigid and I felt for him. Afterwards we shot the shit with the two facilitators of the casting about some YouTube video they thought was hilarious and then I was out of there. I still didn’t know what I’d auditioned for!

Then I got a call from my agent in San Francisco with good news. Even though I hadn’t been able to make an audition in SF last week Buick decided they wanted me for their shoot anyway just from my resume and picture! Score! Probably a print job for a magazine or something advertising their latest model. Thank Jehovah! I’d been watching my bank balance diminish with a horrifying assiduousness ever since I quit all my jobs in San Francisco and heaved all my crap down here to follow this dream. Things were getting tighter than a duck’s asshole and it wasn’t fun! This Buick job should bring in around   two and a half thousand beans! BINGO!

Banana

Hollywood!

Before it was just a word. The name of a place. A kind of make-believe, imaginary place far, far away that magically produced stories which somehow made their way to me across the ocean and helped to brighten the murky, mundane existence of the dismal little island (Britain) on which I lived.
Let me try to explain to you how far removed a place like Hollywood is from the average chap living in England. In England you can go weeks without seeing a ray of sun. In the winter it get’s light late and dark early, which means you’re making your way to work in darkness, and returning in darkness, possibly in wet drizzly weather. If you’re lucky the wind won’t be attempting to batter your senses at the same time. A wait at the train station can be a dice with death at this time of year. Not because of dangerously speeding trains or the presence of vicious thugs, but of the very real possibility you’ll suddenly get the urge to commit suicide by hurling yourself onto the tracks. A train station in Britain at this time is possibly the most depressing place on earth.

 An Englishman does not get up in the morning and pour himself a cup of coffee. He makes himself a cup of tea. Nine times out of ten he won’t step outside into a world of sunshine and feel the heat of our nearest star on his body. He will step out into an endlessly grey existence and have to turn up his coat collar against the cold. The life of somebody living in England is not intrinsically infused with light and warmth. It grows surrounded by damp and mould under a murky, suffused sky. There is very little glamour or exoticism in the life of an English person. Confidence and belief in oneself is not something to be nurtured; it is something to be stifled, and encouraged as little as possible. You have no right to attempt to raise yourself above your peers, financially or otherwise. You have all made a silent pact that you will all remain miserable together, forever, and that happiness will always remain something that exists, but is never reached. God forbid an English person should ever attain a small amount of contentment or even joy. Traitor!!

I have a theory that the witches who were hunted and drowned in the dark ages around Britain were not meddlers in magic but simply people who had been foolish enough to have expressed some amount of happiness in their lives. These bouts of buoyancy may never have been witnessed before and somebody acknowledging people with their eyes, curling up the sides of their mouth exhibiting their teeth and even engaging in whistling from time to time may very well have been quite a frightening spectacle! Something funny going on.  

What am I going on about?? Oh yes, I was attempting to convey the stark differences in reality between life in Hollywood and an English person’s existence.

So I hope that gave you some idea. I guess what I’m trying to get at is the total absence of glitz in England. It is the most unglamorous, unglitzy, most real place that the planet has to offer. And when I say real I mean that the place has a tangible sense of solidity. The rocks are really rocky. The air has a sense of solidity about it. And even the people have a crusty outer layer to them that takes time to penetrate.

A simple test to prove this theory of England’s unglamouresness is to apprehend a banana on English soil. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there is something very incongruent about a banana in England. This sweet, fragrant, bright yellow fruit hanging out in all it’s exotic opulence in a fruit bowl in Stockton-on-Tees is simply irreconcilable!